Hello aMember Community... I am new here but not new to web technologies, design and architecture. I would value some solid input from a professional user regarding merging the aMember functionality with a custom built site. The overall functionality of this online software seems quite nice and seems to meet most of the professional requirement I have. My main concern is being locked into prebuilt forms, member pages and such. Is it possible to pull in pieces of the aMember system onto my custom PHP pages via PHP Snippets thus doing away with the need to build new aMember themes? If building new custom themes is the correct and desired approach could you point me in the right direction? Most of what I have seen is only slight tweaks not a total modernization of various login forms, products, member pages and such. Also concerned about building custom aMember Themes as I want to be sure upgrading is quick and seamless? Would value other input regarding all this? Kind Regards, Dave
You can definitely grab the functionality of the aMember forms and pages and build them into your own PHP scripts, but why do that when everything is already pre-built for you and all you have to do is style it to match your current website? Seems like re-inventing the wheel and doing 3x the work. And yes, building new custom themes is the correct approach so that you can overwrite any of the default aMember features/styles and keep them throughout all the upgrades. Easy way of going about it is to create a new folder in /application/default/themes/YourTheme and then copy whatever files you need to modify (for specific pages) from /application/default/views folder - that's a default theme that aMember uses. Just copy the files/folders in the same structure and then modify the ones you need for specific forms or pages you'd need (instead of copying the whole folder over with all the files and only changing a few of them - aMember might update some of their default templates at some point down the road and you won't see those modifications if you overwrite them all in your theme with older files).
Great Advice And I do Agree... Have spent quite a bit of time with this now and getting the hang of how the theme functionality works. Thank you for your input, most appreciated. Kind Regards, Dave