An "all free" site, with multiple levels?

The topic says it all.

I am setting up a private site and I do not charge my members for access. I do however want to have different access levels for different members.

Can S2 support multiple free levels?

Are you letting people select the level they want when they register or are you creating their accounts for them?

Dave

Hi, I didn’t ask the original question, but I’m also looking for an answer to it. In my case, my site will have free subscribers, which is basically the interested general public, but I also need a free level which is only available to people with a specific professional certification.

The latter group will fill out the registration form and include their certification number. This registration request will be reviewed by a human, who will check to see that the certification number is valid, and if so, provide the registrant with a password for the “professional” level.

Is that something that S2Member will handle, and if so, does it require the Pro version?

If you are manually checking them, then all you would need to do is either:

1. Use Level 0 and Level 1. Then protect your Level 1 pages/info so only certified people can access it. Then when they join, if they are certified, just manually update them to Level 1 status.

or

2. Use the same process but keep both at Level 0 and use custom capabilities to filter who has access to what.

Yes, this can be done with the free version.

Dave

Excellent, thanks. I’m brand new to S2, so I have a learning curve ahead of me, but you’ve pointed me in a couple of useful directions!

Thanks again for the suggestion; after talking to my client, what they’d like to do is have people identify themselves as a “certified trainer” (or not) upon registration, and enter their certification number. Then the system should basically assume they’re telling the truth and send them out a confirmation and a password, which would grant them access to their protected pages on the site. When the client gets the message that there is a new member, and that they’ve identified themselves as certified, they’ll check the number, and if it’s not accurate they’ll block the access and contact the registrant to confirm the number in person.

So what I’d like to do is have people who identify themselves as “certified” on registration be automatically upgraded to level 1 when they log back in, which I’m thinking could be done with custom capabilities, but after spending some hours trying to figure out how to do that, I’m still stuck.

I’ve added the registration fields that will identify a “certified’ user, and I’ve been able to use the [S2Get…] shortcode to display their information on the screen when they log in, but I don’t know the syntax for the shortcode (or php) to use that information to write a conditional something like “if user_field ‘certification’ = “true” then level=1″.

Can someone help me with this? Thanks!