Multiple private membership forums

Hi all.

I’m using S2Member (framework) in conjunction with Simple:Press. This seems to be a popular combination, so I’m hoping what I want is doable. For the most part I’ve got several public forums set up fine, but there’s one configuration issue I’m having a problem with.

Apart from the public forums, I need to have a number of different forums, with access to each restricted to its own membership. So I might have:

Club 1 Forum
Club 2 Forum
Club 3 Forum
............
Club n Forum
etc

Each of those forums is closed and restricted (for both viewing and posting) to its own members. Eg. members of “Club 1 Forum” cannot view or post to “Club 2 Forum”, etc.

Also…

• Any member of those closed forums is also a member of the website as a whole, with viewing and posting rights to the public forums.
• Applications for membership to a closed forum must be manually approved by a Moderator. Preferably a closed-forum Moderator would not have access to the other closed forums, but I could live with it.
• There is no fee charged for membership of any forum, private or public.

Is this a job that S2Member can handle, or am I asking too much?

Hello Soporose,

Well this isn’t exactly a job s2qMember can handle, it is able to do it, but I don’t think it was meant this way.

Anyway, I would use conditionals for this, you can find an article about them here:
Knowledge Base » s2Member® Conditionals

Hope this helps. :)

Thanks Eduan, I’ll take a look at conditionals and see what I can make of it.

Seems to me that an unlimited number of Membership Levels might be one way to do it — a different level for each private group. Then I guess you would apply a condition that prevented all lower levels from accessing any particular level.

But I saw a note somewhere that unlimited Membership Levels are only possible with s2Member Pro, and unfortunately $69 is not exactly an insignificant outlay at the moment.

Or were you thinking it might be possible in some other way?

Well, there is of course the option of using custom capabilities (a.k.a. ccaps), you can have an unlimited amount of them.

You can check them out in these links:
Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting -› Custom Capabilities
Video » s2Member (Custom Capabilities)

Hope this helps. :)

Hi. I had to leave this problem for a while, and am just coming back to it.

I’ve just been watching Jason Caldwell’s video series on Custom Capabilities, but that hasn’t put me much further ahead in finding a solution.

The problem for me is that Jason keeps referring to, and using, PayPal functionality. But my various memberships are all free, and I don’t want any reference to PayPal at all.

However, I do need multiple protected pages, EACH of which will allow access by certain members only — NOT certain members plus all on levels below them. I can see that I can exclude “all levels below” access using shortcodes/conditionals, or PHP even.

I can also see that if I assign a different membership level to each of those protected pages, I can limit access that way.

But I also understand Jason’s warning about the problems associated with using multiple levels, particularly in regard to future extensibility.

So while I’m convinced it would be better to avoid multiple levels and use Custom Capabilities instead, I’m at a loss as to how to do that, without using the PayPal options.

If it helps to make it any clearer, each of the protected pages I need is a forum subsection that belongs to a particular club. Members of each club should have access to their own forum subsection and no one else’s.

Anyone?

Getting down to basics, surely it should be possible to have a condition where a page can only be accessed by members who have a certain access level (Eg 2), yet not by anyone with access levels above *OR* below that?

I’m afraid my PHP is not good enough to figure it out, but wouldn’t some sort of an if-then-else conditional statement do the job?

I’m sorry Soporose, I believe I submitted an answer for this, don’t know why it doesn’t show.

Anyway, there is this which you ask, you can use s2Member conditionals, once again, check this article about them:
Knowledge Base » s2Member® Conditionals

For what you need, if you want to put them inside a post, you would simply use shortcode conditionals, if you’re using it in the code of your website you would use PHP conditionals.

Does this help?