EP Membership

EP Membership gives your PageMotor site a public-user authentication layer. Visitors register, log in, manage their profile, and you gate content behind a login or a membership level. Pairs naturally with EP Courses for members-only learning content and EP Ecommerce for paid membership tiers.

Published by ElmsPark Studio.

Overview

Registration form on a public page, with optional email verification.
Login form with rate limiting and lockout on repeated failures.
Built-in password reset via email (secure one-hour tokens, no extra plugin needed).
Profile page for members to update their own details.
Member dashboard showing course enrolments and progress (with EP Courses).
Member levels (0.5.0): optional ordered tiers — Free, Pro, VIP or whatever fits your site.
Level-gated content (0.5.0): gate a span of content or a whole page by level.
Purchase grants (0.5.0): active EP Ecommerce membership purchases count towards a member’s level automatically.
Members Only documents (0.6.0): a protected content type that PageMotor itself refuses to non-members, so the document stays out of the sitemap, the content API, site search and search-engine pings.
Login gating on any shortcode-wrapped content, and login-required settings for courses and lessons.
Integration with EP GDPR for consent capture and logging on registration.
Integration with EP Newsletter for an opt-in checkbox on the registration form.

Members are registered as a dedicated Learner user type. Learners have no admin access — the plugin redirects them to their profile page if they try to reach the admin panel.

Status

Version 0.6: core flows, member levels and Members Only documents are live and verified on PageMotor 0.10 and 0.11. Social login and bulk member import remain on the roadmap.

Requirements

PageMotor 0.7 or later (0.10 and 0.11 both verified)
EP Suite base class
EP Email, or PageMotor 0.11’s built-in mail. Transactional email (verification, welcome, password reset) goes through EP Email when it is active. Without it, 0.6.1 and later fall back to PageMotor’s own mailer (0.11+), and those sends appear in core’s email log attributed to EP Membership. On 0.6.0 and earlier, or on a 0.10 core with no EP Email, those emails are not sent and the failure is silent: each attempt is written to the PHP error log only.

Optional:

EP Courses for login-gated course access and the dashboard’s enrolment list.
EP Ecommerce / EP Ecommerce Subscriptions for purchase-granted membership levels.
EP GDPR for a required consent checkbox on registration, with consent logging.
EP Newsletter for a newsletter opt-in checkbox on registration.

Installation

Install and configure EP Email first (it delivers the verification, welcome, and reset emails).
ep-membership.zip comes with an EP Suite licence — ElmsPark supplies it directly (see EP Suite plugins); after install it updates through your site’s Updates screen.
Upload via Plugins → Manage Plugins. Activate.
Create pages for registration, login, and profile:
- [ep-register-form] at /register/.
- [ep-login-form] at /login/.
- [ep-member-profile] at /profile/.
- Optionally [ep-member-dashboard] at a members’ landing page.
In settings, check the Login Page Slug, Registration Page Slug, and Profile Page Slug match the pages you created, and set the After Login Redirect.
Optionally define Member Levels (see below).

Shortcodes

Shortcode	Purpose
`[ep-register-form]`	Registration form: full name, email, preferred language, password with confirmation. Includes a honeypot spam trap, and GDPR consent / newsletter opt-in checkboxes when those plugins are active.
`[ep-login-form]`	Login form: email and password, with Remember Me and a forgotten-password flow.
`[ep-logout-link]`	Log out button. Optional `text` for the label and `redirect` for the page to land on afterwards. Shows nothing to a visitor who is not signed in.
`[ep-member-profile]`	Profile editor for the signed-in member (display name, preferred language, password change). Shows the login form to visitors.
`[ep-member-dashboard]`	Signed-in landing page. With EP Courses active it lists the member’s active enrolments with progress bars.
`[ep-login-gate]...content...[/ep-login-gate]`	Gate the wrapped content to logged-in members. Visitors see a message and a login link instead. Optional `message="..."` argument overrides the default prompt.
`[ep-level-gate level=pro]...content...[/ep-level-gate]`	Gate the wrapped content by membership level (0.5.0). Visitors see a login prompt; members below the level see an upgrade prompt; members at or above the level see the content. Optional `message="..."`.

The bare, unprefixed forms of the original six ([register-form], [login-form], [logout-link], [member-profile], [member-dashboard], [login-gate]) still work as deprecated back-compat aliases for existing content. Use the ep- prefixed forms in new content.

Member levels

Levels are optional. Define them in settings under Member Levels: one per line, lowest tier first, as slug | Label:

free | Free
pro | Pro
vip | VIP

Line order is rank order — a Vip member passes every Pro and Free gate. New members receive the Default Level at registration (blank means the first line). Leave the levels box empty and the plugin behaves exactly as it did before levels existed.

A member’s effective level is the higher of:

the level assigned to them (at registration, or by you in the Members panel), and
any active purchase grant (below).

Change a member’s level any time from the Members panel in settings — every learner is listed with a level selector.

Purchase grants

With the Purchase Grants setting on and EP Ecommerce installed, an active membership purchase lifts the member’s effective level automatically. Set the product’s membership_level to one of your level slugs; EP Ecommerce Subscriptions records the grant on purchase and renewal. Grants are checked live, so an expired or cancelled subscription stops counting immediately — no sync job, no delay.

A product whose level is not in your list is ignored by the ladder. EP Ecommerce 0.1.40 and later warn you when you save such a product. The product still sells, and its buyers still pass EP Ecommerce’s own exact-match [ep-membership-content] gate; they just gain nothing on this plugin’s ladder.

Gating content

There are two kinds of gate in this plugin, and the difference matters if you are selling access.

Presentation gates control what a visitor sees. The per-page Required membership level, the sitewide gate, and the [ep-login-gate] / [ep-level-gate] shortcodes all work by replacing the page body at render time. The prompt shows correctly in a browser, but the underlying document is still an ordinary public page as far as PageMotor is concerned: its text remains readable through the public content API, it stays listed in sitemap.xml and in site search, and saving it pings the search engines through IndexNow. Use these for soft gating, teasers, and members-only presentation of material you do not mind being readable.

Protection is the Members Only content type (0.6.0). PageMotor refuses the document itself to anyone below the level, before any of those read paths sees the row. Use this for anything you are actually charging for.

The two compose: put the document on the Members Only type for the hard gate, and keep a page’s own Required membership level for the finer one.

By level, in content

Wrap the span in [ep-level-gate]:

[ep-level-gate level=pro]
Here's the pro-and-above content.
[/ep-level-gate]

[ep-level-gate level=vip message="This one is for VIP members."]
VIP-only content with a custom prompt.
[/ep-level-gate]

A gate naming a level you haven’t defined fails open by default (the content shows, with a note in the PHP error log) — a typo degrades to visible, never to a page nobody can see. Since 0.6.3 a site that would rather hide a paid page than leak it can reverse that: Member Levels → When a Gate Names a Level That Does Not Exist, set to hide. The breadcrumb is logged either way.

By level, per page

With levels defined, every page’s content options gain a Membership box with a Required membership level select. Visitors and members below the level see a prompt in place of the page body; the page chrome renders normally. Admins always see the page.

This is a presentation gate, as described above. It changes what renders, not what the site will hand out. If the content must not be readable at all, put the document on the Members Only type as well.

Sitewide (0.5.1)

To gate the whole site at once, set Sitewide Required Level in the Member Levels settings to a level slug. Every page then requires that level, except:

the paths you list under Public Paths (one per line, / for the homepage — say, a landing page and an application form), and
the login and registration pages, which are always public so members can never be locked out of signing in.

A page’s own Required membership level always overrides the sitewide gate. Blank the setting to switch the sitewide gate off; nothing else changes.

Members Only documents (0.6.0)

This is the only gate that withholds the data itself.

0.6.0 registers one content type, Members Only, which behaves exactly like a standalone HTML document (same renderer, same clean URL) except that PageMotor marks it protected. Core then refuses it to anyone who is not a signed-in member at or above the level you set, and the refusal happens at the content layer rather than at render time. The document is therefore absent from sitemap.xml, absent from list-public-content, returns not_found from get-public-content and from MCP, absent from site search and listings, never pushed to IndexNow, and any file attached to it is refused too.

To use it, open the document in the admin and change its type to Members Only. The document itself is untouched, and moving it back is the same change in reverse.

Set the minimum level under Members Only Document Level in the Member Levels settings. Blank means any signed-in member. This setting exists because a standalone document never renders through the per-page gate, so for these documents it is the gate.

Admins always have access, as everywhere else in the plugin.

Why this exists. Before 0.6.0 the only gating on offer was the render-time kind, which hides a page body and nothing else. Reported from the field in August 2026 with a full reproduction: a page gated to a level showed the prompt correctly in a browser while its complete text was still being served to anonymous callers through the public content API, and the URL stayed in the sitemap. Credit to andre for the report and for independently identifying the protected-content-type seam as the fix.

Wrap content in [ep-login-gate]...[/ep-login-gate] — visitors get a login prompt, any logged-in member sees the content.

Courses and lessons

With EP Courses installed, the Access Control section in EP Membership’s settings has two switches: Lesson Access (require login to view lessons) and Enrolment Access (require login to enrol). Level-based course gating is planned for a future EP Courses release; plugin developers can already call member_has_level($user, $slug) on the EP Membership instance.

Settings

General — the site name used in emails and notifications.
Registration — enable/disable registration, email verification on/off, default language, after-registration redirect, welcome email on/off, newsletter opt-in on/off.
Login — login and registration page slugs, after-login and after-logout redirects, Remember Me duration in days, max login attempts, and lockout duration in minutes.
Profile — profile page on/off and its slug.
Access Control — the course and lesson login requirements above.
Member Levels (0.5.0): the level definitions, default level, purchase grants switch, (0.5.1) the sitewide gate with its public-paths list, (0.6.0) the Members Only Document Level, and (0.6.3) what a gate does when it names a level that does not exist: show the content (default) or hide it.
Members (0.5.0) — every learner account with registration date, verification state, and a level selector.

Password reset

Built in — no separate plugin needed. The login form links to a reset-request form; the member receives an emailed link with a single-use token that expires after one hour. Requests are rate limited per account. Delivery goes through EP Email.

When EP GDPR is active, the registration form adds a required consent checkbox, and each registration logs the consent text, email, and IP through EP GDPR’s consent log.

With the Newsletter setting enabled and EP Newsletter active, the registration form adds an opt-in checkbox; ticked registrations are subscribed automatically.

Planned (not in any shipped version)

Social login.
Bulk member import.
Level-gated courses (the EP Courses side of the integration).

Troubleshooting

“Registration form says email already exists but the user doesn’t remember registering”

Search the Members panel by email. If the email exists, the user has an account they forgot about. Point them at the Forgot password link on the login form.

“Logins work but the session doesn’t persist”

Check cookies are being set correctly. Common cause: session cookie’s Secure flag is on but the site is being accessed via HTTP. Ensure HTTPS is the only way in.

“Verification, welcome, or password reset emails aren’t arriving”

With EP Email active, check its delivery log for the specific send. Without EP Email, on 0.6.1+ on a 0.11 core, check PageMotor’s own email log (sends appear as source EP Membership); if core mail is not configured either, the attempt is written to the PHP error log, which now names what was missing. On 0.6.0 and earlier there is no fallback: EP Email is required, and a missing EP Email means the email was never sent.

“A member paid for a subscription but their level hasn’t changed”

Check the Purchase Grants switch is on, and that the product’s membership_level matches one of your level slugs exactly. The grant’s level string and your defined slug must be the same word.

“A gated page is still readable through the API, or still in the sitemap”

Expected, if the page is gated only by its Required membership level, the sitewide gate, or a gate shortcode. Those are presentation gates: they change what renders, not what the site hands out, so the document stays public to the content API, site search and sitemap.xml.

Put the document on the Members Only content type (0.6.0). That is the gate that withholds the data.

“A level gate is showing its content to everyone”

The gate names a level that isn’t defined in settings — undefined levels fail open by default. Check the slug in the shortcode against the Member Levels box, and check the PHP error log for the breadcrumb. If you would rather such a gate hide the content, set Member Levels → When a Gate Names a Level That Does Not Exist to hide (0.6.3).

Changelog

0.6.10

Fix for sites installed in a subfolder (for example example.com/site/): the sitewide gate no longer hides the log-in form. With a Sitewide Required Level set, the log-in and registration pages are meant to stay open to everyone, along with anything listed under Public Paths. On a subfolder site none of them were recognised, so the log-in page showed the “please log in” message instead of the form, and its link led straight back to the same page. Members could not sign in from your site. These pages are now recognised wherever the site is installed.
Sites installed at the top of their domain are unchanged.

0.6.9

Security fix: saving a member in PageMotor’s Manage Users can no longer make them an administrator. PageMotor 0.11 no longer lets plugins add user types, so members were stored as a type it does not list. Manage Users showed their type as blank, and the Edit User screen’s type menu fell back to Administrator, so clicking Save User on a member would have made them an administrator. On PageMotor 0.11, members are now stored as PageMotor’s own User type, which cannot use the admin. Edit User shows them as User, and saving keeps them a User. Reported by mikozoid.
Existing members are switched over automatically the next time an administrator opens any admin page, before Edit User can show them. Their level, language, verification status and display name are kept. Member accounts created by EP Ecommerce for buyers are switched over the same way.
Members still log in, verify and appear in the Members panel exactly as before. Ordinary User accounts that were not created as members are left alone.
Nothing changes on PageMotor 0.10, which still lists the member type.

0.6.8

The link in the verification email now verifies the account. Clicking it opened the registration page with an empty form and left the account unverified, so the member was then turned away at the log-in page with “Please verify your email address first”. The link now marks the address as verified, signs the member in and takes them to your Registration Redirect page. A link that has already been used, or has expired, now says so instead of showing an empty form. Reported by mikozoid.
The password-reset link had the same fault and now works. It opened the normal log-in form instead of the form for choosing a new password.
Password-reset links no longer arrive already expired on servers where the database clock is set to a different time zone from PHP. The one-hour link was checked against the database’s clock but written in PHP’s, so a database an hour ahead made every link expired on arrival.
Members left without a working link can get a new one. A member who registered while email verification was switched on was left unverified, holding a link that has since expired, and could not register again because their address was already taken. When they log in at your log-in page with the right password, they are now sent a fresh verification link and told to check their inbox. An account never holds more than three unused links at once, and each lasts 24 hours, so no inbox gets more than three a day.
Email verification now also applies to PageMotor’s own log-in at /admin/. A member who had not verified could sign in there and be taken to their profile page. They are now signed out on the next page they open, whichever page that is.
If email verification is switched off, the only change you will see is the working password-reset link.

0.6.7

Security fix: “Hide the content” now hides it. The setting “When a Gate Names a Level That Does Not Exist” is meant to keep a page hidden when its level has been renamed or mistyped. Until now it only applied to other plugins asking EP Membership; a page’s own Required Level, the Sitewide Required Level and [ep-level-gate] blocks still showed their content to everyone. With “Hide the content” chosen they now show the log-in or upgrade prompt instead, and site admins still see the content. With the default (“Show the content”) nothing changes.
Settings language menu. The language menu in this plugin’s settings now lists only the languages it is actually translated into, plus English, so you can no longer pick a language that changes nothing.
Section status. Each settings section shows whether that feature is switched on. On a site that also runs an older EP plugin, the section shows its plain title instead.

0.6.6

A password-reset, welcome or verification email that fails to send is now recorded in the PHP error log. Until now the result of the send was thrown away, so a site could show “check your email”, write the reset token and log the request while nothing had left the server. Nothing else changed in how the emails are sent.
Pair this with EP Email 1.10.57, which fixes the cause on sites using Mailgun, Brevo or the ElmsPark relay: depending on plugin activation order, emails sent while the page was loading could fall back to the server’s own mail program instead of the configured service.

0.6.5

Fixes a crash on the registration and login forms when an older EP plugin is installed on the same site. Submitting the form returned an internal error and the sign-up or sign-in failed. EP plugins share one common code library, and whichever copy loads first is the one every EP plugin on that site uses, so a single out-of-date plugin could leave this one calling a spam check its copy did not have. The check now carries its own fallback and no longer depends on another plugin being up to date.
No change on a site where this never happened: the same spam check runs, and nothing else changed.

0.6.4

9 September 2026. The Log out control is now a button, not a link, and you should update.

Before this release every logout control the plugin rendered was an ordinary link, and simply loading its address signed the member out. That is a problem because browsers quietly load links on their own: modern browsers pre-fetch links they expect you to click, and link scanners in email and security software follow them too. A member could therefore be signed out without clicking anything. A link on another site pointing at yours could do it as well.

The Log out control on your profile page, on your login page and anywhere you have used the [ep-logout-link] shortcode is now a form with a button, which nothing can trigger by accident. It is styled to look exactly as it did before, so your pages should not change visibly.

Nothing you have already written breaks. If you hand-wrote a Log out link in your own page content, it still works. It now opens a short “Are you sure you want to log out?” page with a single button, rather than signing the member out on the spot.

Two smaller fixes in the same release. The shortcode’s redirect option, for sending a member to a particular page after they sign out, now works, having been silently ignored until now; it and the After Logout Redirect setting both accept pages on your own site only. And [ep-logout-link] now shows nothing at all to a visitor who is not signed in, instead of a link that did nothing.

0.6.3

7 September 2026. A gate naming an undefined level can now fail closed. Fail-open remains the default; the new setting under Member Levels lets a site choose to hide the content instead. Logged either way.

0.6.2

27 August 2026. PageMotor 0.11.2 compatibility: update this plugin before or with the core update. 0.11.2 scopes permission keys to the plugin that grants them, so bare keys stopped matching and Members Only documents locked out every member; accepted keys are now declared in both forms, one file serving both cores. Members Only documents also gain 0.11.2’s Dynamic Denials: a refused visitor sees the login prompt, a below-level member the upgrade prompt naming the required level, where before 0.11.2 this was structurally impossible on documents. Rig-proven on both cores with real member sessions.

0.6.1

26 August 2026. Transactional email falls back to PageMotor’s own mailer (0.11+) when EP Email is absent, with sends attributed in core’s email log. Previously those sends failed silently to the PHP error log.

0.6.0

24 August 2026. The Members Only content type: standalone documents refused by PageMotor itself, closing the sitemap, content API, site search and attached-file read paths that render-time gating left open.

Feedback and corrections

For a quick question about this plugin, EP Support inside your admin is the fastest option. The chat widget sits on every EP plugin settings page and knows which one you’re on, with starter questions and links preloaded for that exact screen.

For anything bigger — a bug report, a feature request, or a “how do I…” that needs a real reply — open a ticket at help.elmspark.com. A real person, helped by AI, writes the reply. Usually within a few hours. Tickets don’t disappear into the void.