Separating capabilities and membership plans

I watched the video tutorial about using custom capabilities. I like the approach, in principle, but have a few questions.

Let’s say I want to give access to members-only material, with the custom capability “M.O.M.” .

1) When a subscription expires, a member is switched to membership role S0. Are their custom capabilities changed, or would they still have that M.O.M. capability? Can I depend on expiration to change their access?

2) The tutorial suggested using a minimal number of roles – make all members S1 and give them custom capabilities as they purchase. I need to be able to see who bought what subscription plan. It’s necessary to understand sales, to provide customer support, and because there are membership plan benefits that I can’t automate. The way I’m doing it now is for one plan to buy S2, another to buy S3, etc. Is there another way to save and retrieve what plan a person bought?

3) Is there a way to use custom capabilities in Restriction Options? e.g. the /forum URI requires the M.O.M. capability? It looks like no, just want to confirm.

Thank you.

Hi Clayton.

1) When a subscription expires, a member is switched to membership role S0. Are their custom capabilities changed, or would they still have that M.O.M. capability? Can I depend on expiration to change their access?

Demotion on EOT also removes all custom capabilities. [hilite path]Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Options -› Automatic EOT Behavior[/hilite]

Is there another way to save and retrieve what plan a person bought?

In the user’s profile you can see all the custom capabilities he has. What do you mean by “saving”?

3) Is there a way to use custom capabilities in Restriction Options? e.g. the /forum URI requires the M.O.M. capability? It looks like no, just want to confirm.

No, not yet.

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I hope that helps. Please let us know if you have other questions. :)

That does help, thank you.

>> Is there another way to save and retrieve what plan a person bought?
> In the user’s profile you can see all the custom capabilities he has. What do you mean by “saving”?

How can I preserve information about what subscription plan a customer purchased? When a customer calls for support, I need to know what plan they purchased.

If I make one membership level per subscription plan it’s obvious: the membership level tells me what they purchased. The downside is then I have S1, S2, … S20 … S50 roles. How can I use one role plus custom capabilities, and immediately identify what plan a user purchased?

How can I use one role plus custom capabilities, and immediately identify what plan a user purchased?

In the user’s profile there’s a field for his custom capabilities.

I don’t understand what you’re suggesting.

I want a user to be marked as “PURCHASED XYZ LEVEL MEMBERSHIP”, in a place I can see it immediately if they call. This is about saving order history.

Custom capabilities are about permissions. You’ve also said the capabilities will automatically be removed when the subscription expires, so that information is lost.

How can I save this piece of information automatically, as part of the purchase process, and find it immediately if they call? How could I select all “PURCHASED XYZ LEVEL” users with SQL? ( That is, auditing PayPal transactions one user at a time is not a workable solution.) Is it stored in wp_user_meta somewhere?

Thank you.

If you use a user list plugin, like amr-users, you can set up a user list that includes the custom capabilities that you are trying to track.

Otherwise, you can extend the WP_List_Table class so that it outputs what you want.

Clayton,

You can use Signup Notifications (Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Notifications -› Signup Notifications) to send yourself an email with all the details about their signup (including their Level and Custom Capabilities using the %%item_number%% replacement code).

You might want to send the notifications to a GMail address so you can use their great search capabilities to find exactly what you’re looking for when someone calls in.