Membership Application form

I may be going about this the wrong way, so if I need to redirect, I’ll do it.

My END GOAL is to have a website which serves 2 groups of people:

1. people who are members in our organization
2. people who are visitors to the website

For the 2nd group of people (visitors) I am planning on using Connections to display a list of our members so they can find a person to help them with a bee problem. These visitors will never need to logon to the site.

For the 1st group of people – our members – I am trying to create a “Membership Application form” to help them join our organization. To be honest, I am creating 2 different membership forms because one type of membership we need to collect quite a bit more information than the other type. The membership form needs to accomplish these tasks:

• have all of the fields for a typical membership (name, email, phone, address, etc).
• send the information to the membership director via email
• put the information into the fields in the WP user database (members will be able logon to edit their information, as well as access private parts of the website).
• be connected to PayPal to pay for their membership

The PayPal option needs to have 2 payment levels – either pay for just the current year at $25, or pay for this year (pro-rated) plus all of next year at $37.50.

The problem I am having is finding a unified form/membership/payment system.

Background – my site uses Kadence for the theme and Elementor Pro.

What I have tried is to use Contact Form 7. This sucked because the forms it creates are very “unprofessional” in appearance. Basically everything in 1 column.

When that didn’t work, I tried to use the Form within Elementor Pro (upgrade to Pro just to get this). This allows forms that are very nice. But damned if I can figure out how to get a single “submit” button that sends the email AND handles the PayPal payment.

And I haven’t even tried to get it integrated into the WP user database yet.

Surely somebody somewhere has already done this. I would believe that virtually every club/organization everywhere is wanting to do something similar to it.

The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]