Membership Levels + Types, Start Dates

Hello!

I am looking to configure a fairly dynamic membership site – and it appears s2 can fit most of my needs but just want to ask some clarification on the whole custom capabilities, and a couple of other areas.

At a glance – the site will run 30 day online nutrition courses of which there are 4 types (sugar free, gluten free, etc) and 3 pricing levels on each. I THINK I could create 3 LEVELs of membership, and create 4 buttons within each, each with a custom capability that would pertain to that specific page that the information for the course is on. Does this sound correct?

Also the courses all start on the 1st day of each month. So if I set a 1 month membership, but people pay for/sign up a few days in advance, when does their subscription become active? The client is going to be running a Groupon coming up, which is good for 6 months so ideally looking for a way that people could buy their ‘course’ or membership, but choose to activate it down the road. Is there some sort of solution for this? Or would I have to ask people to only sign up on the day of the course?

EMAILS – I also read that s2 member integrates well with mailchimp – on level 2 and 3 people need to be signed up to a specific MailChimp list depending on the TYPE of class they are doing. I am under the impression with the mailchimp integrated you can select which LIST people are subscribed to – could this work depending on the custom capability? Or only on Levels?

Sorry if I’m making this confusing – can clarify anything if needed!

Many thanks,

Natasha

Hi Natasha,

All of this is possible with s2Member, but your business rules will require several customizations to s2Member to get things set up the way you described.

Setting things up so that members sign up in advance and only get charged on the 1st of the month would require writing some PHP code that calculates the numbers of days remaining unti the end of the month and then applies that number to the signup button as a trial days (effectively not charging them until the 1st). You can read more about this here.

The thing to keep in mind with s2Member levels is that levels are cumulative. That means someone with Level 3 access will have access to everything given to Level 1 and Level 2. If you’re looking to create separate courses where the content is unique to each group, then we recommend using one level with multiple Custom Capabilities (you could also use multiple levels, but you’d need to make sure each level has unique Custom Capability assignments to prevent lower levels from accidentally gaining access to the content offered through a lower level; you may actually need to go this route if you need fine control over list integration — see next paragraph). If you haven’t already seen it, this video on Custom Capabilities is a great way to learn more.

The MailChimp integration works on a per-level basis. Each s2Memeber Level can be configured to subscribe new members to a specific MailChimp list. If you want members for specific course types to be subscribed to different MailChimp lists, then you’ll need to use an s2Member Level for each course type (with s2Member Pro you can have unlimited levels). Then you’d simply configure each level with the corresponding MailChimp list.

Many thanks for the informational reply!

As for the mailchimp integration with multiple levels – I just want to clarify – if I set each course up as a different level to have people automatically assign to different mailchimp lists – would this not mean that Course Gluten Free that is Level 3 would have access to everything in Level 2, 1 and 0? I had thought I would set up each course as it’s own custom capability within the given level.

Another question – I noticed in a few videos that it looks as though there is only room for one Login Redirect Page – when looking through other membership plugins there are options to have multiple redirects for different levels – is this not offered through s2 at all?

Thanks again!

Hi Natasha,

If you use a level for each course and don’t want higher levels to see the content of lower levels, then you’ll need to restrict content with a Custom Capability that is specific to that level. If Level 1 content has a ccap called “level1”, for example, and Level 2 users don’t have the “level1” ccap, then they won’t be able to see the Level 1 content, despite being a higher level.

With regards to the login redirect: Yes, this can be accomplished using a little PHP code on the single Login Welcome Page. The PHP code would use the s2Member PHP Conditionals (Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting -› Advanced PHP Conditionals) to check the level of the current user and it would then redirect them to the correct page. You can see an example of this here.