Non-accreting category access

Hello all. My employer asked me to develop a website (I’m not a professional developer) with several discrete (non-accreting) membership levels (ie, level 1 can’t see level 2 content, level 2 can’t see level 1 content either). I’ve figured out how to accomplish this with s2If shorttags, which works great. We also wanted to have level-specific content appear in the sidebar. Again, shorttags in a text box widget worked perfectly for this.

Here’s my problem: my employer finds the shortcodes too complex. They want things as automated as possible – so that, for instance, after they’ve created a new protected page, it will automatically show up in the protected sidebar for only the intended level. (The best I’ve been able to do is have them manually place the permalink into the text box widget within the s2If tags, and it was simply too complex.)

I’m thinking this simplification could be accomplished by protecting content (in a non-accreting way) at the category rather than page level. But I don’t think that can be accomplished with shorttags. I’m willing to dig into the PHP, but I actually don’t really know where to begin there, in spite of having read through a bunch of the support docs. Or perhaps someone has another idea…

We’re planning to upgrade to s2pro for the additional levels…but my boss only wants to do that once I can demonstrate this can be done in a highly simple way. Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Hello Anthony,

I just checked under Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting and there isn’t anything to see if the user has access to a certain category… The only way to accomplish this would be to custom code it so that it goes and gets all the categories, and deletes those that the user doesn’t have access to, or something along those lines.

– Eduan