Most membership plugins are built for selling online courses. The Caney Circle is a Taino spiritual community, and what they needed did not fit in any box I could buy. So I built the box.
Over several months I designed and developed a custom WordPress membership plugin for caneycircle.org. It now powers tiered member access, private group chat, member to member messaging, a member directory, an events calendar, a vendor marketplace, file sharing, video meeting rooms, and a full learning school where apprentices study the circle’s teachings under assigned teachers. All inside WordPress. All owned outright by the organization, with no monthly platform fees.
Here is the full breakdown of the project: what the organization needed, why off the shelf tools fell short, and what I built instead.
The Challenge
The Caney Circle had three problems at once.
First, their community history lived on an aging Ning network: 131 forum topics spanning 2008 to 2025, full of teachings, ceremony reports, and discussion. That history needed a new home before it was lost.
Second, the circle is structured in tiers that reflect real spiritual responsibility: Apprentice, Behike, Elder, and Board Member. Content, conversations, files, and meetings all need to respect those tiers. A member should see exactly what their tier allows, nothing more and nothing less.
Third, the circle needed practical tools in one place: a way to chat, share files, meet over video, list public events, sell handmade goods, teach its apprentices, and welcome new members. Off the shelf membership plugins handle logins and paywalls well. They do not model a living spiritual community.
Why a Custom Plugin Beat Off the Shelf Options
I evaluated the usual suspects. Membership plugins like MemberPress and Restrict Content Pro are excellent at protecting content, but they know nothing about circles, tiers, or ceremony calendars. Community plugins like BuddyPress and bbPress bring forums and profiles, but bending them into a four tier spiritual organization means fighting the tool at every step.
A custom plugin gave the circle three things no packaged tool could:
- An exact match to how the organization actually works, down to the tier names and who can see what.
- One codebase instead of six plugins wired together, which means fewer conflicts, fewer updates that break things, and faster page loads.
- Full ownership. No per member pricing. No feature locked behind a higher plan.
Platform Breakdown: What I Built
The plugin is organized around shortcodes, so the circle’s site builders can place each piece on any page. Nineteen shortcodes cover the whole platform.
Tiered Membership and Private Circles
Every member holds one or more tiers: Caney Apprentice, Caney Behike, Caney Elder, or Board Member. Tiers control access to chats, files, video rooms, events, lessons, and directory listings. Members can also hide themselves from the directory entirely, and each profile supports a Taino name, bio, location, skills, and contact methods. Directory entries link to public profile pages for members who opt in, so visitors can meet the circle’s teachers and artisans before they ever join.
Group Chat Built for Real Conversation
Each circle gets its own group chat with image sharing, automatic link previews, clickable URLs, and a thumbs up acknowledgment button so members can confirm they have seen important messages. Moderators can remove messages, and the chat polls for new messages without page reloads. The chat lives in a dock that follows members around the site, and it opens, closes, and stays out of the way exactly the way members asked for during testing.
Private Messaging Between Members
Group chat is for the circle. Private messaging is for two people. Members write to each other directly from the member dashboard, with conversations kept private between the sender and the receiver. During testing we verified the visibility rules tier by tier: a message goes only where it is addressed, and every tier sees exactly its own conversations.
Events Calendar with RSVPs and Reminders
Members can post events with images, start and end times, and location or meeting links. Events can be marked public to appear on the public events listing, or kept for the circle only. Members RSVP with one click, and anyone who RSVPs gets an automatic email reminder before the event. Organizers can also flag a gathering as a mandatory meeting, which emails every member in the selected tiers.
The calendar itself comes in two views from one system. The public view shows only public events, safe to place on any open page. The member view shows member and public events together, with public events badged so members know what visitors can see.
Vendor Marketplace with Commission Tracking
Circle artisans sell through WooCommerce storefronts with per vendor shipping settings, product galleries, and a commission ledger. The circle keeps a set commission on each sale, vendors see exactly what they earned and what is unpaid, and payouts are tracked in the dashboard. Each vendor also gets a bio on their public profile, and every product shows a Sold by line that links back to the artisan, so buyers know whose hands made what they are buying.
File Library, Video Rooms, and Documents
Each circle has a tiered file library with image thumbnails, a documents collection, and dedicated video meeting rooms with Google Meet and Zoom links plus schedules. A special committee meeting card appears only for members who qualify to see it.
Join Requests and Welcome Onboarding
New members request circle membership through a shortcode form. Admins approve requests from the settings screen, which grants the Apprentice tier and triggers a welcome email plus a guided welcome banner on the member’s first dashboard visit. Returning members can also sign in with Facebook, tied to their existing account, so there is one less password standing between a member and their circle.
The Apprentice Learning School
The largest addition to the platform is a complete learning school for the circle’s apprentices, built into the same plugin.
The circle’s Behike preparation teachings already existed as a slide deck of more than 800 slides: three teachings covering eight wisdoms, the opening ritual and thirteen ceremonies, and nine ceremonial songs. I turned that deck into a structured online curriculum of 31 lessons with 219 quiz questions, written in the circle’s own words. Where a lesson builds on an article the circle has published, the lesson links to it, and the full set of lessons reads as one path from first wisdom to final song.
Here is how the school works:
- A path, not a pile. Lessons unlock in order. An apprentice finishes one lesson before the next opens, and a quiz closes each lesson with a 70 percent pass mark.
- Real teachers. Only Behikes and Elders can teach. Each apprentice is assigned to a teacher, and that rule is enforced by the software, not by a policy page.
- Sign offs that mean something. The ceremonial songs are signed off in person by the teacher. The dashboard gives each teacher one clear section per apprentice, with a sign off button for each song, so a teacher can confirm a song the moment it is sung correctly.
- Progress everyone can see. Apprentices watch their own path fill in from their dashboard. Teachers get detailed reports: every apprentice, every teaching, lesson by lesson status, quiz scores and attempts, and sign offs, all on one screen.
- The circle owns the curriculum. A Lessons editor in the WordPress admin lets the circle edit every lesson, every quiz question, and every field, add new lessons, and add whole new teachings, without touching code and without calling me.
Circle posts written by members can also be limited to private categories, so teachings and ceremony reports stay inside the circle even when members publish from the front end. A search box on the member posts dashboard keeps years of those writings findable.
Admin Tools That Respect the Organizer’s Time
Community platforms live or die on small admin tasks, so the plugin sweats them. The WordPress users list gains a Circle tier column, and the tier can be changed right from Quick Edit when a member advances. The lessons editor, the join request queue, and the teacher reports all sit in one Caney Circle menu in the admin. Nothing about running this community requires opening a settings maze.
The Migration: Seventeen Years of Community History
The technical build was only half the project. The circle’s history had to survive the move.
I exported all 131 Ning forum topics and rebuilt them as WordPress drafts with authors, categories, and formatting intact. Then came the images: 1,035 image references pointed at dying Ning servers and old WordPress.com file hosts. I wrote a custom importer that downloaded every reachable image into the WordPress media library and rewrote the post content to use local URLs. 670 images were recovered and rehomed. The rest pointed to servers that no longer exist, and those references were left cleanly in place rather than broken.
I also repaired hundreds of legacy links across the site’s posts and pages, pointing them from the old wordpress.com address to the organization’s own domain.
The Result
The Caney Circle now runs its entire community operation on WordPress: 1,252 member accounts organized into tiers, a living archive of seventeen years of teachings, private spaces for each circle, a school that carries apprentices from their first lesson to their teacher’s sign off, public pages that welcome newcomers, and a marketplace that supports the circle’s artisans. One plugin, one dashboard, no platform rent.
Is a Custom Plugin Right for Your Organization?
If your organization has outgrown generic membership tools, or if you are paying monthly for features you barely use while missing the ones you actually need, a custom build may cost less than you think. I have spent twenty years building WordPress sites for nonprofits, artists, and small organizations, and I would rather build you exactly the right tool than sell you a bigger toolbox.
Contact Chattooga Design to talk about your project.
How the Build Progressed
This plugin was not designed in isolation and delivered as a finished product. It was shaped by real testing, round after round, with the circle’s organizer clicking through every build. The version history tells the story:
Foundation (versions 1.1 to 1.4). The core platform went up first: tiered profiles, group chat, file libraries, video rooms, and vendor storefronts. Then came member managed social links with opt in public pages, the Board Member tier with its private circle, and frontend post submission with admin review.
Expansion (versions 1.5 to 1.7). Member sub navigation, multi tier membership, the events calendar with past recordings, members only post listings, Zoom alongside Google Meet, and renamed virtual meeting rooms.
Hardening (versions 1.8 to 1.8.2). Testing exposed that the members only post guard had never actually fired, so these versions repaired single post protection, extended privacy to blog listings and search, and added a second private category.
Member experience (versions 1.8.3 to 1.8.4). Directory hide toggle, skills pills, Taino names, bio expanders, then chat image uploads with link previews, file thumbnails, and a special committee meeting card.
Community tools (version 1.8.5). The biggest single build of the first run: event RSVPs with automatic email reminders, membership join requests with an approval queue, welcome onboarding for new tiers, a public events page, mandatory meeting broadcasts, and directory search.
Polish (versions 1.8.6 to 1.8.9). A warm organic visual theme, a centered tab navigation, directory rebuilds directed from live screenshots, thumbs up message acknowledgments in chat, and plain language disclaimers for vendors and contributors.
Member communication (versions 1.10 to 1.11). Private member to member messaging joined the group chat. The directory gained links to opt in public profile pages. Vendors gained bios and Sold by lines on their products. Members gained Facebook sign in tied to their existing accounts. And circle posts became restrictable to private categories, so member writing stays inside the circle.
The learning school (versions 1.12 to 1.12.3). The platform grew a school: 31 lessons and 219 quiz questions built from the circle’s own Behike preparation teachings, assigned teachers, song sign offs, and progress tracking. Follow up rounds wired the lessons into the member dashboard and navigation, gave the circle a full Lessons editor with room for new lessons and new teachings, added the public and member calendar views, put tier changes into Quick Edit on the users list, and gave teachers their detailed reports. The curriculum itself got a cleanup pass too, aligning every lesson with the articles the circle has published on its own site.
That is the advantage of custom development done collaboratively: every round made the tool fit the organization a little better, instead of asking the organization to fit the tool.