Definitely Not for Amateurs

  • There’s no doubt this is a plugin with some very powerful potential features. But the key word here is “potential”. By that I mean, the plugin itself is pretty much bare bones. Which provides you with an opportunity to customize it to your hearts content. There’s tons of hooks & filters for specialized php configurations which allow you to basically use the plugin to do almost anything.

    The downside? If you’re not a developer with extensive php knowledge or aren’t working with a large development budget – this plugin is definitely not for you.

    The support staff does a really good job helping out as much as they can through their paid support forum (which @ $97 isn’t a bad deal, imo), but the business model behind this plugin is all about paid support. Which is totally cool. Not razzing ’em on that. They’ve spent tons of hours & money putting this thing together & should definitely be compensated for for it. But ultimately, the support forum acts more so as a tool to point you in the general direction when it comes to customizations (even those that one would assume should be a basic feature). With the exception of problems with the plugin itself. From what I’ve seen in other posts on the forums, the developers are ON POINT when it’s discovered that there’s a bug or problem with the actual plugin. +1 for that.

    **Worth noting, we’ve been using PMPro for about 2-3 months & have put A LOT of development hours into it & have surpassed what we would have spent for a year’s subscription with a turnkey sub plugin; just to get it to perform basic functions such as:

    – Allow Users to Upgrade Their Membership Level (still having difficulty with that one)

    – Allow users to retain their membership through current expiry cycle when they cancel

    – Customizing email templates

    – Troubleshooting payment gateway issues (not the plugin developers fault)

    – Adding fields to the registration forms (this one was tricky)

    – Restricting multiple free trial signups by the same user/restricting users from renewing free trials & hiding free trials from paid members

    – Basic styling

    So overall, I wouldn’t consider this a negative review at all. Just a fair observation after a significant amount of use that, as I said before, this one definitely isn’t for the average user with expectations of a turnkey subscription solution. Those users would probably be better suited with a plugin such as membermouse or the like.

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  • Plugin Author Jason Coleman

    (@strangerstudios)

    Thanks for the fair review. It’s definitely our intent to make the core PMPro plugin as streamlined as possible (although I wouldn’t use the words “bare bones” ?? with the ability to customize it to exactly what you need through programming.

    If someone can find another plugin that does exactly what they need without customization, then it’s going to be better to go with the other plugin. A lot of the other WordPress membership plugins are high quality. If those plugins don’t have what you need, chances are that it will be easier to do with PMPro since we expect our users to build outside the box.

    > the support forum acts more so as a tool to point you in the general direction when it comes to customizations

    This is pretty fair to say. We definitely don’t have time to do a lot of hands on work for the $97 membership, but we often will say “sign up for a PMPro membership and we’ll give you the code for that” or do tweaks to our existing gists as part of the standard membership. IMO we go above what you would typically get from a plugin support forum. But if someone is unsure if they’ll get the help they need from our forums, they can try to ask first or give it a shot and exercise our money back guarantee.

    Thanks again!

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