Getting Started with Ultimate Member

Overview

This doc is a guide for people just starting with Ultimate Member and provides a general overview of the plugin.

Menu links in Plugin

When you install Ultimate Member you will see the following links in the menu

  • Dashboard - The dashboard page gives you an overview of information.
  • Settings - This is where you can customize various aspects of the plugin.
  • Forms - Allows you to edit the default forms and create additional forms. This is where you can add custom fields to the registration form and user profiles.
  • User Roles - Allows you to edit the default UM roles (member & admin) and create additional UM roles
  • Member Directories - Allows you to create new roles and manage existing roles.
  • Extensions - Displays all the extensions that are available for Ultimate Member 

Default pages

When you install and activate Ultimate Member, 7 pages will be added to your pages list:

  • Account - The account page is where users can control various aspects on their account e.g privacy, delete account etc. It includes the shortcode: [ultimatemember_account]
  • Login - This page includes the default login form shortcode and is where users can login to your site
  • Logout - This is a blank page which does not contain a shortcode. When a user clicks on a link to the logout page they will be logged out of your website.
  • Members - This page includes the default member directory shortcode and displays your websites users.
  • Password Reset - This page is where users can request to reset their password if they have forgotten their password. It includes the shortcode: [ultimatemember_password]
  • Register - This page includes the default register form shortcode and is where users can login to your site
  • User - This page includes the default profile form shortcode and is where users can view and edit their profile.

List of Shortcodes

Ultimate Member does not have a long list of shortcodes like other plugins. Instead Ultimate Member is mainly controlled via settings in plugin. There are only two "static" shortcodes: [ultimatemember_account] and [ultimatemember_password]. 

The other shortcodes vary as they include a unique id e.g [ultimatemember form_id=29944]. This type of shortcode is used for forms and directories. To find the shortcodes for your forms or directories you can find them from within the plugin itself on the forms and member directories page.

First steps

As every site can vary a lot, your first-steps with the plugin will vary depending on the nature of your site. However, we would recommend thinking about how many different user roles you will require on your site and creating the roles you need.

This is because many other aspects of the plugin are based on user roles e.g content restriction, conditional menus. So by understanding your user role requirements first it will make it easier setting up the rest of the plugin.

After that, you may want to edit settings in the plugin, add custom fields to your register and profile forms and add conditional logic to your nav menu e.g make register and login links show to logged out users and logout link to logged in users. This doc explains how to do this.

Learn about all the basic features in Ultimate Member

The best thing before diving straight into plugin is to read in detail about all the different basic features and functionality that are available in the plugin which you can view here.