Before you use this plugin, we want to make you aware of some of the limitations and challenges that exists so you have a realistic expectation of support from us.
Our Simple Membership plugin is currently installed on 40,000+ sites. So it is a functional plugin that is being used actively. It does help a lot of users create a small and simple membership website.
This plugin is tested on a typical server setup before it is released and should work on most sites. However, the truth is that there are thousands of hosting companies with different server configurations and thousands of other plugins and themes with their own set of features and little flaws so even though we have full intention of making the plugin work on every site, it is impossible to achieve this goal. In reality, we know that there will be conflicts on some sites and it will not work unfortunately.
For example: think about the following situation/scenario which can create a complicated conflict that is very hard to untangle:
- A site using 30 to 40 plugins.
- Each of those plugins will have many options and features that you may or may not have enabled (with different combinations).
- Some of these features could be preventing an option of another plugin from working correctly.
- The site maybe hosted on a host with server configuration that may not be 100% suitable for all the features.
- You may have hired a developer/designer in the past to apply some customization to this site which can be causing an unexpected outcome.
- The configuration of your PayPal or Stripe merchant account may not be fully complete.
We are a small team that works to maintain the free plugin and provide support for it. A very small percentage of the users actually ever buy anything. So the revenue generated by it is very small. We love maintaining this plugin but at the same time it is a passion project for the team. We use this plugin ourselves and we always keep it up-to date to work with the latest version of WordPress. We just don’t have the resources to reply to all the free users of the plugin unfortunately.
Sometimes, we need to be able to reproduce the issue to efficiently troubleshoot it. It is very hard to guess and fix a coding related issue without seeing the issue visually. So we may fail to address an issue if we cannot visually see it (or reproduce it from our end).
A very common problem we see is that the users setup the test conditions incorrectly. For example: the PayPal sandbox setup needs to have proper configuration for your PayPal sandbox account for things to work. We see websites and PayPal account with incorrect setup then we get blamed for it.
This plugin was primarily created to cater for a simple setup. Some of you will require a more heavyweight plugin to handle your membership requirements. We don’t expect to be able to cater for every single type of membership site setup with this plugin. So some projects will require a different type of membership plugin to be used and there is nothing wrong with that.
You can give this plugin a try to see how it works on your site. If it doesn’t work well then you can give another plugin a try.
If you have a bad experience with the plugin, we apologize in advance. We hope some of the things mentioned in this page provides some explanation as to why it may happen.