Is s2Member right for me?

Hi

I’ve been using s2Member Framework to set up my website and like it’s functionality but have a lot of unanswered questions. I understand that you can’t support free members, and am happy to upgrade to Pro if I will be able to get assistance on the following.

1. I want my site to be a membership site, with 2 levels of membership – free and paid. The main aim of my site is to offer paid members technical advice via a Q&A. The way I want it to work is for paying members only to be able to view the Q&As, a paying member can ask a question but ONLY I can respond to the question.
Does s2Member support this, and what Q&A plugin would best suit my needs?

2. Subscription options: I want an introductory offer where new members sign up to a reduced rate for their first year, but to pay monthly. This will allow me to increase the rate after the first year. At the moment it appears that the Paypal options are for ongoing monthly subscription, without a fixed term.

3. I’m having trouble testing my site, as I can only log on as 1 user (admin). I want to be able to view the site as a visitor, a free member and a paid member. Is there a way of doing this?

I look forward to some advice.

Thanks for your inquiry.

~ We appreciate your patience :-)

1. I want my site to be a membership site, with 2 levels of membership – free and paid. The main aim of my site is to offer paid members technical advice via a Q&A. The way I want it to work is for paying members only to be able to view the Q&As, a paying member can ask a question but ONLY I can respond to the question.
Does s2Member support this, and what Q&A plugin would best suit my needs?

I can’t offer any specific advice about a Q&A plugin, because really, I’ve not spent any length of time testing a bunch of existing plugins for something like this. Generally speaking, I would suggest building something like this for yourself, or with help from a freelancer at sites like Elance.com, where you might find someone you can hire to help with this. I say that, simply because it does’nt sound like anything really complex that you need (e.g. not real expensive), but you ARE looking for some specific functionality, and having a coder helping you, will give you that.

s2Member can most definitely be integrated with things like this. Aside from basic Restriction Options in the Dashboard, s2Member also provides both Simple Conditionals, and Advanced PHP Conditionals. We call them advanced, because most aspects of s2Member are point and click. However, the Advanced Conditionals are NOT hard to work with either.

For instance, if you have a particular section of your site that needs to be protected (i.e. only YOU can access the form that allows you to answer the question, or something else like this, even if it’s related to a User/Member), you would wrap that section of your site (in the code), with a Conditional expression.

<?php if(current_user_is('administrator')){ ?>
	Display the form to post an answer to this question.
<?php } else if(current_user_can('access_s2member_level1')){ ?>
	Display a box where the customer can ask a question.
<?php } ?>

You will find all of the details and documentation on this inside your Dashboard, even in the free version of s2Member. References to this documentation are inside the Dashboard of your WordPress installation.

Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting -› Advanced PHP Conditionals
Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting -› Simple/Shortcode Conditionals
Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting -› Advanced Query Conditionals

All of s2Member’s API Functions are documented online for developers:
http://www.s2member.com/codex/stable/s2member/api_functions/package-summary/

2. Subscription options: I want an introductory offer where new members sign up to a reduced rate for their first year, but to pay monthly. This will allow me to increase the rate after the first year. At the moment it appears that the Paypal options are for ongoing monthly subscription, without a fixed term.

s2Member supports a whole bunch of different options/scenarios, above and beyond what you see in the UI where the PayPal Button Generator is. Please take a look down below in that same page of your Dashboard, at the Shortcode Attributes. s2Member can certainly handle fixed-term subscriptions for you.

See: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Buttons -› Shortcode Attributes (Explained)

That being said, it is NOT currently possible to start your customers on a monthly payment plan, where the first year is billed at one rate, and the second year is billed at another. Actually, you could do this, but it would require the customer to stop paying for the original subscription, and then signup again under the new terms for the second year.

If you’re looking to make this a seamless transition from the first year to the second, where you’re simply changing the price, it’s not possible to do this with s2Member or with s2Member Pro. This is due to limitations in the payment gateway APIs that s2Member integrates with, and can be attributed mostly to consumer safety. Payment gateways generally don’t like you to setup a billing plan and then change the price on a customer, because that leads to chargebacks and confusion in some cases.

3. I’m having trouble testing my site, as I can only log on as 1 user (admin). I want to be able to view the site as a visitor, a free member and a paid member. Is there a way of doing this?

You would just create users manually from the Dashboard so you can login as someone else. From your Dashboard, go to: Users -> Add New, and give them a Role, of whatever Level you want to test as. It’s helpful to setup usernames like “subscriber”, “level1”, “level2”, so you can just login with those test accounts and view things from their perspective.

Please let us know if you have any other questions/concerns.

Thanks for your reply Jason, that’s very useful.