Presale question about subscription model

Hello,

We are considering using your plugin for a subscriber newspaper’s website. We’ve been looking through the documentation, but we haven’t been quite able to figure out if what we want is possible with your plugin.

Can you maybe help us out?

What we want is the following situation: We have a website, with several categories, and possible author archives. All our posts, are connected to one or more categories, or authors.

Want we want to do, is sell subscriptions based on authors and categories. So, a user should be able to pay for a subscription for category A and B, and eventually for Author A. (if author subscriptions aren’t possible, we can figure out another way to solve that, by making an author a category as well) That means, someone would get access to all posts made by author X or Y, or all posts in category A. If for some reason a post in category A is also in category B, ofcourse you should still have access.

When you don’t have a subscription to a certain category, we do want to show you the category archive page, but with a message on top which brings you to the subscribe page. For posts which you don’t have access to, we want people to see a teaser (excerpt), which brings you to the registration page. This would be best if we’re able to manage this through the templates.

So all access is arranged based on protected categories/authors, and we want to offer subscription packages connected to a category, or an author. You should be able to subscribe to multiple packages. There’s no need on per post protection, just one time configuring or packages and protected categories/authors. So our member system is topic based, and not in a ‘silver’ ‘gold’ incremental way.

A small question, can we translate the plugin with a .mo file if we want?

Last thing, we want to implement our own payment system (dutch iDeal) is there any documentation about integrating other payment systems? And very last, since iDeal doesn’t support recurring payments, will the plugin email you a (customizable) warning that your subscription ends with a link to renew it?

Of course we’re experienced developers so we’ll figure out how to create all of it, as long as we know it’s possible.

Thanks for helping me out!

Best regards,

Timo van Leeuwen

Thank you for your inquiry. ~ We appreciate your patience.

Want we want to do, is sell subscriptions based on authors and categories. So, a user should be able to pay for a subscription for category A and B, and eventually for Author A. (if author subscriptions aren’t possible, we can figure out another way to solve that, by making an author a category as well) That means, someone would get access to all posts made by author X or Y, or all posts in category A. If for some reason a post in category A is also in category B, ofcourse you should still have access.

This is not supported by s2Member’s logic. s2Member’s protections work on with an “AND” logic, meaning that if you require two different permissions, s2Member will require Users to always have both of these permissions to access the content.

The only way I can see you setting this up would be through some tricky Custom Capabilities, which are individual capabilities (or permissions) that you can give to Users through Buy Now Buttons / Pro Forms. If you’d like to see all the info on Custom Capabilities, please see this video playlist:

Video » s2Member (Custom Capabilities)

To achieve what you need here, you’ll need separate Custom Capabilities for each package of Posts/Categories that you’re selling, and you’ll need to break these down farther for each Author. For instance, if you have 3 Authors, and 3 Packages of Posts, you might have the following Custom Capabilities:

cat1_author1
cat1_author2
cat1_author3

cat2_author1
cat2_author2
cat2_author3

cat3_author1
cat3_author2
cat3_author3

Then if a User were to buy a Package for Category 1, you’d sell Custom Capabilities cat1_author1, cat1_author2, and cat1_author3. If they were to buy a Package for Author 2, they’d be buying cat1_author2, cat2_author2, and cat3_author2…

When you don’t have a subscription to a certain category, we do want to show you the category archive page, but with a message on top which brings you to the subscribe page. For posts which you don’t have access to, we want people to see a teaser (excerpt), which brings you to the registration page. This would be best if we’re able to manage this through the templates.

This would need to be done through your theme template to make it automated. You can use s2Member Advanced PHP Conditionals here. With these conditionals you can check if a User has access to content, and show the full post, or just a teaser depending on their Capabilities.

See: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting -› Advanced PHP Conditionals

A small question, can we translate the plugin with a .mo file if we want?

Yes, s2Member is full compatible with WordPress I18n.

See: Pre Sale FAQs » Can s2Member® be translated into other languages?

Last thing, we want to implement our own payment system (dutch iDeal) is there any documentation about integrating other payment systems? And very last, since iDeal doesn’t support recurring payments, will the plugin email you a (customizable) warning that your subscription ends with a link to renew it?

s2Member supports multiple methods of integrating custom Payment Gateways. The best way is to use s2Member’s PayPal w/ Proxy Key functionality, which will allow your developer(s) to pass data through s2Member’s core processing routines for PayPal, which will allow you to automate much of this process.

See: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Options -› PayPal® IPN Integration -> IPN w/ Proxy Key

Alternatively, you could use Remote Operations, but s2Member’s standard emails will not be sent, and you will need to process more yourself.

See: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting -› Remote Operations API

s2Member does send the User an Email when they subscribe to your site, and it is customizable. You should be able to put in a link and whatever information you need to from this area of your Dashboard:

Dashboard -› s2Member® -› General Options -› Email Configuration

See Also: Knowledge Base » Editing the New User Email Notification with s2Member®

Let us know if you have any further questions/concerns. :-)

I’ll add a few comments to Bruce’s comprehensive reply:

Levels give incremental access, but you can edit the roles to remove the access caps to lower levels, or use conditionals in your pages/posts or a hack.

Ccaps are powerful, but don’t protect category, tags or URIs yet, although you could write a hack to do it. Video » s2Member (Custom Capabilities)

And s2Member only deals with a single EOT for all access, there isn’t yet a separate EOT for each access. So if you sell separate access to content, you would not be able to end each separately without some extra hacking.

If you protect a post/page with level and ccaps, then both will be needed, and if you protect with more than one ccap, all will be required. This is the AND logic Bruce mentioned. I think you could have a hack with your own OR conditions and bypass the default behavior.

So, basically, you can do almost anything with some hacks, and that’s what I love most about s2Member. If you can integrate a new payment gateway, then I’m guessing that altering the access restrictions won’t be too hard for you.

I hope that helps. :)