CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Sorry that I seem to missing something basic here, but when you integrate CiviCRM and CiviMember with WordPress, do members of CiviCRM also become WordPress users?

Yes, I want a small set of WordPress users to be admins of CiviCRM, so I understand that they can be added as admins to CiviCRM. However, I do not want every member of CiviCRM to also be added to WordPress because that will create a huge load on our external website. I've read the user manual, but am not clear about whether when someone signs up for a membership if they are also added to the WordPress side.

And if our non-profit's members are not added to WordPress as users, how do they access their contact dashboard to login and renew their membership? Do I need to create and CiviCRM login page? How?

Thanks!

There are a couple ways you can approach this, which one you choose might depend on the number of users you're dealing with and the frequency with which you need to add them...

1. If it's a small number of users who are already in your CiviCRM records, I would simply add them as WP users manually (using the same real name and email address they have in CiviCRM), assign them the WP admin role, then use CiviCRM's Administer > Users and Permissions > Sync users to contacts. 

2. If there are a lot of them and you want them to self-register, when you set up a membership signup form, there is an option in the "Advanced" area to require Wordpress user creation.  You could create a membership signup profile just for your "special" users, and allow them to create their accounts that way.   You would probably also have to create a special membership type for this purpose (something like " Member - Admins", and use the WordPress CiviCRM Member Role Sync plugin to match the membership type with Wordpress Admin role. (Search the CiviCRM forum or Github for the plugin).

There may be other ways, but those are the routes I'm familiar with.