I love using aMember. One of the things that is attractive to me is that I can use anything to manage my content including plain old HTML. But when you have ran a membership site for as long as 4, going on 5 years those resources and can add up. Unless you’re using a content management system it can be difficult for members to find stuff.
That’s problem #1 but you can’t just slap on any search engine either because the content is protected, many third party search engines cannot access it because they cannot log in. Well, I’ve tried a few different options but ended up using Sphider and it works nicely. One thing you must do after setting Sphider up is to make sure the spider has access by editing the htaccess file and add this.
########### SPHIDER ###########
RewriteCond %{http_user_agent} ^.*Sphider.*
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [L]
########### SPHIDER END ###########
If you changed the user agent inside Sphider admin, you’ll want to change it in this code too.
