Best way to set up on my server

I have a WP site and would like to add an area for members with S2. It was recommended that develop my regular site, theme and plugins on my main directory and make a subdirectory with another WP Install for my membership site. I am somewhat of a newbie to WP, at least when it comes to the coding side, but I wanted to check if this recommendation is valid or overkill before I set up the membership site. I assume if I just plugged this into my existing site I could make whatever pages public that I wanted with a “Members Area” menu item that would lead to a log in for everthing in S2. Are there any compelling reasons to do otherwise?

Hi Mary,

Your latter idea definitely makes more sense. Unless you have a very good reason to have two separate WordPress sites, you should keep everything on one site. (The two sites won’t be able to talk to each other if you have two of them.)

I recommend just adding s2Member to your existing site and then restricting the pages you want to restrict.

Thank you! I truly appreciate it.