Member areas is a great idea, but still has a few annoying shortcomings, many already raised in the above comments. One of the issues is vetting who can join as a member. I thought I'd share how we worked around this for one client who had a free member area, but wanted to only have invited people join. It's a little clunky, but it works on a small scale for free memberships.
First up, we grabbed the 'join' button html (using the browser inspect tool), then hide the 'join' button in the settings for 'Access Denied Screen' to stop folks signing up at all. Your 'Access Denied' page will now just have a sign in button.
Next create a password protected page, and using the code block add your html 'join' button. This is the page you will use to add new members yourself, since they can't add themselves.
<button class="sqs-editable-button sqs-button-element--primary join-button " onclick="UserAccountApi.joinMemberArea('621abd3953ae2d1f97886268', null, window.location.pathname, false, 'MEMBER_AREA_ACCESS_PAGE')">
Add new Member
</button>
As you can't add a new member if you are already logged in as a member, you must sign out first. I added a link to the account to sign out:
/account/member-areas
I also made that sign out link open in a new tab so I could easily hop back to my sign up page. Attempting to speed up the clunky process 🙂
Create a form on a public page of your site inviting people to apply for membership (or you could just do this with a personal email invite as we did). Anyway, you want to get their full name and email address, and any other details that help you decide to extend a free membership to them. With that info you can simply use your private sign up page (only you have access to), and create a password for them.
To manage this process, I have spreadsheet with the invitees details, and I make up the password here before I use the sign up form. And moments before I sign them up, I email them their password. The email might look like this:
Hi Jane
You have been given free access to https://www.somewebsite.com/secretmemberarea.
Use your email address jane@gmailish.com and this password: ABC27619*h
Regards
Simon
Squarespace will automatically send the new member an email as soon as you add them on your sign up page, so send your personal email (above) just before you create their new account. You should also edit the Squarespace email so it makes sense too. That email only has a button link to sign in and no password (that's why you have to personally email them the password). Of course they can reset their password in the sign in box.
While site guests cannot join, they will need a sign in. So we enabled a sign in link in the main site menu (which is just a link to the 'member area home page' you'd already have created).
That's the hack. I do hope Squarespace improve on the current membership system. As a developer, it's just not that hard to do, so I don't know why they haven't done it yet. Hmmm.
P.S. One last shared experience. We tried one of the 'plug in' memberships systems someone was promoting here as a solution. It's easy to setup and use, but it's dead easy to bypass if you want to look at any of your 'hidden' page content using your browser code inspection tool, which reveals all the html and links 😞
This is one of a number of known issues with Member Areas. I've raised this internally. It cannot be resolved immediately, but I'm hopeful that this will be addressed in the near future.
We're working to build a members area for wholesale partners. As far as I can tell, through the Squarespace Members signup process, anyone can sign up for an account and be granted immediate access. This creates a problem for us, as we need to ensure the information beyond login is restricted to wholesale partners only.
Am I missing something? Is there a way to either mark applications as pending / requiring approval? Or, is there a way to disable the signup option all together and manually create member accounts?
Is there a way to edit the signup form itself to require additional info from prospective members?
Also, are there unique identifiers (member ID's) available somewhere in the admin backend?
