Can 1 s2m site control access to a 2nd site?

This question has grown out of our need to integrate sophisticated Job Board functionality with our Membership site.

After extensive research, it looks like we’re leaning towards either the WPJobBoard Plugin, or the Job Roller Theme for our Job Board solution.

If we go with the Job Roller theme, that is going to force a new look/layout to our existing site (not desirable), and if we go with the WPJobBoard plugin, we are worried there may be unforseen potential conflicts with the s2member and WPJobBoard plugins (also not desireable).

In either case, we’re pretty sure we want to create a separate WordPress domain/site on our hosting server for that Job Board functionality (separate from our s2member Membership site/domain). With that idea in mind, will the following work?

1. We upgrade s2member to the Unlimited Site License.

2. We then load a new domain/site to our hosting server for the Job Board.

3. We install the s2member plugin on the new Job Board site.

4. We then use our existing membership-site database to feed membership data to the new s2member-managed Job Board site

5. The result: only registered members from our existing membership site will have access to our new job Board site (and we will be able to regulate their page and content access on the Job Board site).

Is this possible, or is there a smarter/better way?

Thank you for any advice or guidance you can give us.

Hi Charles.

No, sorry. s2Member manages access to the blog it’s installed in. It doesn’t do cross site access management.

You could create a hack to sell the access from another site, like having a button in another site pointing to the one you have s2Member in, but you’re still selling it through the site that’ll be managing the access to the content it hosts.

But you posed an interesting question that made me look at this from a different angle and will think about how it could be done.

If you had the two sites connected in some way, maybe… But the sale and EOT and that would probably need to be in the same installation, while access to content could probably be done in another site if you synch the access permissions between them in some way, probably using the notifications API would be a way.

This is definitely something you’d need to hack in some way, not something s2Member does normally.

I hope that answers the question, and I’m sorry I couldn’t help you more with it.

Thank you for the quick reply Cristián. I just want to make sure that my question was as clear as possible.

The secondary site (Job Board) won’t be selling any memberships (memberships will only be sold by the primary site). We want to use the access permissions from the primary site to control access on the secondary site (the Job Board). Essentially, the job board becomes a “slave” of the primary site. Anyone who becomes a member of the primary site, automatically, (and by default) becomes a member of the secondary site.

Our idea was to have s2member running on both sites (both on the same server) but essentially sharing the primary site’s permission access database. What if we simply had a daily copying of the access permissions file from our main membership site to the secondary (Job Board) site? Would that work? We would just do a manual copying of the file that contans the access permissions from one site to the other? I would make sure that we had exactly identical membership levels set up in the 2 sites.

As another (more elegant) idea – could we modify the s2member install on the second site (Job Board) so that it would point to the access permissions file in the neighboring site’s folders on the server.

Do you think that would work?

Yeah, I think either one would work if done right. Of course, I’d be sure after tyring it and succeeding, but I can’t think of something why it wouldn’t work. :)

Cristián,

Per the prior posts in this thread, can you give any guidance on how to re-configure s2member to point to the access permissions file in the neighboring site’s folders on the server?

Thank you.

No, sorry. I know it’s not impossible to do what you suggested, but I haven’t done it myself and can’t work on it at the moment. :/

You’ll need to get a developer to do this for you. You can try freelance sites like jobs.wordpress.net, eLance or oDesk.

One thing you could use, that you didn’t mention in your ideas, is the Notifications API. They could be set up to load a script in your second site to create the user or update the user’s access there. [hilite path]Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Notifications[/hilite]

These would help creating the user in the other site, and updating his access:
[hilite path]Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting -› Remote Operations API[/hilite]
Knowledge Base » Changing Roles/Capabilities via PHP

I hope it helps.

Thank you Cristián.

No problem. :)