As you know I eventually found the best way to build a membership site by using Wordpress and the Wishlist member plugin. I use Hostgator servers because they have great support and I don’t have to pay for each of my websites (as I had to do with Godaddy). You can see my membership site on mastering the guitar fretboard.
Here’s another informative post by Chris Garrett which explains how he built his membership site, which is a little more complicated with the use of Amember and a forum. I believe people will move towards the Wishlist member plugin more and more over time.
When I was a member of Teaching Sells, I started to obtain all the individual software packages that were initially recommended such as Moodle, Amember, vBulletin and Affiliate Pro. But after struggling with this (even as a programmer myself), noticing they weren’t truly integrated (each with their own user profiles and login/logout issues) and wanting to focus more on the content and marketing I went with Extreme Member. This was great for a while because it was fully hosted and integrated, with email marketing and affiliate marketing built in. The downside was the monthly cost at $99/month and having the site go down for many hours a couple times.
Using Wordpress (free) and adding plugins such as Wishlist Member and most others that are free, is so easy with a bit of learning. You can even add a forum such as the Simple Forum plugin (free), which will do the job.
The beauty of themes is that you can instantly changing the look of your site, and the content remains the same. You can go here to get tons of free wordpress themes.