Capacity of Wordpress for building a large membership site

I don't see any reason you can't use WL for your membership. The thing you may want to consider is your hosting service. If you are planning a very large membership, then server resources can be a concern.

If you get a lot of members logging in at the same time, accessing content, that could eat up allotted resources quick. Worst that would happen if you get to that point, is an upgrade to a VPS or dedicated server. At that point you should be generating enough income to cover the cost.

Hope that helps.

Thanks,

John

I would absolute recommend the combo:
OptimizePress and Wishlist Member.

Also combined with Amazon S3 for video and large file storage.

I actually created a free ebook (60+ pages) that shows you how to set this up! I even give you two wordpress plugins one of my developers created.
1) WP Content Dripping (Wishlist have a really poor content dripping functionality so this plugin helps you with this)
2) WP Secure S3 (for securing your Amazon S3 files so they cannot be downloaded outside your membership site if someone knows the url).

The ebook shows you how to set all this up.

I am of course using all this in order to get more subscribers and the ebook does feature affiliate links, but in your situation I do think it would be really helpful.

You can download the ebook through the link in my footer.

I would post a "link" for this but my post count isn't high enough yet.
If you like Wordpress you should check out the Membership plugin. There are two version, lite and pro. Sounds as though you'd be looking for the options included in the pro version.

Membership Pro includes:

Unlimited membership levels!
Unlimited subscription levels!
BuddyPress rules - limit and protect access to groups, group creation, pages, blogs, private messageing
Administration area rules - control blog creation (limit number per level), dashboard widgets, menus and sub-menus, available plugins.

We have users with 25,000+ members that are still working fine. But the problem with bigger sites is that WordPress needs a little care and attention to keep running optimally. The good news is that as your site grows and gets more profitable, it becomes a no-brainier that you spend money on letting pros (not just somebody that can set up WP and install W3TC, yet calls them self an expert) tune it for you.

The biggest problem for busy WP sites is poorly coded and entirely unnecessary plugins. PHP is a great language for people putting together working projects without huge amounts of experience and knowledge and using WordPress as a framework makes it even easier. The downside to this is there are a lot of plugins out there that "work", but don't scale and put unnecessary load on the site. What's more, people seem to want to uses plugins for EVERYTHING when in a lot of cases they are unnecessary as you can do these things without plugins (i'm looking at you google analytics plugins, forms plugins, simple SEO plugins, redirect plugins etc).

It should be stressed, this isn't the fault of WordPress, it can scale brilliantly, it's because it's so easy to throw together sites quickly and easily develop plugins that people who don't understand enterprise level development assume they can do it.

The development agency side of our company does a lot of work tuning large WordPress sites and the first thing we do it look at all the things they are trying to achieve with plugins, remove the unnecessary ones and replace or recode the resource hog ones. Then it's case of provisioning suitable hosting (ignoring the security aspects of shared hosting, it's often quite common their db servers can't keep up) and actually configuring it to cope under serious load.

Wishlist is awesome software and I use it for my membership site that is ran via Wordpress.

However bear in mind you will NOT be able to add one click upsells with Wishlist if you are using Clickbank - not sure about other platforms.

I found this out the hard way.

Chris

Anyone have any thoughts about the MemberSpring plugin for WP? I have it and am looking to develop a membership site with this plugin.

If you are looking for a forum, a good one will be vbulletin, which powers many high profile forums of the world, including the warrior forum if i am not mistaken.

I am surprised no one has mentioned drupal yet. It is one of the best sites for social websites which you want your membership site to be. A membership site is much more than a forum and a bunch of pages strewn together.

I have nothing against wordpress. It is one of the best platforms out there that revolutionized web page creation. But from a software engineer perspective, drupal has a much better architecture and is way more flexible than WP. Now I am not saying WP is bad, but for very high traffic and high profile websites, my suggestion would be to use drupal. The downside is that it is not as simple as WP, but the upside is it can scale way better than WP.

Drupal has its own share of problems, but when it comes to handling a lot of pages, you should look no further than drupal. Of course if you have enough moolah, get a custom one developed using a compiled language like java instead of using scripting one php. There are numerous advantages to using even python over php when it comes to performance, but that is for a different day.

Anyway, check out drupal and see if it satisfies your needs.

We used Amember with our WordPress and VBulletin install.

I haven't used YourMembers but knowing some of the folks who work with them, I'd bet they've got an awesome solution and wouldn't be surprised if it's best-in-class. The only reason I didn't go with them is because they don't have a VBulletin bridge.

I went for a WP + DAP + vBulletin solution.

There should be no problems scaling up with this. If there are then

a) You're running poorly coded plugins (as has been stated)
b) Your server is insufficient.
c) You're not caching.

If you're running a membership site with a forum, do not skimp on hosting.