Building a site with MembersIntel

MembersIntel can build a membership site for you from nothing — server, WordPress, plugins, license and starter content — rather than connecting to a site you already run. This article covers what that build actually does, what you see while it runs, and what happens if it stops.

What gets created

The build runs as a sequence of stages against a real host. The build screen names each one in plain language as it works on it:

Stage	What it is doing
Setting up your account	Your MembersIntel account, if you do not already have one
Creating your server	The host the site will live on
Installing WordPress	A fresh WordPress install on that server
Installing your plugins	MemberPress and the rest of the plugin stack
Activating your MemberPress license	Your license, on your new site
Connecting your site to MembersIntel	The Connect plugin, so your data starts flowing
Setting up who your content is written by	The WordPress user generated content is attributed to
Applying your template	Your chosen starting design
Writing your starter content	The pages your site opens with
Adding your pages to your site	Either published or saved as drafts — your call, see below
Finishing up	The last of the setup

You end up with a working WordPress membership site: your own server, your own WordPress install, MemberPress activated under your license, a template applied, starter pages written, and the site already connected to MembersIntel so the advisor has your data from day one.

Watching it run

The build screen keeps itself up to date while the build is going, and tells you two things: the stage being worked on right now, and where that sits in the sequence.

It deliberately does not show a percentage. The stages are not the same length as each other, so a percentage would be a made-up number, and a made-up number on a progress bar is worse than an honest stage name.

The headline tells you the state of the build: Waiting to start, Building your site, Your build is paused, or Your site is ready. There is a link to your new site’s address as soon as there is one — with a note saying there is nothing to see there yet if the build has not finished.

The one decision you make

Partway through, the build asks whether to publish your starter pages to your live site.

Read that question carefully, because it is a real one. If you approve, pages are published as they are written and anyone visiting your site can read them — you do not see them first. If you would rather not, every page is saved as a draft instead and nothing is published; you publish whatever you want, whenever you want, from your own site.

Declining is not a failure state and does not hold anything up. Your site and your account finish either way. Approving is recorded — who approved, and when — and the build screen shows that record back to you afterwards.

There is more detail in Publishing, and what you approve.

If the build pauses

A build that hits a problem it cannot get past on its own pauses rather than carrying on. Each stage retries a few times first, so a pause means a stage tried, failed repeatedly, and stopped deliberately instead of leaving your site in a state nobody could describe.

Two things are true of a paused build:

• Nothing already done is thrown away. The stages that completed stay completed. A pause is a stop, not a rollback.
• It is not the end of the build. A paused build can be picked up again once whatever stopped it is dealt with.

The build screen has a What happened section explaining the stop. If it is not something you can act on, that is what support is for — say which site and what the screen told you.