I recently changed my name and need to build a new site at a new domain, so I’m thinking about switching all of that to Ghost. My current setup:
Website: WordPress + Divi
Membership: MemberPress, a paid plugin that sits on top of WordPress and integrates with Stripe for payments
Email marketing: Kit
How it works:
My membership is a yoga library with over 200 individual pieces of content, most of the content are WP posts with an unlisted Vimeo video embedded. Access is protected through Memberpress.
I use WP’s native post category functionality to group posts by topic (ex: Yoga Pose Troubleshooting, Beginner Videos, Resources for Teachers) which is one of the main ways users browse the site.
I use Divi to build out a category template for each topic with its own header and description, then the posts in the category display below with thumbnails and descriptions.
Here are my questions:
I currently run the site off a subdomain of my main website (yoga.amberkarnes.com) - would I need a separate website to do that here or does a subdomain work? I don’t want the yoga library mixed in with my website / blog content and I want the yoga library to have a separate design than my main website.
Is there a similar category function that would allow me to create a membership with a large library of content like this? I’m thinking particularly of my category pages.
Any documentation on moving from Wordpress/Stripe/Memberpress combo? I have under 100 members but I would want the migration to be seamless for the members (no one has to give their credit card again, etc). I didn’t find many posts about Memberpress itself so I’m not sure what the process would be on the Stripe end of things.
I’m sure I have more questions but that’s enough for now. Thanks so much!
If you want the membership part completely separate from your main site, yes. Ghost itself listens to a single URL. There are some ways to point both domains to your Ghost site, but in most cases the “assumed setup” would be a single domain per Ghost site.
That said, is there a particular reason you’d want them separate? You could set up a collection (Building content collections in Ghost) in Ghost that holds all your membership content, for example at example.com/members/post-slug. That way a non-member would see the member-only post and know what’s hidden, but couldn’t access it. Might be good for conversions to the membership itself.
Yes, tags:
Tags themselves are always public. Visitors would see the title, description, feature image, etc. of a tag, but the content in a tag can be gated (see above).
Since the subscriptions are in Stripe, this should be pretty straightforward, but I am also not aware of a specific documentation.
That said, most managed hosting providers do offer some sort of migration assistance. If you’re planning on self hosting I’d start by using a Stripe sandbox environment, filling that with same (fake?) memberpress data, and connecting the Stripe account to a Ghost site.
(And a quick disclaimer: I run a managed hosting provider for Ghost myself, don’t work for Ghost, but have done quite a few migrations)
My current setup: