Private WCHS1969 High School Reunion Website

Greetings Support,

I am moving a site from XSitePro to WordPress and my goal is to simply restrict access to private areas of the site by allowing anyone to register as either a “Guest”, which means they would be able to view all public pages, or as a “Member”, which would give them free access to all areas of the site.

We do NOT, however want to require any kind of payment at this time, nor do we want members to even see a PayPal button as it would be very confusing to many of them who are not tech savvy – class of 1969.

I just want to make sure that an admin approves a registration before granting access to the private areas to make sure that they are a part of the group that should have access.

So, is it possible to allow registration without using Paypal and still require admin approval before allowing access “behind the curtain”?

Another question I have and I may have seen a reference to this – Is it possible to allow immediate access to names that match a list?

Finally, in the previous version of the site, I was using some custom php forms with several custom fields, such as firstname, middlename, maidenname, lastname, dateofbirth, streetaddress1, etc., and was storing them in a MySql database and then displaying them on a “friends” page based on specific restriction fields in order to protect privacy.

I am wondering if there is a way to create these fields in s2member Pro? If the Pro version allows for unlimited additional fields, I believe I could use PhpMyAdmin to view your table names, change the field names in my exported sql file to match those of s2member Pro and then import the data, right?

If that were the case, then I would think there might be a way for previous users to be “already registered” even if it meant ticking a box or whatever in PhpMyAdmin.

I will not be expecting any support on these items. I just want to know if they are possible.

Thanks for reading.

Hi Ralph.

So, is it possible to allow registration without using Paypal and still require admin approval before allowing access “behind the curtain”?

Yes, you can let users register for free leaving registrations open, and they’ll be given s2Member Level 0 (free). [hilite path]Dashboard -› s2Member® -› General Options -› Open Registration[/hilite]

s2Member doesn’t have an account approval feature, but what you can do is protect the content at a higher level than the one they’ll get when they register. So protecting the content at Level 1, for example, will hide the content from new registrations. Then, you’d review new registrations and your account approval would consist of manually upgrading their account from level 0 to 1.

I am wondering if there is a way to create these fields in s2member Pro? If the Pro version allows for unlimited additional fields, I believe I could use PhpMyAdmin to view your table names, change the field names in my exported sql file to match those of s2member Pro and then import the data, right?

You can, even in the free version of s2Member, create custom profile fields to add these to their profiles. [hilite path]Dashboard -› s2Member® -› General Options -› Registration/Profile Fields[/hilite]

and then displaying them on a “friends” page based on specific restriction fields in order to protect privacy.

What s2Member doesn’t provide are public profiles, so that one user could see the profile of another. You’d need to add this yourself in a WP page, querying user data to display it to others. There are WordPress functions you can use for this.

s2Member also has a couple of functions that can help:
http://www.s2member.com/codex/stable/s2member/api_functions/package-functions/#src_doc_get_s2member_custom_fields()
http://www.s2member.com/codex/stable/s2member/api_functions/package-functions/#src_doc_get_user_field()

If that were the case, then I would think there might be a way for previous users to be “already registered” even if it meant ticking a box or whatever in PhpMyAdmin.

s2Member Pro has a User Import tool that you can use to create all their accounts from a CSV file, including the custom profile fields. After creating their accounts, you can email them letting them know about it. [hilite path]Dashboard -› s2Member® -› Import/Export -› User/Member Importation[/hilite]

---

Let me know if that helps and if you have other questions! :)