Our newly designed form builder is here.

Development work on version 3 continues with recent focus being on new UI designs for front-end components. Field groups has also been created as a new approach for creating custom fields.

To celebrate the upcoming release of our new WordPress plugin ForumWP we’re running a giveaway where you can win 1 of 5 free one-year licenses for the ForumWP – Basic Plan (worth $99).

What is ForumWP?

ForumWP is a forum plugin which adds an online forum to your website. With ForumWP you can easily create forums and allow users to create topics and write replies.

Forums are a great way to build and grow an online community and whilst a few forum plugins already exist for WordPress, we felt that we could offer a more modern solution with a beautiful design.

Competition details

Prize: Win 1 of 5 free one-year licenses for the ForumWP – Basic Plan (worth $99).

How to enter: There are 4 ways to enter the competition:

• Sign up to our mailing list
• Follow @forumwpplugin on Twitter
• Like ForumWP on Facebook
• Retweet our tweet.

Each completed action will give you more entries into the competition increasing your chance of winning.

The giveaway is a way for you to win a free license and for us to get the word out about ForumWP.

If you are one of the five winners we will email you once the competition has finished to let you know you have won.

Even if you don’t win the competition by signing up to our ForumWP mailing list we will still send you a discount code for being an Ultimate Member user.

You can enter the competition using the widget below.

Goodluck!

ForumWP giveaway

This week we will be releasing two new extensions, making the theme (beta release) available for purchase and making some change to pricing.

New extensions

The first week of October we will be releasing two new extensions: User Groups and User Photos.

User Groups

The User Groups extension allows users to create and join groups around shared interests, topics etc. Users can post and have discussions within the groups.

User Photos

The User photos extension allows users to create and upload photos to their user profile.

Theme

The beta release of the theme will also occur in the first week of October. If you purchase the theme during the beta period you will get a 2-year license for the price of a 1-year license.

Pricing Changes

With the release of the new extensions and the theme, we will be making some changes to our pricing models. We will be replacing the extensions bundle with an extensions pass and introducing a new extensions + theme pass.

The extension pass provides the exact same features of the current bundle (access to all premium extensions and unlimited site usage) but the access pass will only require one license key rather than the current system where each extension has a separate license key.

The extensions + theme pass provides access to all premium extensions and our official theme for one single price.

Our prices have not increased for 3 years but to ensure the long-term sustainability of the business and to allow us to grow the team (faster development and support) we will be increasing the prices of our extensions.

Prices for existing extensions will increase by 20% and with the release of the new extensions the pricing for the new access passes will be as follows:

• Extensions Pass – $249/year
• Extensions + Theme Pass – $299/year

With the access passes it works out at buying each extension for only $13.10 ($249/19). This is a small increase of $1.40 from $11.70 ($199/17). Purchasing the theme via the access pass offers a 50% saving compared to buying the theme individually.

The theme will also be available for purchase individually (starting from $99/year for a single site license).

Whilst we’ve tried to avoid increasing prices for the last few years, it is important that we have the ability to grow the support and development team as every year support increases significantly as more people use the plugin.

These changes are designed to ensure that Ultimate Member is here for the long-term and allows us to provide a better plugin and service in the future.

These changes will occur in October.

Existing Customers

For existing customers, you will be grandfathered into the existing pricing. Customers with an active bundle license, you will be moved onto the extensions access pass.

After the release of UM2 which was many months in the making, we are now stepping up development of new features for the plugin and new extensions.

To make it easier for you to see what we’re working on and what’s coming in the future we have created a public roadmap.

The roadmap provides a quick summary of new features that are currently being developed, what we will be developing next and future plans.

Via this page, you can also submit feature suggestions for new functionality you would like to see. So if you have an idea for how Ultimate Member could be made better we would love to hear it!

At the bottom of the page you can see the changelog for the plugin and all the extensions.

We hope you find our roadmap useful and alongside our public revenue-metrics, we aim to be a transparent and open company.

GDPR

On the 25th of May, new EU privacy rules come into effect called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

These new regulations have a wide-ranging impact on businesses and websites. If you are an EU based business or have website users who are from the EU you will need to ensure that your site is in compliance with the new regulations.

If you’ve never heard of the GDPR or are not sure about the consequences of the new regulations, we recommend reading the following sources:

• https://www.eugdpr.org/
• https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/complete-wordpress-gdpr-guide/
• https://kinsta.com/blog/gdpr-compliance/
• http://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/the-ultimate-guide-to-wordpress-and-gdpr-compliance-everything-you-need-to-know

WordPress 4.9.6

On May 17th WordPress 4.9.6 was released which included some GDPR privacy-related features including data export and removal tools, privacy policy page template and cookie opt-in for comments. You can read more about WordPress 4.9.6 here.

Ultimate Member & GDPR

To make it easier for your site to comply with the new regulations, we’ve done the following:

• Integrated UM with the WordPress data exporter (Custom UM created fields will show in the data file).
• Integrated UM with the WordPress data eraser
• Updated Private Messaging extension to make it possible for users to download their private message chat history (Private Messaging extension).
• Added a privacy field to registration forms for users to consent to privacy policy before registering
• Recorded timestamp of user confirmation to terms & condition upon registration (Terms & Conditions extension).
• Updated MailChimp extension to either delete or unsubscribe users from your MailChimp list when they delete their account.

Responsibility

Whilst ourselves and other plugin developers are working on making it easier to comply with the GDPR, as the owner of your site, it is your responsibility to ensure that your site is compliant with the regulations.

Action to take

We suggest doing the following in regards to Ultimate Member plugin:

• Update Ultimate Member to the latest version
• Create a privacy policy and enable the privacy policy field on registration forms by turning on the privacy policy from edit registration form page.
• Install our free terms & conditions extension so that users must agree to your terms & conditions before registering.
• Turn on double opt-in for MailChimp subscribers
• Enable the user deletion tab in account page so users can delete their account

What we’ve implemented

To comply with the GDPR regulations ourselves we have:

• Added required checkboxes to forms on our websites (support, pre-purchase etc).
• Updated website to the latest version of WordPress which includes the data exporter/eraser for user requests for data.
• Added a required privacy checkbox to the checkout page.
• Updated our privacy policy.
• Disabled IP storage for form submissions.
• Added GDPR cookie consent plugin to the website.
• Turned on double opt-in for MailChimp signups.
• Moved our website server location to EU