Visitor Types
When using ActiveMember360 there can be many different types of visitor to your WordPress site.
Understanding these types of visitors is essential to ensuring the site behaves in the desired way for each visitor.
Apart from a Public Visitor all other visitor types only exist after they have successfully logged in to your WordPress site.
Public Visitor
A public visitor is one that has not logged in to your site. They can only view content that either has no ActiveMember360 access settings specified or that where those settings specify conditions such that the content may be accessible by anyone or by a not logged in user.
Also, as they are not logged in to the site they have no connection via ActiveMember360 to ActiveCampaign. Therefore no ActiveCampaign contact information is available for this visitor, neither fields nor tags.
A public visitor is typically the type of visitor that views your site having been directed there from a Google search or similar, from any link to your site, or from stumbling across it via web surfing, word of mouth etc.
A public visitor can also be someone who has unsuccessfully attempted to login to your site.
Local WordPress Administrator User
When a user installs WordPress, a new user is created with the username and password defined during the installation. That first user is assigned the user role of administrator. They can perform all actions on a WordPress website and have full capabilities. They can also create additional users with the role of administrator.
ActiveMember360 treats WordPress administrator users as a special case.
All content, in most circumstances, will be seen by administrator users irrespective of the ActiveMember360 settings for Controlling Access To & Visibility Of Pages & Posts and Controlling Visibility Of & Customising Content Within Pages & Posts. However ActiveMember360 Shortcodes that rely upon the logged in user being a contact within ActiveCampaign will not be displayed.
When testing the behaviour of your WordPress site you should NOT use an administrator user. Only a Remote User should be used for testing.
Every user within WordPress must have an email address linked to their WordPress user profile. For security reasons a contact should not exist within ActiveCampaign with an email address the same as that of a WordPress administrator user.
Local WordPress User
If a user has an email address that only exists within the WordPress database, but is not associated with a contact in ActiveCampaign, upon using the WordPress credentials to login the user will be logged in to the site as a local WordPress user.
They will only have access to content for which they satisfy the conditions specified by ActiveMember360 settings for Controlling Access To & Visibility Of Pages & Posts and Controlling Visibility Of & Customising Content Within Pages & Posts. Any ActiveMember360 Conditional Shortcodes will evaluate as false as no ActiveCampaign data is available for the user to test against. Similarly, any ActiveMember360 Shortcodes that rely upon the logged in user being a contact within ActiveCampaign will not be displayed nor show ActiveCampaign data. Hence it is most likely that these visitors will appear as if they are not actually logged in to your site.
If for whatever reason your WordPress site loses its connection to ActiveCampaign it is likely that all users will be able to login as local WordPress users. Similarly if ActiveMember360 is not active on your site.
Remote User
ActiveMember360 classes a visitor as a remote user if they are logged in to your WordPress site and have a connection to a contact with the corresponding email address within your ActiveCampaign application. The connection to ActiveCampaign is established upon login to your ActiveMember360 powered WordPress site if the visitor exists in ActiveCampaign, and has the appropriate ActiveCampaign data i.e. typically tags, to access the WordPress site.
Typically, as a minimum, a remote user must have at least one ActiveCampaign tag used to define a membership in ActiveMember360, Settings, Memberships, and use valid login credentials authenticated against those stored within ActiveCampaign or WordPress to access the WordPress site. However if within ActiveMember360, Settings, Login, Allow login without a membership tag is set to Yes only valid login credentials are required.
They will not be able to login if they have any one of the ActiveCampaign tags that are used to ban access to the WordPress site as defined within ActiveMember360, Settings, Login, Tag used to ban a subscriber from site.
Once logged in to the site the remote user can at any point in time be any combination of:
- A remote user who satisfies the required conditions to access content as specified by ActiveMember360 settings for Controlling Access To & Visibility Of Pages & Posts and Controlling Visibility Of & Customising Content Within Pages & Posts.
- A remote user who does not satisfy the required conditions to access content as specified by ActiveMember360 settings for Controlling Access To & Visibility Of Pages & Posts and Controlling Visibility Of & Customising Content Within Pages & Posts.
- A remote user who is permitted to see public content but not able to access any content that is controlled by a Set Page/Post Access Conditions - Memberships condition for which they have the Failed Payment Tag as defined within ActiveMember360, Settings, Memberships i.e. a remote user with a Failed Payment status.
Typically, all logged in users to your site apart from WordPress administrators will be remote users if all is configured and working correctly.