[smithcreate]

Forgive me for the amount of information in this post, but I could really use some pointers here.

I am redesigning a website on my local drive for a club which has paid membership. Their current website has forums that are running on Simple Machines 1.1.1. My solution was to move everything to WordPress and bbPress. But I want to make sure I am doing this in the most careful and streamlined way. This is where my questions begin.

Locally, I am running WordPress 4.5.2. My theme is a custom Traverse theme which is also a Builder theme from iThemes. bbPress The look and feel is working fine. I created the forums with topics from scratch as I found no way to really migrate Simple Machines to bbPress. So the basics are there, but now I need to find a process for users and memberships. The forums are public, but only members can post and/or reply. Membership goes through a Gravity Form.

I’m using Gravity Forms to create a membership form for new members. This also uses the User Registration add-on which hopefully will add the user as they signup and submit payment via the Paypal add-on. However, an admin will need to update/approve the user registration to “participant” so that the new user can post in the bbPress forums (and hide the WordPress menu).

For current club members, I anticipate that I will need to wait until I launch the website, then manually add every user from a list of email addresses and names. This will kick off an email to the user that they have an account and can login. Time consuming, but I can’t think of any other way to do this.

Another concern I have is how do these users who I enter manually renew membership? Since they are basically being manually added, they are bypassing the new membership form which will be used for new members. Actually, I have a concern with new members as well since membership is only for 1 year, how do I/admins handle alerting users to renew their membership? Perhaps I need a new “Renew” form which would bypass new user creation.

I realise this post probably crosses over several topics and plugins and for that I apologize. Some of these questions are probably better suited for posting in Gravity Forms support forums. But any help or advice, I would greatly appreciate.