That thought is kind of subjective.
Dealing with wordpress membership mostly just needs messing with its built-in role and capabilities, unless you really have a complex membership setup which you shouldn’t have use wordpress to begin with.
But for a basic membership, a typical set-up involves the following.
- Create a custom roles and assign specific capabilities for your members, make sure you have different roles and capabilities for different membership type, this is crucial for the security of your membership set-up. You can find more info here
Additionally, you can mess and test with different roles and capibilities using a plugin like this one
- Create a registration form which integrate the payment system you want to use (if you need a paid membership). only 3 things needed on this process.
- check the users table and make sure the email provided is unique and does not exists in users table before succesful submission.
- determining successful payment for paid membeship
- create the user after form submission and assign them to the their specific role.
I remember setting up a basic membership a decade ago where I only use gravity form for registration and payment capture process, all I did was execute something on different gf event hooks
and thats it. you have a membership set-up.
For backend access of your members like creating custom post type, this relies on the capabilities you assign to them.
For front-end access, you can use user_can or WP_User::has_cap to restrict specific pages intended for specific members