You do not have to have an active payment gateway configured in order to test Membership Access using PHPurchase. You can manually create a member and then manually assign a subscription product to the member. Then you can test your WordPress membership website to make sure the access privileges are working the way you want them to. Here’s how to set this up.

How To Test Membership Access Without An Active Payment Gateway

  1. Log into your WordPress Admin
  2. Navigate to the PHPurchase Settings Panel and configure the Authorize.net / Quantum Gateway settings so that the PHPurchase subscription features will be activated.
    • For the gateway URL you can enter the test Authorize.net URL
      https://test.authorize.net/gateway/transact.dll
      It doesn’t matter if you have access to a test account or not because no data will be sent. PHPurchase just needs these settings populated in order for the subscription functionality to be activated.
    • For the username and transaction key you can just enter “test” and “test” – these values don’t matter either since you won’t be connecting to the remote system.
    • Leave the vault key blank and you probably want “Use SSL” set to “no” for testing
  3. If you haven’t already, create a subscription product in the PHPurchase Products Panel
  4. Navigate to the PHPurchase Members Panel and create a test member
    • Click the “Create New Member” link to reveal a small form to create a new member
    • Provide an email address and a password then click the “Create Account” button.
    • Once the account is created you will see a screen that says “Name not set” at the top and the email address you used to create the account directly under that. Don’t worry about editing any account information such as the billing or shipping address – that won’t work anyway if you don’t have an active gateway account.
    • Under the “Establish New Subscription” heading
      • Select a subscription product in the drop down list
      • Enter a date in the start billing text field. The date doesn’t matter because we won’t be automatically charging credit cards in this test
      • Set the payment type to “Manual” so that PHPurchase does not attempt to auto-charge the customer
      • Click the “Save Subscription” button
    • You will then see that your test Member has an active subscription to your subscription product

Now you can use this test member to test your membership access privileges. If you haven’t already, create a page on your WordPress membership site that includes the shortcode [account-login] which will render a login form where members can log into your website. Enter the email address and password for the test member you just created. After successfully loggin in, take notice of wether or not your subscription pages are showing up in the navigation. Also check any pages that are using the phpromote and/or phprotect shortcodes.

For more information on how to set up a WordPress Membership website with PHPurchase please see the .