Migrating from Drupal: S2Member question

We are migrating our drupal-based membership site to WP and have a few questions before getting too far along with S2Member. Before getting to the questions, I will describe what we do. This will help answer the first question.

We deliver a service to companies. All materials are kept on the website, where users have access. The service we deliver lasts a year and as they progress through the program, additional materials become available. The materials are divided into 12 modules, with 4-5 documents per module. When a company starts, the employees can see all the material related to Module 1. At the end of the first month, we’ve covered all the material and they are then moved to Module 2, where they can see Module 1 and 2. This process lasts the whole year. At the end, they have access to materials in Modules 1-12.

The current drupal-system defines role by company. As they progress, we simply change access to the additional material through the admin page.

My first question is this: the free version of S2Member has four membership categories. If we move forward this way, we can put all companies under the same membership category, create a custom post/page type and progress them that way (I think).

Or, if we use the paid version, we can have an unlimited number of companies, all with the same membership level and progres them that way.

For those of you familiar with membership sites and keeping things organized, which do you think is better?

We currently have 13 companies in our program, so it would require a lot of custom typing of pages/posts.

Not sure if this helps, but once a company has finished, the users with that company go into a finished membership type, which is simple enough with either version of S2Member.

Thank you for your advice and help. If you need clarification on anything I’ve said, please let me know.

Hi Brian,

As you probably know, WordPress doesn’t have any concept of “companies”; there are users with different roles (e.g., Subscriber, Administrator, s2Member Level 1, s2Member Level 2, etc.).

The s2Member Levels are “levels” not “categories”. You can then restrict WordPress content to specific s2Member Levels and only users with that level or higher will be able to access that content. That last point is important: All s2Member levels are cumulative, meaning that users with higher levels automatically get access to content restricted to lower levels.

The free version of s2Member comes with 4 levels, but with s2Member Pro you can have an unlimited number of membership levels.

If you want to get around the cumulative effect of the levels and restrict users in higher levels from accessing content in lower levels, you’ll need to use the powerful Custom Capabilities feature. With that, you can restrict content to specific Custom Capabilities and only those users who have that Custom Capability will be able to access the content, regardless of their level.

To restrict Custom Post/Page Types, you’ll need to modify your WordPress theme files and add a few conditionals that handle that logic (see Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting -› Advanced PHP Conditionals).

Raam, thanks for replying. Your 2nd paragraph is very helpful. In my original post, I mentioned we restrict content based on where a user is in the program. We have 12 modules, spaced out over a year. With the Pro version, we can create 12 levels of membership, each one representing one set of content and then move them through all of the material by changing their membership level as they progress. Is that correct?

If so, that would certainly be easier then just about anything else.

Hi Raam, to follow up. I looked at some of the custom capabilities videos. At first glance, I think this will work. I can label the different modules as categories then use company name as the custom capability. I will experiment. Thanks again for your help.

Glad I could help, Brian! :)