Including Member Login to a CiviCRM Site

Question

I am just starting to configure a CiviCRM/Wordpress implementation for my organization. As well as a tool for the club's administrators to keep track of membership, I also want the members themselves to be able to keep track of their own membership.

CiviCRM seems incredibly powerful for administrators, board members, and other roles within the club to manage members, payments, events, etc. However, I would like members to be able to login and maintain their contact information, pay their dues, be able to make donations, sign up for events, etc. I'm having a hard time finding anything built into CiviCRM to allow this functionality. A nice login widget/plugin/feature with the option to sign up would be ideal. From there the user could manage their account.

As a stretch objective CiviCRM would know if a user has donated or participated before creating their account, and recall all that information for the member.

I see this question how the members can login to civicrm alludes to a plugin. A single plugin doesn't seem too hard to manage, but I don't want to have to install 20 different tools just to facilitate this functionality. Is that the only way?

Finally, could CiviCRM keep all user interaction on the front-end site? Or because I'm using Wordpress, would all member interaction happen in the Wordpress back-end? If that is the case, I'd hope some functionality would be hidden to members without sufficient permission. A confusing interface for the club members would render CiviCRM ineffective for my organization.

Answer 1

You have a few questions here so I will try to address them individually.

The login and user accounts are handled by WordPress. CiviCRM syncs with the WordPress user accounts so when a WordPress user is logged in it connects to a CiviCRM contact. If that user then goes to register for an event, make a contribution, etc. the form will populate with their current information and changes will be saved to the CiviCRM database.

There is a WordPress plugin called "Members" which allow you to create custom user roles and has a nice login widget.

You can use a combination of profiles & the user dashboard to allow logged in users to view and change their engagement with your organization through WordPress front end pages.

This plugin https://civicrm.org/extensions/civicrm-wordpress-member-sync will change a user's role based on their membership status. So if a you have restricted content or discounts based on membership and a membership for a contact expires the user's role will change to reflect their new status and content will be restricted.

There is a lot here but with some planning it is all doable.