michelle_o_O

Just adding my voice to the mix. This is such a bizarre blind spot! Please allow events to be placed in emails, just like blogs are.
May just be screaming into the wind here. Hopefully we'll get through to someone!

Would love to be able to add events to marketing emails in the same way as blog entries.  I spend more than an hour adding events to my newsletter by copying and pasting and occasionally getting the links wrong. Please develop this feature!!! 

Would also love to be able to add events to marketing emails in the same way as blog entries. 

Agree, this would be very useful for a number of my clients.

Amplifiying this for 2023. This is a needed addition

Having received the notifications about the 7.1 upgrade, I finally decided to see what the process of upgrading was all about. After reading about it and pouring through the help center, I'm absolutely appalled. 
Final answer: SquareSpace offers no options for upgrading other than completely recreating our sites.
Not believing such a thing could possibly be true, I kept searching the help forums.
The first alternative I found involved using SquareSpace's competitor, WordPress, as a temporary holding spot to move my photography blog into version 7.1.
"I'm sorry, sir, but to upgrade to the new version of gMail, you'll need to first create an AOL.com account, then forward all your archived messages to AOL, then upgrade gMail, and finally email everything now in AOL back to gMail. The process will only take you countless hours/days of your life, quite possibly change how every email looks, and destroy your will to live. But hey, it's all free!"
The next option I uncovered was to use a third-party, paid plugin.
So apparently we're expected to believe that the programmers over at SquareWebsites ("Not affiliated with or endorsed by Squarespace") have figured out how to migrate from 7.0 to 7.1, but the SquareSpace team can't build a beautiful new platform that is directly accessible from their previous platform.
The last option I read about is that we simply pay a third-party consultant to do all the work. Sorry, but I don't even want to consider what that might cost.
How can it possibly be true that SquareSpace upgraded its own product and then provided no reasonable method for existing customers to move to their new version? Are you mad at all of your existing customers? Is our subscription money insufficient? I swear I've never said anything bad about SquareSpace and have only recommended it to others, and for seven years running have always paid my subscription on time!
Apologies for being so blunt, but have you people lost your minds? 
Certainly, this must be a bad dream and your upgrade process/tool-thingy will be along soon and is just delayed for some reason, right? C'mon, please tell me that's what is happening. Please?

I have provided an answer in your other thread here:
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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 😞

There are so many important requests in this thread regarding the members area, I have a few to add of my own. I would not have signed up for this service had I known of the many limitations to this feature before becoming mired in its problems.
As many have pointed out, not only is there no way to "approve" members as they sign up, but the various Profile types SquareSpace currently creates for the different ways a visitor interacts with your site cannot be manually managed or merged— though a visitor accessing these different site functions runs into ample opportunity to put themselves on the wrong path. 

For example:

I have a Members Area that is gated with a subscription price. If you click Join through this Members Area portal you will create a Member Account (along with a member profile and subscriber profile.) However, if a visitor clicks Sign In, below the Join button that following credentials window includes a footer that invites someone to "Create an Account". Despite the fact this visitor arrived here through the Members Portal, they will not create a Member or Subscriber account/profile, if they click this"Create an Account" link . They will instead create a Customer account. Which does not give them any access to the member/subscriber content, and site operators cannot edit on their behalf.

These paths are further complicated by putting a LogIn button in your primary Nav. One would want to do this to give already subscribed members a way to log in without going through the Sign Up page. (saving a click.) One would also want to do this if you have selected the option for Members Only Navigation Links to appear in the Members Panel— why? Because "Account" is what the Log In button changes to upon login and the members panel only appears when someone clicks "Account" from the main nav. While you can remove this login option from the main nav, that means having to opt for members area navigation options that either replace the public nav, or do not appear at all. Obviously this is an issue for anyone who needs their public nav to be permanently available to visitors whether or not they are logged in members.

Some simple solves for this that should be implemented ASAP:

1) Just allow site operators to edit user profiles. If we can set customer accounts to member/subscriber accounts as well, problem solved. We can correct user errors made because of complicated UXD on the back end.

2) Divorce the option to create a Customer Account from the path to creating a Member/Subscriber account. The user does not know or care the difference. Keeping these separate removes the opportunity for user error.

3) Create another Member Area Navigation display option that is not dependant on having turned on the Account Login in navigation option such as appending the current Public Navigation with additional Member Navigation links rather than replacing it so that users do not have to rely on the Login/ Account link in nav to access Members Area content through the Members Panel— this option would eliminate theLoginIn link from the nav to avoid further user errors with account creation.
4) Ensure the Members Area Sign In page is far more editable / customizable than it currently is would also provide users with some options for working around these constraints.

Further to these issues, current documentation leaves it very unclear as to how Subscriber/Member profiles differ. 
Until at least one of these is implemented the Members Area features are costing me an excess of time. In the mean time I can only hope user: tuanphan finds this post and offers to take a look at some of my currently clumsy CSS workarounds.