Of course not.

I must say that I don’t understand why the membership templates are treated so much differently than other templates.

yes, there might be security issues and there are a lot of them, but there is no reason why there couldnt be the option of a master template, since all the templates end up having a header, footer, a message area, a menu area and a content area.

Allowing people to change a master template to reskin around these areas, without having to touch the content of these areas and therefore not risking to break anything…

My weblog has the menu on the right, but I cannot do that on the membership pages without a lot of hassle, and it’s not worth it.

Now I use EE for my own private toy site, so it’s not that much of an issue for me. But I know in my days that if I had told clients “our CMS is wonderful and has all these superb features, but when your clients log in their membership area to view their old orders they will see a grey/blue ugly boxy set of pages and that’s all there is to it” they would have told me how absurd that was. Now obviously this was our own CMS and it was at a much higher level than EE is (price tag too!) and it was only used by us to build sites for large clients so we didnt have to focus about anything besides functionality and usability and making sure our designers polished every last bit of it. Had we had to package it for release and use by any number of people we would have had to make a lot of limitations too.

But skinnable membership would be a good thing. After all this is where clients (customers of the client of your client) log in to view their orders/newsletter preferences etc.

As things stand I was considering trying to find an EE web agency to see whether they could do something to take over 3 large sites my current company has. But things like this membership issue certainly would not be acceptable to us.

It would open a lot of types of projects for EE if the membership was a little better integrated.

@iphigenie: Have you seen or considered Solspace’s User module?

There are also documented ways (here on the forums) to drive member templates through the regular template engine.

I’ve used both the User module and the method of doing member templates through the regular template engine and both work well. Of course, I too would like to see the member templates natively be as easy to manipulate as the regular templates, but there are some decent ‘workarounds’ you can use right now.

mdesign - 20 January 2008 02:57 PM

There are also documented ways (here on the forums) to drive member templates through the regular template engine.

Link(s), please?

I normally add links, but didn’t do so this time - sorry about that!

Here are the links I have regarding member templates going through regular templates:

Main question posed here:
Thread entitled ”[Solved] Custom member templates using {include:content ...hack?”

Method outlined here:
smallbeer’s comment on thread called “registration / login form”

From the thread pointed to above:

Change the “Profile Triggering Word” to something else (I change it to something no one would guess).

Then go back to the Templates tab and create a new template group called ‘member’.

In the index template within this group add:

{exp:member:manager}

{content}

{/exp:member:manager}

Wow, wish I’d found this a couple of weeks ago! Very helpful.

Turns out {exp:member:manager} barely touches on a solution. But Solspace’s $90 User module totally does. If Solspace can do it, EllisLab can do it. Really, the member templates as they are is a poke in our collective EyE.

THis may be a moot point on March 8th , but I concur that Solspace’s User module is EXCELLENT!! It is well worth $90.00 It is very easy to implement and the support is great!! You can’t go wrong. Again, well worth the money. I basically look at it as 2 paid hours ($45/hr) for a developer to create some custom code. But really it’s a lot cheaper than that considering the upgrades, documentation, the support, forum, etc.., Just like Expression Engine—the best deal in town!!

Having done both the members area and the forums to match a number of clients sites design recently, I must say that:

1) It isn’t overly difficult, especially considering the members and forums both have header/footer/css file.
The members areas and forums have completely different functions from weblog templates and I can understand EllisLabs separating them, and am sure they did so for a very good reason.

Those who have done changes “may eventually”, as time allows, create a tutorials/templates on doing so. I am in the process of making my own templates for this to make doing other clients sites easier. Time restraints make doing so a “downthe road plan”

It looks like solspaces User module mentioned above would do what a lot are asking for.

That being said,
Allowing a member to be in more than one member group would be my main request, if that’s possible. If it cannot be done simply explain why and we’ll all be uderstanding and be happy with what we have

Adam Khan - 25 February 2008 03:23 PM

Turns out {exp:member:manager} barely touches on a solution. But Solspace’s $90 User module totally does. If Solspace can do it, EllisLab can do it. Really, the member templates as they are is a poke in our collective EyE.

This would be great for now, but this close to EE 2.0 I think I’m gong to hold out for a bit.

I concur with others in regards to Solspace’s User module.. The only problem I’ve had with it is that, for some strange reason, there is no function to allow users to “remove” their avatars, which I find puzzling, considering the module allows users to “Edit” their information without resorting to stock member management stuff..

I’m just putting my hand up here for the two feature requests (Members in multiple groups and Member Profile template integration). I’m building my first large EE site and have been very impressed with flexibility of the system…until now! I’ve started on the Members Area of the site and suddenly, after everything else being so straightforward, it’s turned into a nightmare trying to integrate the design of the Member Profiles within the design of the rest of the site.

Fingers crossed that 2.0 will take care of it, it seems like such a shame that it’s not more integrated already! In the meantime i’ll probably take the hit and download the Solspace User Module…

+10 for members in multiple groups
+5 for a standard templating system (both for members and the forums)

I was extremely happy with my decision to purchase EE until I had to start working on member features and then realized I can’t even assign members to multiple groups!  The fact that I have to create separate templates for the member profile pages was very annoying but at least it had a relatively simple albeit time consuming solution. 

Multi group assignment seems like such a basic feature that it never occurred to me that expression engine wouldn’t support it.  Please please please tell me this is going to be included in 2.0