Custom DB fields, ODBC

Hi

I’m seriously looking at getting a pro licence for s2member, based on the review at Winkpress, the pre-sales FAQs, and looking at the fora.

I’m an experienced web developer and designer who manages the site at http://www.eurocall-languages.org, which is for a non-profit international academic community. I’m putting this site into WordPress, using Woothemes Canvas for styling plus a couple of other plugins. My colleagues want a members-only area, but better than my existing very basic setup which requires members to fill in a registration form but doesn’t connect with our membership database (currently implemented in Zoho – yeah, I know, I’m working on it).

Although I could use s2member simply to restrict Members Area content, getting members to register with the site so that they get records in the WP database, our membership secretary would have to manually remove any members who’ve not renewed, which happens often [1]. Ideally, our membership database, the website and payments would be tightly integrated, so that the member logs in and sees her membership profile, info and status and can renew membership online. I was going to redesign the membership DB in PHP/MySQL with an API which could be queried, but looking at s2member (and other WP membership plugins, though this looks to be the closest fit to our basic needs) it occurs to me that the WP DB could be our main membership DB, which could save a lot of time and effort.

After that preamble, my questions are:

1. Does s2member allow the creation of custom fields/attributes in the user database?
2. Although most members are individual, we do have corporate members who can nominate three individuals as members (eg to get discounts on conference attendance). The corps often change these nominations, which is a major headache for our secretary. Could s2member accommodate corporate members and nominees in the WP DB?
3. Is there documentation online on the structure of the tables and relations that s2member sets up in WP? An entity-relationship diagram, perhaps.
4. Can s2member send API calls to external DBs, and/or connect to them via ODBC? This would be in case the WP DB couldn’t do the job we want.
5. Does s2member provide an API for authenticated external users to query the membership DB? This is very much optional.
6. Is there a GUI method of exporting the s2member tables from the WP DB to local disk (as CSV, for instance)? I could as the admin back up the WP database to disk via the export plugin, or access the DB in phpMyAdmin and dump all or part to disk as SQL, but I’m wanting to make things easy for my non-technical colleagues.

I’m sure that the answer to all the above is ‘yes’ if the developer does enough coding, but I’m hoping to avoid any serious coding within the WP environment as I’m just not familiar enough with it, particularly the API and all its ‘hooks’. Also, my colleagues are non-technical so I don’t want to leave them with something that can only be maintained by a coder.

We’d be using the standard PayPal business account as we currently do as our members are ok with that, and I don’t want the hassle of setting up a PP Pro account plus SSL certificates – we’re not large enough to justify the extra time and expense.

Thanks in anticipation for any answers. If I can implement our membership DB into WP that would be a major saving in time, and would easily justify the small Pro fee and make me a happy bunny :o)

Cheers

Fred

[1] Attendees at our annual conference get a year’s membership as part of the conf fee, and many of these don’t renew, though of course attendees at the next year’s conference become members. So there’s quite a membership turnover, which we would really like to cut down on and improve renewal rates.

• This topic was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by  Fred Riley.

Hello Fred,

I am not confident I can answer all of your questions, but I can answer those which I know. ;)

Does s2member allow the creation of custom fields/attributes in the user database?

Yes it does, check under Dashboard -› s2Member® -› General Options -› Registration/Profile Fields.

Although most members are individual, we do have corporate members who can nominate three individuals as members (eg to get discounts on conference attendance). The corps often change these nominations, which is a major headache for our secretary. Could s2member accommodate corporate members and nominees in the WP DB?

Not sure about this functionality, I believe this would have to be coded in, maybe this video will help: Video » s2Member (Client Portals?)

Is there documentation online on the structure of the tables and relations that s2member sets up in WP? An entity-relationship diagram, perhaps.

Not that I know of, not an official one at least, since s2Member saves it’s options and information serialized arrays within WordPress’ own tables in the database.

Can s2member send API calls to external DBs, and/or connect to them via ODBC? This would be in case the WP DB couldn’t do the job we want.

You might be interested in the documentation under Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Tracking.

Is there a GUI method of exporting the s2member tables from the WP DB to local disk (as CSV, for instance)? I could as the admin back up the WP database to disk via the export plugin, or access the DB in phpMyAdmin and dump all or part to disk as SQL, but I’m wanting to make things easy for my non-technical colleagues.

Yes this is possible with s2Member pro, check under Dashboard -› s2Member® -› Import/Export. Understand that this is only available in the pro version of s2Member, the rest is available in the free version I believe. Whatever you import/export, you can’t do it with the user’s password, this is encrypted one way by WordPress.

Hope this helps. :)

Thanks for the reply, Eduan. I was intrigued by one of your answers:

Is there documentation online on the structure of the tables and relations that s2member sets up in WP? An entity-relationship diagram, perhaps.

Not that I know of, not an official one at least, since s2Member saves it’s options and information serialized arrays within WordPress’ own tables in the database.

Do you mean that s2member stores arrays in single fields/attributes?? That would go against a fundamental database design principle. Or did you mean something else? I am very keen that our data is stored in an open and portable format. I know that I shouldn’t have to worry about proprietary lockin with an Open Source CMS, but if s2member uses strange methods to store user data in the database that’d make me nervous.

I’ll likely give the single domain Pro version a punt as it’s only $69 and could save us a lot of effort.

Cheers

Fred

You can do your tests with the free version, the method remains the same.

I believe s2Member uses the same method WordPress uses for it’s options. It is kind of impractical yeah. But it isn’t anything out of the normal, just not the ideal for such a big plugin.

You can of course modify this for s2Member to create it’s own tables etc., but would require advanced custo coding all over the plugin, in order for everything to work correctly.

Hope this helps. :)

Thanks again, Eduan. I’ll download the freebie and run it in a localhost WP installation to see what it does to the database, and of course I’ll watch the videos. I suppose my alarm comes from my database theory education, where I was told that it was very bad form indeed to have a multi-valued single field which is asking for update problems, and ever since all my DBs have only single-value fields. OTOH, if s2member has to work within the constraints of the WP database design then that might be an acceptable kludge.

Cheers

Fred