Free or Discounted Membership

Is there a way for admin to give a free membership to a user? ie I would like some special friends to get the highest membership for free or for a limited time I would give the first 100 joiners a paid membership for free, how can I do this?

You can edit members, which will also allow you to assign membership levels to them directly. To do this, navigate to Administration > Members > [Member], which will bring you to their profile editing page. If you want to give more people than a few close friends a heightened membership level for a limited time, you may want to look into using the promotional membership feature.

Beautiful. I will also try the promotional for numerous memberships. I wish we could generate a special code so when they go to pay you can enter the discount code there and get $0 charged or whatever discount the admin wanted to apply.

Is there a way to generate discount codes o this system?

The promotional membership is a pre-made membership level that you can change to make it mimic that of a paid membership level. You can control whether it is enabled or disabled from Administration > Settings > Membership Levels. It will only affect those who join when enabled. You'd need to hire a developer to integrate a coupon system, as that's not in the default package as far I know.

Thanks for the feedback.