Please Advise – Best Method

Hey, first I want to say thanks so much for the most developer friendly plugin for memberships I have run across.

The reason for my post, I feel it would be a great time saver if I had some input from the community. We are building a site that has 3 membership levels. We are using Buddypress, S2Member and a responsive buddpress theme called MikMag along with some custom geo-locating programming to interact with our members data.

Our users:

A free member should not have access or the ability to create a professional profile(buddypress). Free members would be users of the site. We would only collect an email address for marketing purposes.

Our other two membership models are a monthly recurring membership, and a yearly recurring membership at a discount. Paid members can fill out an extended profile information form and have it displayed in our members directory and on displayed on site to local visitors via our geo-locating plugin features.

We would like the to configure the site so that no content is hidden even to non-registered users(at this point). We would also like to be able to manually approve a paid user after a background check has been completed.

My questions:

How would you configure your membership plug-in if you were tasked with this scenario?

How to block free users from having a buddypress profile?

Hi Michael,

For the approval process, I would recommend having paid users go to Level 1. Then to “approve” a paid member, you’d manually change their level to Level 2 (which is what you’d restrict features to).

You may be able to achieve blocking free users from having a BuddyPress profile using the URI restrictions (see Dashboard -› s2Member® -› Restriction Options -› URI Access Restrictions). Otherwise, you’ll need to manually edit the BuddyPress files and add some PHP code that does a conditional check to see if the logged in user is a free user (see Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting -› Advanced PHP Conditionals).

To restrict certain features to Level 2 users (i.e., paid, and approved users), I would again recommend using Advanced PHP Conditionals within the PHP templates/pages that display and give access to the features you want to restrict. This would give you the finest control over what gets restricted.

However, if all your paid-only features can be restricted using URI Restrictions, then you could simply use s2Member’s URI Restrictions and enter the URI’s to those pages in the Level 2 restriction box.