Restricting partial content comments & views

OK, so I am interested in trying to get S2Member installed on the site. Can you point me to the specific documentation or specific shortcodes/scripts? I would like to have 2 tiers of memberships, so visitors would fall into three categories:

A. non-registered visitors
B. free registered members
C. paid members

B. free registered members – Restrict access to any post readings by # of visits within a certain timeframe. Ideally I was hoping to limit IP addresses, I believe like ft.com or mercola.com, which records your IP and then limits how many articles you can view per month or day based on your subscription level. I would like to limit how many of any posts can be viewed without registering at least an email address for free. Something like you can view up to 3 articles per month for free without registering an email address for free. This goes to unlimited once registered.

I understand this may be a future s2 functionality, according to this, but appreciate any help:
http://www.s2member.com/forums/topic/restricting-views-actions-in-lieu-of-pay/

C. paid members – I will have some content that can be seen in its entirety and other premium content where to non-members & free registered members: posts are limited after a certain point (for example after ~500 characters or ~75%) and comments are not shown or allowed to be submitted. Members would pay a monthly fee. I know I can show/block the content with the [s2If !is_user_logged_in()] and [s2If is_user_logged_in()] shortcodes but some additional questions:
I have a lot of authors contributing and I’d like them to be able to manually set where the free content ends and the premium content begins. Are there any recommended plugins or other methods to make it easy for non-technical writers to mark where the premium content is? Like the “read more” button on the Visual editor in edit posts, something like a “start free content here” button or similar. Sounds like with the above scheme I may not need to shortcode the free content.
Is there a way to auto insert these shortcodes after some set character count or # paragraphs or similar?
how can I also block some or all comments automatically based on membership? I’d like to maybe after a certain number of comments perhaps have a teaser comment shown, maybe the best rated comment or just the newest….

I should add what I talk about above in C) I want some amount of content blocked to non-paid members, I mean when viewing the permalink itself. This is similar to how this member website works:
tomkinxxxxstimes dot com remove x’s

• This reply was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by  Jim Climy.

Hi Jim.

B) Like you said, this will be much easier to achieve with the next generation of s2Member. Right now s2Member doesn’t monitor the number of views of content to limit access. In the current s2Member this is only available for the download restriction, and it’s not item specific, all downloads are cummulative for the count towards the Level’s limit.

C) To show comments or not, you’d need to use a PHP conditional in the template that shows the comments. [hilite path]Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting -› Advanced PHP Conditionals[/hilite]

To not show the latter part of a post, the simplest way right now would be using shortcode conditionals in the post, which can check more than the login status, they can check the access the user has too. [hilite path]Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting -› Simple/Shortcode Conditionals[/hilite]

A user of s2Member contributed a plugin that adds a button to your editor to insert some of these shortcodes faster, which may be helpful to your guest authors. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/s2member-buttons/

If you want to automate the restriction based on char count or similar, you’ll have to customize the template for the posts so you add the PHP there.

I hope that helps. :)

Thanks! Any rough idea when the next gen of s2 will be coming out? Weeks? Months?

I can’t really say at this point. Jason is full-time on it and making great progress, but it’s a huge project at the same time, and we also have the beta testing period, so I don’t know when it’ll be released yet.