M.K. Safi

I understand what you’re trying to do and why, but the way WordPress does things is better than what you’re proposing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you should conform to some limits in WordPress. All I’m saying is: WordPress can help you achieve your end goal while keeping things dynamic and flexible.

Instead of creating a page whose content is your layout, you should find a theme that has a front page template that looks like what you want. Posts are the building blocks of a WordPress site. The job of your theme and its templates is to arrange those building blocks in the way that you like.

Look for magazine style themes. Those have layouts similar what you described. Check out Magazine Basic, for instance.

Par, Thank you so much for making the plugin compatible with normal posts also–much appreciated!

Hi Adam, I was actually only trying out the plugin for a review for my shopping cart page. Thanks! MK

If you want to completely turn WordPress into a shopping site, I’d recommend you look at some of the fully featured shopping cart plugins, such as eShop, Cart66, or Shopp.

However, if you only wanna sell a few items from a WordPress blog, consider using a lightweight shopping cart plugin, such as Simple PayPal Shopping Cart or FatFreeCart.

Par, Thanks for the great plugin!

This plugin is actually very good for creating hierarchies of default post types too.

I modified the code a little to get it to see my default posts.

Line 251 modified to:
return "post";

Line 296: deleted.

With that, I was able to put my default posts into hierarchies. Now why would I want to do that? The answer is: breadcrumbs. The breadcrumbs feature in Yoast WordPress SEO plugin can read the hierarchies created by CMS Tree Page View and output the breadcrumbs accordingly — very convenient and flexible.

I will use the plugin to create these hierarchies now. Even if my modified code gets overwritten in the next update of CMS Tree Page View, the post hierarchies data will remain stored in the database, I think. So, I’ll go ahead and arrange my posts with CMS Tree Page View, but I hope that you will allow default post types to be arranged using this plugin in the next update.

Thanks again,

M.K.

Hi hollifischer, There are free plugins as well as premium plugins that can do this. Does your client want to charge money for the subscription? If so, your choices of free plugins are limited to WPMU DEV Membership and s2Member (both plugins also offer premium upgrades that have more options).

If you want to manually enable and disable user access to certain content, you can try the Members plugin by Greenshady.

Other than that, take a look at this page to research more options. Your requirements (i.e time-limited membership, download protection, automatic passwords, etc) are met by almost all membership plugins.

I’m not sure that WP e-Commerce has this feature. But I know for a fact that ShopperPress does. It’s not multiple files, only one. But your client can tell his visitors to zip their files and upload the single zip.

As far as I know, FoxyCart is not a real WordPress solution. It’s a hosted shopping cart. Your products, customer data, and everything else is on FoxyCart’s servers. This model is restrictive compared to when you have that data stored in your own database and you have total control of it.

Hmmm, a lot of solutions could meet your requirements, such as eShop or Ecwid. But you have one requirement that’s not really covered by any plugin, which is: limiting the number of copies a customer can order per month.

My recommendation is that you ignore that requirement for now and get started. Once your site is up and running and you start receiving more orders than you can handle, then look into having that feature custom developed.

Oh, I got what you mean now. PlatinumPopup does what you want.

With PlatinumPopup, you create the popup, whose content can be anything you want, and then in your WordPress post, you do [ppopup id=”33″]link text[/ppopup].

This one sounds like just what you want, no?

The only other free plugin on www.remarpro.com that works similarly to s2Member is WPMU DEV Membership lite.

I’m not a real WordPress shopping cart user, but I tried to make a resource to help people select the best shopping cart plugin available. I have tested all the plugins out there. There are MANY competitors for WP e-Commerce/GetShopped and no body has eaten their lunch yet. In fact, the plugin keeps improving. There are a lot of sites in the showcase of the plugin and being one of the earliest movers in this field, the plugin is very popular and even has its own list of consultants.

I don’t get a kickback for recommending this plugin over any other. I’m just saying this ’cause I think it’s the truth.

What you need is a membership plugin that supports multiple membership levels or roles as you call them. Yes, there are plenty of membership plugins that meet your requirements. You can try WPMU DEV Membership lite or s2Member. Both are free.

How about this:

Create your own plugin that configures WordPress and installs other plugins programmatically. Now the question is: how does your plugin get activated automatically?

How about this: in functions.php of TwentyTen hook into “init”, and activate your plugin there (if it’s not already active). This should only be a few lines of code in functions.php. Your plugin takes care of the rest of the configs and installs.

The MultiSite solution sounds good, but in this case you’ll be the real owner of the sites — not your clients. You’ll be responsible for them even after project delivery. This could be a business opportunity, though. Charge clients a subscription fee in exchange for keeping their websites always up to date, optimized, and secure. But, in this case, you’ll have to look into how to handle requests of withdrawal from your network — you may find yourself again compelled to create an automation script for that ??