Constellation

Constellation is an all-in-one WooCommerce membership plugin that can help you offer perks, protected content, and discounts to members on your store. Constellation supports a variety of use cases, including purchasing clubs, associations, communities, online learning, content paywalls, wholesale / b2b, and more.

1. Download the extension from your WooCommerce dashboard.
2. Go to Plugins > Add New > Upload and select the ZIP file you just downloaded.
3. Click Install Now and then Activate.
4. Click the button to start the setup wizard, or go to Constellation > Configuration and read the next section to learn how to use the plugin.

The first time you install Constellation, you’ll see a prompt to start onboarding. This is the fastest way to set up the plugin — you can complete this now, or access it later from Constellation > Dashboard.

Onboarding wizard

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If you choose to do the onboarding wizard, you’ll be guided through a few steps. First, you’ll be asked about the type of business you run, and how you want to protect members-only content.

By choosing your business type, we’ll automatically adjust the settings that are best for your industry. For example, if you’re a content publisher, we’ll ensure your protected content uses a paywall and teaser to entice signups, instead of completely hiding your articles. However, you can change any of these settings later!

You’ll then create your first plan by adjusting how you grant access, what content is protected, what discounts are offered, and what emails members will receive.

If you complete the onboarding wizard, you probably don’t need to change any plugin settings! But if you’re the kind of person who likes to flip every switch and turn every knob (hey, no judging here!), we’d love for you to check what’s under the hood at Constellation > Configuration. Here you can add custom profile fields for your members, or adjust settings.

General settings will let you adjust how protected content is hidden (make it 404? show a paywall?), and whether members should be directed to a specific page when they log in (vs general customers).

Products settings will let you adjust how perks interact with your product catalog, such as whether member discounts can be stacked with sale prices, or whether having a membership in the cart lets the customer tap into member discounts right away.

Recurring billing settings control whether your members can renew early (prior to the membership expiration) and whether billing cycles should all be synchronized on a specific day of the month.

Messages let you take fine-grained control over all of the member and non-member messages shown on your site (such as what your content paywalls say to encourage folks to subscribe). While you can set up global defaults here, it’s also worth noting that you can customize these messages on specific pages, blog posts, or products.

When you set up a product to sell a membership, you can create a simple or variable product (to sell memberships with a one-time fee or manual renewals), or you can use recurring billing to sell memberships with automated renewals. In either case, you must enable “Grant membership access” on the product when setting it up.

(Using recurring billing will automatically grant membership access, since Constellation adds these new product types.)

If the product grants membership access, you’ll choose the plan that purchases will gain access to — this will create a membership for any customer upon purchasing this item.

You can adjust membership perks or access at any time under Constellation > Plans. The plan created in onboarding can be updated here, or you can create a new plan.

• General: control which products grant access to this plan (or other ways of gaining access), and choose how long the membership lasts.
• Restrict content: Add pages, posts, categories, or tags that should be protected for members only. You can decide if the member gets access immediately once they subscribe, or if they have to wait a certain period after purchase to view the protected content. (Including whether they can access content during free trials or not.)
• Restrict products: Choose products or product categories that should be protected for members. You can decide if products are visible, but only purchasable, by members; or, if the products are only visible for members.
• Purchasing discounts: Create amount ($) or percentage (%) discounts that are automatically applied for logged in members. Discounts can be applied to your entire catalog, to categories, or to specific products.
• Members area: Add member perks to the account area when members log in. You can show lists of all perks, such as protected content, products, and products that have discounts. This is also where members can manage their billing or cancel memberships.
• Email content: If you want to send pre-renewal or win back emails for expired members, you can customize the content of the email to make it more personal or relevant for this plan. Learn more about emails below.

While you can protect content for members from the plan page, you may also want to protect new content as you add it. By using the Constellation button in your post editor (or using the top-right options menu), you can open the Constellation windows to protect your new blog posts or pages, and choose whether the content needs to be delayed for member access.

If your content is restricted, you can also force it to be public by disabling restrictions.

Products can be restricted in a similar way, or be discounted for members, using the Constellation metabox when editing a product.

When customers purchase memberships, you can view them under Constellation > Members. You’ll see an overview of the membership details, and you can click into the membership to view more. (If a customer has purchased more than one membership, you will see multiple entries in this list!)

You can also use the “Open filters” button to segment your members list (helpful if exporting a list, depending on membership status or profile fields).

Members can always be manually added via the “Add Member” button. You can choose an existing customer to grant access to a plan, or you can create a new user in the same process.

Constellation is packed with a lot more advanced functionality — you can check out detailed documentation here. The most commonly used advanced features are listed below.

Profile fields are useful for sites that leverage a member directory to list out members on the site (whether public or on members-only pages). They can also be used for admin record keeping (and will not be visible to members). You can define a new profile field under Constellation > Configuration > Profile fields. Each field can have a field type, which controls whether the field has options, and the plans the field is related to (members of this plan will have this field show up on their profile).

When a profile field is added, members can edit the field (if editing is enabled) from the account area. If the field is added to the product page, members can also fill out fields during purchase, before adding the membership to their cart.

The members list is filterable by profile field options as well.

Member emails can be enabled in the WooCommerce email settings. However, the content is controlled by each plan, so that you can personalize the emails for maximum impact. Each plan has an Email content tab, where you can edit the default email content as desired.

Emails will use merge tags to dynamically insert member content, such as member names or end dates.

Note: If you use membership view or renewal URLs, members will be securely and automatically logged in when clicking (similar to LinkedIn or Facebook).

Constellation can let you choose to offer free shipping for your members. When creating a free shipping rate, you can set a restriction that the free shipping method requires “an active membership”. When you add this rate, you can edit which plans are required to be shown this free shipping rate.

For example, you may offer free shipping to non-members with a $50+ purchase. However, members can get free shipping for all orders, or may be offered expedited free shipping (for any order, or when they meet a minimum total).

WooCommerce and most extensions are translation-ready – click here for tips on translating extensions. This plugin’s text domain is: kestrel-constellation 

However, this plugin also bundles packages from other authors to support its functionality. Some strings may come from those packages — typically from the woocommerce-plugin-framework package. You can read more about translating that framework (authored by SkyVerge) here.

How does Constellation handle privacy requests?

This plugin is designed to help you respect your members’ data, and help you with GDPR or CCPA compliance. Any data export requests will include your membership and recurring billing records for the user. Data deletion requests can also remove personal data or membership records if you’d like — you can enable these under WooCommerce > Settings > Accounts & Privacy.

If you run into issues while using Constellation, please run these checks first:

1. Sometimes your server or site timezone settings can produce unexpected results. If you experience issues with content dripping, recurring billing, or email schedules, please check your WordPress timezone under Settings > General. Use a location timezone instead of a UTC offset (for example, “USA: New York” rather than “UTC-4”).
2. If you see other issues with emails, please double check that they’re enabled under WooCommerce > Settings > Emails (we know, this seems too easy! But sometimes it really is the case).
   • If these emails are disabled, you also won’t be able to edit the email content for your plans.
3. Make sure your membership products are purchasable. If non-members can’t buy them, your expired members can’t renew! It’s a great idea to make sure membership products have the Disable restrictions toggle on to force them to always be public.
4. Caching and optimization plugins can sometimes interfere with content protection. Please temporarily deactivate these plugins if you see content protection failures (e.g. content is public that shouldn’t be, or members can’t view the content they have access to).
   • If this is the culprit, please check if you can exclude protected pages from caching in the plugin settings to resolve this issue.

Still have questions? We’d love to help out! Please submit a request to the help desk and include a description of what’s going wrong along with your system report (found under WooCommerce > System Status).