As a writer, journalist and very amateur web designer, I’ve been pretty pumped to see the various improvements in Wordpress over the years. The platform has become so powerful nowadays that developers are building universes of plugins, some of which run extremely powerful membership sites, and can integrate with online payment gateways like Paypal.

So I decided to go about creating my own first membership site, which I decided to call the Bangladesh Traveller. While researching which plugin I should use for the membership site I considered a lot of options. Any search on Google out there will bring you an absolute raft of choices and reviews, some of which are obviously biased and lack the voice of first-hand user-driven experience. These reviews read like sales pitches — hardly honest places to make a decision about which membership plugin to go with. If you know how affiliate programs work, I think the idea of writing such beaming reviews is to generate profits for oneself. Fair enough, but you dear internet user, should read things with a grain of salt.

But back to my site. I wanted a membership plugin that met the following requirements:

• Easy enough for me, the non-programmer to use and set up
• Well supported with a community of other developers big enough so that I wouldn’t be the first person bumping my head on every error; I could learn from others’ experiences and questions on the forums
• Integrated easily with Payment gateways so that I could get my system up and running quickly
• Not so large of a user base that my inevitable requests for support would not be met

After a lot of deliberation I eventually decided to give Your Members a go, based on some positive reviews posted at Justin Tadlock’s site. Run by a pair of developers in the UK under the name Cambridge New Media Services, I thought that the original deal was quite alright — $50 to get the basic plugin and to get me up and running. It seemed like a low commitment way to get into the game and see how I went.

I didn’t experience too many problems at first but I didn’t yet have all the content ready to go online. I needed to understand the capacities of the plugin so that I could consider a much larger client that I’m pitching for investment.

After a few months (this was back in September), the developers offered a deal by which they promised to deliver a new set of upgraded plugins to those who decided on the what they called the ‘developers’ license for a cool US$200.

A raft of new features was proposed, and I think they were pretty successful at getting people to upgrade, including me. By this time I had been loading a significant more content into my site, but I hadn’t yet crossed into the paid realm of content, just the stuff that was meant to get some test users in the door. The plugin was doing what it was supposed to, and pretty well. I saw that I was probably future-proofing myself by upgrading now.

Soon my big moment came. I then had a meeting with the big bosses and gave them my pitch. They were interested — they wanted to see more. I was successful at getting a few other content developers interested in the product too. I would need to speed up development if I could.

Eventually I found that development was getting more complicated and the selling mechanism more sophisticated. I was expecting the plugin instructions to be pretty clear like they had been in the first stages of development.

But then that’s where my problems began. Either something in the plugin wasn’t working properly — I’m not sure what as I’m not technical enough to say — or I wasn’t coding it properly in the Wordpress site.

Whatever the issue, I knew I needed help. First I began searching the Cambridge New Media site, which in my opinion is rather poorly organised. A post on their blog which outlined the functions of what I wanted to do didn’t actually work like I expected it to.

And so, I began asking for support on the Your Members forums when I couldn’t figure it out. At first I was asked if I had followed the basic instructions, to which I replied that I already did. Then I stopped getting responses from the programmers.

At the moment I feel like I’m basically being ignored. I’ve posted on the forums a few times, and even sent an e-mail. But there’s been no response.

There could be a lot of other reasons for the support delays. I read on their forums that one of the two developers got very very sick last year, which is probably why the development of the Your Members plugin has been so slow. I can understand getting sick. But sick or not, YM’s development has been classically overpromised and underdelivered, in my opinion.

It could be a lack of skill on my end. While I am not a professional programmer or developer (I’m entirely self-taught), I’m pretty sure I’m not a total idiot either. The reason I bought the plugin was to enable payments on my site. But I’m finding that now that I’ve finally got my content ready, my requests for support are not being met.

This seems to be pretty hot topic around the internet, so I’ll be posting more to say how it’s going as I try and tackle these technical problems that are indeed, way over my head. But hopefully this post will help me get the developer’s attention.. Sean, Tim? Are you out there?