Continuation of Building a WordPress Website from Scratch with KadenceWP
Continuing from where we left off – Building a Membership Site from Scratch – At No Cost
Continue our journey to build our new WordPress website using free tools and services.
Previous Discussion
We began this journey in last month, October 2023 with our first in-person WordPress SIG in 3 years.
We looked at the available development environment services available. We settled on building our website using the InstaWP online WordPress development platform using the Kadence theme and its associated block plugins. We then migrated the website to a local environment using LocalWP by WP Engine.
Kicking the journey off
Can we really get going with a public facing WordPress website for free? And make it look good? And offer some cool features? Yes. Watch and learn.
Adding Membership Capabilities – Next time
Membership levels permit us to segment content based on a variety of entities. Our example has a very simplified membership structure with a free tier and a single paid tier.
InstaWP Site Available – Migrate it to LocalWP
- Create new website with Local
- Download Local for Windows
- Kadence Local Site Build Video
- Restore our backups made on the InstaWP site last month to our new LocalWP website.
- Upload backup files
- Perform Restore
- Apply any WP core, theme, or plugin updates
- Set theme and review navigation
- Create a basic membership site
- Install Paid Memberships Pro plugin
- Initial configuration
- Create Free tier
- Create Premium tier with gateway in test mode
- Generate test content – pages & posts.
- Add Free and Premium content to navigation
- Review front end – all content available.
- Log out and subscribe as free user.
- Log in and review blocked / available content.
Migrate local to live / staging
- Use UpdraftPlus to perform migration
- Make local backup
- Upload backup files to remote InstaWP site
- Restore backup
- Review updated staging site
Recording?
Nope. We met in person. No recording of the SIG was made.
Resources Used in this Series
- Paid Memberships Pro – Content Restriction, User Registration, & Paid Subscriptions – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org
- Setting up a Developer Account to Test Your Payment Gateway (paidmembershipspro.com)
- InstaWP
- Kadence website
- Kadence theme on wordpress.org
- Kadence Blocks plugin on wordpress.org
- Kadence Starter Templates on wordpress.org
- Kadence Local Site Build video
- Kadence Build using InstaWP video
- Kadence Pro
Featured Image Notes
The featured image on this post was generated by Adobe AI. I submitted this prompt to ChatGPT, and it provided a cool alternative to use for my drawing AI.
ChatGPT Prompt: Draw a graphic of a robot sitting at a laptop logging into a membership website. The robot should look surprised. The robot is sitting in a grocery store cafe while doing this – since we met in-person I thought it appropriate to be in a grocery store.
ChatGPT Response: I’m a text-based AI model and cannot create visual graphics or images. However, I can help you with a textual description of the scene, and you can use that description to guide an artist or use graphic design software to create the image you’re looking for.
Imagine a scene in a grocery store cafe with a robot seated at a table. The robot has a laptop open in front of it, and its metal arms are extending toward the keyboard as if typing. The robot’s face has a surprised expression, with its eyes widened and maybe some visible electronic indicators to convey surprise. Meanwhile, the laptop screen could display a login page for the membership website.
You can provide this description to an artist or use graphic design software to create the visual representation you have in mind.
I used the provided ‘Description’ in Adobe FireFly to create the image. Pretty cool.
