Thank you for your inquiry.
Will s2member pro enable us to manage this user database as we intend?
- add custom fields when a new user subscribes, ie: a member wants to be a member of “development” group, so he chooses “development group” when he subscribes.
This could be done through s2Member’s Custom Capabilities. These are specific packages that you can sell or manually give to Users when they sign up. You can find lots of information regarding Custom Capabilities here:
Video » s2Member (Custom Capabilities)
Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting -› Custom Capabilities
- I also need him to be able to choose subcategories, ie: development group => translations => french + development group => translations => german + think tank group => ideas => whatever…
You can give Users multiple Custom Capabilities to separate these Users into subgroups. You’ll have to take a look at the way Custom Capabilities work to understand how you can use them this way.
- I need to be able to contact by email all the members of a said group, send emails to the “devlopment group =>translations =>german” members.
This is not possible through s2Member. You’ll have to have a developer set this up if it’s necessary for you.
- I don’t need restriction of content for these users, i dont need access to “premium” content to specific groups either, just a “database” of members and the ability to contact each group separately. But as i said, i need the member to pay a subscription fee to be able to access membership.
s2Member uses the default WordPress Roles and Capabilities system, so the default WordPress Users database would be used here. You can also export your Users with s2Member Pro to achieve this if you need to.
We could use the export function to export our users database in CSV, and use external software to email specific groups of this database, but i have to be sure we can organise these members like explained above : users can join a variety of groups, and subgroups. And that the export contains these custom data fields.
Yes I believe you could achieve this, but it would take a custom parser for the Export data. You can find information on the format of these exports here:
Knowledge Base » Import (or Mass Update) Users