WordPress as a CMS Membership website

I am involved with several WordPress support websites including this one (recently). I seem to get the question “Can WordPress be used as a CMS/Membership Website?”. I haven’t needed to set one up, so I always refer them to suggestion from other forums. I’ve decided that it’s only a matter of time until I will be required to implement this type of a WP website so I’ve decided to be Pro-Active and set up a development version.

I’ve been looking at Magic Members specifically, but I don’t know anyone that has used it. My question has two parts:

1) Does anyone have first hand experience using Magic Members. If so is it worth the $197.

2) Do you have any recommendations an an alternative?

NOTE:
I’ve tried out many of the plug-ins from the repository, but for a business I haven’t found one that fits all the requirements.

Here is a list of the features that are most likely needed:

1. Membership access control on various levels
2. Public and Private content
3. Simplified User Interface (this isn’t as important since I know a few tricks including ones I’ve discovered here.
4. Document sharing
5. Content Available to Author created content that can only be changed/updated by them and the Administrator.

I know this is a pretty in depth questions, but any pointers or personal experience will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Jeremy Jared

You could use a combination of the Members plugin to manage user roles (ie employee types or levels) along with the Custom Post Type UI plugin to manage various post types.

With the Custom Post Type UI you could create posts types. Then you could allow or deny rights for various operations on each type of post separately (edit, publish, edit after publish, delete, submit for publish by an admin, view, edit other’s posts) for each employee type role. You could create posts that an employee of type 1 could publish and be viewable only by other type 1 employees. Along side those, there could be some other post that employee type 1’s could read but not publish too. And still another post type that could be viewable by the public. Etc, etc, etc…

The combo of these two plugins would give you very granular control over what different types of employees would be able to do. Check out this simple example of restricting rights on one custom post type.