primarily time-limited e-goods sales?

Hi,
From my reading of the docs, and the fact that source is available, it looks like a great plugin, but (as the name implies) it’s heavily slanted towards membership. The use case I’m looking at is a bit different. Essentially, there’ would only be a single free membership tier. Members can then purchase the right to access particular resources for a period of time, or the right to download and keep accompanying materials.

This appears possible, via the ‘custom capabilites’ (ccaps) that appear in the docs and other FAQs, but if this sort of thing is the site’s bread and butter, and it is to be administered by non-technicians, I need some confidence that it will be easy to comprehend / manage. So I’m wondering how far from the core use case this one bends, and whether it will be too fiddly to manage it. We would want to display a catalog of these egoods. Do templates for these views exist, or would they need to be custom-coded?

If it goes close, I think that the rest of the functionality of the plugin, which may have potential benefit down the track, is a great value-add over and above the original brief, making it a winner. But I need to see if it fits this core use-case first.
cheers,
Hugh

Hi Hugh,

You are correct that Custom Capabilities are going to be your best bet for this scenario. You can sell Custom Capabilities on a one-time basis using the Capability Buy Now feature (Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Buttons -› Capability (Buy Now) Buttons), but keep in mind that those can only be one-time payment (i.e., no recurring charges).

If membership accounts are not needed, you can also sell things on a one-time basis using the Specific Post/Page feature (Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Buttons -› Specific Post/Page (Buy Now) Buttons). With this feature, someone purchases access to a specific Post/Page for a specific amount of time and receives an email with a link to access that post/page, which doesn’t require any login. The link expires after the given amount of time they purchased.

There are no templates or ways of listing “egoods” in s2Member, because, as you said, the plugin is oriented towards membership, i.e., restricting various content to members with different levels. However, you can certainly use it for the scenario you described, but you will need to custom code any features that do not exist. I’ve seen s2Member adapted for use in many different scenarios that were not purely membership based, so the flexibility and power is there.