Refund Request+ constructive criticism

Hello,

I would like a refund request for my recent order. (Subscr. ID: 5MX27654XE907351S)

I have spent days wrapping my head around S2Member and wading through the documentation and forum, and I have run into one roadblock after another. It seems to me that some very basic functionality is missing. I upgraded to the PRO version in the assumption that I would have greater flexibility to adjust the registration form performance for different membership levels. The way S2Member deals with registration seems very constraining and unless you are using paypal (pro) as a gateway it’s incredibly backward trying to develop custom registration screens for different membership levels that don’t require upfront payment.

The manner in which S2Member manages custom fields is user unfriendly, custom fields are not easily searchable, hidden fields are not available and querying the custom fields is a hassle because the values are serialized in the user meta table. I understand that a future update to S2Member might fix this particular issue but frankly I’m already over my deadline for this site and don’t care to wait for an undetermined amount of time.

One reason I gave S2Member a go was the availability of accessible hooks and filters and the ability to look at the code to figure out custom functionality. I don’t mind doing custom code work but the way S2Member deals with registration is entirely frustrating to me to the point where I’m thinking up solutions on how to create workarounds for what should otherwise be simple functionality. It shouldn’t be a pain to create different registration pages for different levels, and dare I say, create registration pages that can be inserted on the front page. Instead, S2Member uses the default registration url and pretty much builds around the scenario that the member is coming from a payment gateway. When using ‘Open Registration’, according to the documentation, those members can only be tied to the level 0 membership, which is another constraint. And I’ve tried this for my particular scenario, but I could not even get this to work, as new members are set as subscribers (the wordpress default) and not listed under level 0.

For the time I spend working with custom code to bend S2Member to the membership requirements, I might as well build my own solution and not have to deal with workarounds.

I wanted this to work badly, but I’m pretty disappointed. It would be nice if there were actually a membership plugin that makes the basic things easy and is also developer friendly. I must say the organization of the admin ui for S2Member and even this site is headache inducing (spent an hour looking for the custom registration access link generator) and a exercise in how not to design a userfriendly interface. There’s far too much text on a screen which makes it unpleasant to work with.

I hope you can understand the refund request having explained a bit of detail. I do appreciate the versatility of the plugin and the fact that the underlying code – unlike a plugin like Wishlist Member – isn’t encrypted.

Cheers, Peter

Hi Peter,

In a way I can agree with you that the docs could use a better organization. FYI, only a while ago I started using the pro version as well and indeed not all is very clear from the start. Some working examples could be of good help. a step by step list to do things, given a certain scenario would work well also.

As to the gateways for payments you can use others as well, like autorize.net, ccBill and alipay.
I need to mention that for Authorize.net you MUST have a bankaccount in the USA, I found that out after making a call to that company. Thyat leaves a big part of the world out of course (I live in the Netherlands).
For the rest I don’t know, I did not bother to contact them.

Hi Peter,

Thank you for your constructive criticism. We’re constantly working to improve the way s2Member works while building our knowledge base and available video tutorials. All of the source code for both the s2Member Framework and s2Member Pro is made available for customization; code documentation is available through the s2Member Codex.

Please see s2Member® » Terms » Refund Policy for further details on returns and please use the Private Contact Form for any further inquires regarding returns.

Thanks for the heads up on this request for support.

This thread was resumed via email. If there are further questions regarding the items that were addressed in the email, please feel free to continue this conversation here.

Open Registration
Login/Registration Design

Hi Peter.

I’d like to mention that you can use the free registration pro-form without a PayPal Pro account, and this pro-form will let you register users at different levels for free. [hilite path]Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Pro Forms -› Free Registration Forms[/hilite]

You may get a warning about no PayPal account having been configured, but just enter fake credentials if you’re only using the free registration pro-form, the message will go away.

The pro-form will include the s2Member custom fields available to the level the user is registering at.

We are getting rid of the serialized arrays soon, but if you need to work with them, there are different things I can share:

http://www.s2member.com/codex/stable/s2member/api_functions/package-functions/#src_doc_get_s2member_custom_fields%28%29

http://www.primothemes.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=15658#p48878

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/amr-users/
http://wpusersplugin.com/related-plugins/amr-user-plugin-add-ons/amr-users-plus-s2-member/

I hope that helps! :)