I am considering trying aMember on our site, which is driven by Joomla, with NO required login. I also use SMF as our forum and logins ARE required for posting. In the sales pitches for aMember, it mentions that "plugins" for both Joomla and SMF are available. I do not even know what that means - are the plugins available as Joomla extensions and/or SMF mods? As I search this Forum, I am seeing all kinds of conflicting information about how these three products are integrated together - and am confused whether it is even truly, easily, possible. Ideally, I would like aMember pages to simply be "joomla-wrapped" so that users do not lose our site, or be confused by a different interface (I saw some posts regarding hard-coding elements of the Joomla template into the aMember template, but that works against template and other site reconfiguration tasks). I would also like to use one user database for both aMember and SMF, but may still want to have SMF free registration possible for external users to post to our forums without requiring club membership, but to have our club members, who pay an annual registration fee, to exist as a separate "group" which gets all the aMember attention. Is there some documentation which can just point me to what I can and cannot easily do? Thank you ...
Hi, First you don't need Joomla plugin if you will not protect content in Joomla. For your situation only SMF plugin is required. Plugin is small script that should be installed in aMember and that allow to add users to SMF when user signup into aMember. Here is how plugin works: http://www.amember.com/p/Integration/ You can use aMember inside a wrapper, but this may require customizations depends on exact setup. Setup with SMF as you described will work by default. Plugin will add paid users from ammeber and will assign them to paid group in SMF, also free users will be able to signup if registration in SMF will be enabled.