Please contact me, help me, or refund my mone

Hi. I want to start on a good note and say you made a good plugin. Ok, moving on.
I can’t figure out how to generate paypal buttons and/or configure the Membership Options page (I’m not sure if those two things are actually the same workflow because your documentation is total madness). I found a forum post on this, but it seems written for developers. The guy who first asked about it said so himself. He said the response didn’t make any sense to him (nor did it make sense to me) and he wouldn’t even know where to input code. As of tonight he still has not been responded to. Can someone please hit me up and explain to me how to get this working? If involves editing a file, I’m down. If it involves coding, please refund my money and we’ll just part ways. If it involves having me code NOW, then it’s gonna be nothing but a headache going forward. Rather just get out of the cyclone.
P.S.
It’s really lame the hoops you make customers jump through to get a little help. I’m sure if you made it open season you’d get bombarded, so I appreciate trying to regulate support requests. But geez man, give us a break here. It’s easier to contact the pope!

Hey, Tim – There’s a bit of a learning curve to all this, but as plugins with this level of sophistication go, s2Member is REALLY easy once you get over a couple of hurdles. And it can be frustrating, simply because of how robust this thing is. Trust me, I have implemented some major membership add-ons, plugins, whatever-ins, and this one is about the most straightforward.

OK, soapbox aside, here’s what you need to do for PayPal buttons…

0. Are your PayPal options all set up? In the s2Member control panel along the left edge of your site select “PayPal Options” and be sure everything there is complete exactly as requested. This hooks you up to your PayPal account.

1. In the s2Member control panel along the left edge, go to the “PayPal Buttons” page.

2. Choose the membership level that the person will be put into when s/he pays with the button you’re about to create and click-open that tab. Let’s choose “PayPal Buttons for Level #1 Access”

3. Read the stuff there carefully. It’s well-written and explains everything. If you’re like me, you might want to skip some stuff, but force yourself to read it.

4. Fill in the boxes of exactly what you want to do with this membership level, then click the [Generate Button Code] button and – voila – there’s your embedded code to put on your page. Copy and paste it into the page where you want the button to appear.

Every so often you’ll see a little question-mark in a box – these are really helpful little tips for that topic, click each to see what’s there.

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Configuring Membership Options – consider that there are TWO different pages where people will land; a member (e.g., Level 1) will land on the page you’ve configured under “General Options” to be the “Login Welcome Page” – this is where you put stuff you want your members to have access to. s2Member automatically protects this page from non-members.

The second page is the page people will be directed to when they try to access member content, configured under “General Options” as the “Membership Options” page. This is where you put all your PayPal buttons for people to sign up for a membership of whatever level(s) you have configured.

HERE’S THE RUB – How do people actually land on these pages? Well, members that log in are directed there automagically, so that’s covered. But I always put a “Members” button on my site and when people click on it, it’s just a link to the member’s page, so they’re either allowed in (they are a logged-in member) or they are automatically re-directed to the membership options page.

I also always put “Are you a member? LOG IN” on the membership options page at the top, with a link that re-directs them to the login screen. Here’s my code for that:

<strong>Already a member?</strong>&nbsp; Splendid!&nbsp; You will want to <a href="[blogurl]wp-login.php/">Click Here</a> to log in.

The blogurl shortcode comes from this plugin: http://wordpress.org/plugins/peters-blog-url-shortcodes/

What I had to do with all this is take a deep breath and READ all of the stuff written in the “Quick Start Guide” in the s2Member control panel, and read EVERYTHING else that I could and keep the squirrels at bay. Once you work with this plugin awhile, you will come to love it. Or you could go try a couple of others and come screaming back.

Listen, when you talk to the Pope put in a good word for me, too.

Randy