Membership Email Registration for Newspaper

I have a subscription site that needs to use the S2 Member WordPress plugin. I have worked with S2 Member in the past, and what we need is some custom code to let current print subscribers add their email to their record in the database. The current business model is a print suscription where the subscribers receive the newspaper and have a unique user ID that is printed on the print edition that is delivered to their home. We want to offer them the online version and also the print version of the newspaper.

The issue is that we don’t have email addresses for many subscribers, so we want to create an easy registration process so the users can add their email. What we do have is a unique custom ID or 3-4 digit code in the subscriber database that is in excel. We can potentially import this database into S2 member so when a user enters their ID in the subscriber ID that is unique to them, the number is queried in the database and allows them to edit or add the rest of their information including their email. We don’t have an email address for many of the subscribers beccause the publication has mainly been print based.

I know that regular users for wordpress normally need an email to register their account.

I’m wondering if i can import the excel spreadsheet and then somehow create a new account registration based on the users finding their custom id on their print newspaper (the code is in near the address info). See ss. I’d like to have them register with that user number, but also only make that registration or customer ID used once and only allow one customer number per email.

I realize this project needs some custom code. Do you know any of any projects that you have worked on with a similar workflow for S2 and maybe any solutions or ideas you can offer on how to best handle the functionality that is required? Another thought is that we can add a dummy email as their email and then let them login by using their member code as their username. From there they can update their user email.

We have the Pro Version of S2 Member.

Thank you for your inquiry.

I’m very sorry for the delay in response.

what we need is some custom code to let current print subscribers add their email to their record in the database

Unfortunately, we cannot provide you with/debug custom code as per our Support Policy, but I’d be happy to point you in the right direction here.

The issue is that we don’t have email addresses for many subscribers, so we want to create an easy registration process so the users can add their email.

Because these custom IDs you’re hoping to use for Users to link with their account are so short (3-4 digits?), I’d say that it’d be very easy for someone to guess an ID that is unused and create an account even if they do not subscribe to your service.

For this reason I’d say the best approach to take here would be to create an SQL database of your current User’s First&Last Names, and these IDs. You can then have a developer set up a form to collect information, and validate it against this database’s entries. If this matches, you will need to have to pass this special ID into an s2Member Custom Registration/Profile form. You can do this using s2Member’s Remote Operations API to create these Users.

See: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting -› Remote Operations API

After these Users are created, you can then have them update their Email addresses, etc with these forms:

Dashboard -› s2Member® -› General Options -› Member Profile Modifications