I’ve been avoiding publishing this blog until I have basic “membership” capability. I just want people to register with their email addresses in order to post comments (and get a confirmation email so I know they’re real), and I want to be able to promote people I actually know to a “Friends” level, and restrict access to personal information to that level.

To do that, I need a login form, a registration form, a change password form, and a logout option somewhere. I also need something to add post field(s) to restrict what user levels can access what content.  Doesn’t sound that difficult, right?  It’s apparently easy enough that there are literally hundreds of plugins that do all (or parts) of it. They all work differently, and have different “free” and “premium” feature sets. Invariably, I’ve either found them to have flaws that make them unusable, or found at least one aspect of what I need that requires the “pro version”, usually at least $200 for the one I need. 🙁

Last night I bought WPForms’ pro version so I could try their “registration” plugin, that’s included with the $200 version (that will be $400 when it renews next year.)  It handles the forms stuff just fine, but doesn’t provide any way to specify what content to restrict!  So I’ll be taking advantage of its trial period and cancelling that license.

The worst thing is that this should just be basic functionality built-in to WordPress. It is, part of it, sort of – if I want to give users the same WordPress login dialog, profile settings, toolbars, etc, as WordPress provides me when I log in as admin, then hey, NO PROBLEM!  But there’s still no way to restrict content based on user level, or the rest of the basic stuff I want, and it’s ugly. (There are plugins that JUST style the login dialog!)

So I’m going to have to widen my search to more expensive options, and remember that my time is valuable enough to rationalize $200 a year for a useful tool.  But I’m also lamenting that while Delphi seemed expensive at about $1200/year per developer, it will be easy to spend that much on WordPress plugins, with far less polish and functionality.  On the other end, I can have any of several professional-level IDE’s (Integrated Development Environments) for just about any mainstream programming language, for free.  I wonder if I wouldn’t have been better off learning Django (a Python based web site framework) and writing my own blog with code, rather than a kludgy WordPress + plugin mashup.