We absolutely love creating membership sites for our clients – well for us too – because we can often get really creative and have a lot of fun making things easy, and attractive for members. Stuff that you don’t normally find in a standard WordPress site set up.

Among the most requested tweaks is to customize the login screens. Over the years, I’ve done this in several different ways. Here are two great mini-tutorials how to do that.

From WP Addict – this is more comprehensive but perhaps a more complete

From WPRecipes – this is simpler for when you only want to edit the logo and link (scroll to the comments below)

Another common request is to have a simpler (and I think less WP-centric) login URL. This can easily be achieved with the Simpler Login URL plugin. If you are adventurous or technical, you can also rename it to something entirely different like /signin instead of /login

Once people are logged in, it is also a nice touch to greet them by their names. You can use the information already stored in WordPress by using the get_currentuserinfo function as outlined in the Codex. Your mileage may vary here depending on how well your shopping cart talks to WordPress.

If you actively make use of user Roles or capabilities, you can also display different things to your members based on their Role or capability. You could make use of the current_user_can function. Generally this is rare. Most membership sites we have built do not allow members to do much but read, comment or go to the forum which is governed by a plugin anyway. But we have built some where members get certain posting and editing privileges so this could come in handy.

Here’s another annoying one that you may want to change for your Membership Site. Members sometimes receive transactional emails from your WordPress site like when they want to change or request a password reset. The default from and email address is “WordPress” and “wordpress@yourdomain.com”. Changing that without a plugin is easy as outlined here.

And finally, a brand spanking new tweak. For WordPress 3.1 and up. With the new admin bar feature you can get a little creative too and add quick links to different parts of your membership sites to the admin bar. This makes your site look and feel more like an app than ever before. You’ll use a code as featured in last week’s post.