Use S2Member as pay-per-purchase of e-goods?

The goal:

1. User arrives at site, registers as a subscriber, logs in.
2. The user can now post from the front end (I have this set up with my own custom code).
3. The user says, “Hey, I want to make PREMIUM posts now”.
4. The user designates which of his posts he wants to promote to premium, I save the postID in a cookie, and he gets routed to paypal to join as an S2MemberLevel_1.
5. Now he’s back at the site. He has to log in again since he’s been promoted now.
6. Now I can use that cookie I saved earlier to confirm he’s about to add premium content to the post for which he paid.
7. Once he saves the post, I do a database update to strip him back down to normal subscriber level. Now he would have to pay again in order to create another premium post.

Step 5 bothers me. Any way to configure things so he doesn’t have to log in again?

But overall, is this doable? It seems like a lot of trouble, but I was having a lot of problems with my IPN script, so that’s why I picked up S2Member.

Hi Scott. Thanks for your inquiry.

What you’ve described certainly sounds doable, using s2Member as a framework on which to build this type of site. However, we do NOT currently support Administrative Users within WordPress. s2Member is designed for end-users of a site, and not for Users/Members that actually gain access to your Dashboard in some way.

Again, I’m certain it can be accomplished (i.e. we’ve had several site owners do this with s2Member), we just aren’t supporting this officially yet. Any custom code required for this is not covered by our Support Policy.

I totally get that. I’ve got scripts set up to allow my s2members to post.

I guess the real problem I have with it is that they have to log in again after they’re promoted from subscriber to S2member, right? Isn’t that part of the normal sequence of events for s2member? Does it have to be?

No, it doesn’t have to be at all. In fact, all of s2Member’s routines, including all of the core WordPress routines are designed so this is absolutely NOT a requirement. The primary reason that s2Member introduces this, is simply for the benefit of the customer. If the customer logs back in, they go back into the Login Welcome Page, where they normally will see the status of their account change, or that they now have access to something more.

Could they have done this without logging back in? Absolutely!

Scott, if the user gets logged out for some reason and has to log back in, you may want to check that you’re not having a www issue in one of your links in the site, or the return URL from PayPal or something. Knowledge Base » Logged in but am considered logged out

Let me know if that helps.

Thanks very much for the responses guys. I’m re-reading the question as I posted it and I see that I asked it in a confusing way.

Jason,

Once the user is logged out after being promoted, I totally undertstand why he would be prompted to log back in. My complaint is that I don’t want him to be logged out when he gets promoted. Is THAT possible?

Christian,

I’ll look through that link you posted, thank you. But isn’t part of the way S2 Member is designed, that the user is logged out upon being promoted?

Hi Scott. Sorry if I misunderstood.

My complaint is that I don’t want him to be logged out when he gets promoted. Is THAT possible?

No, s2Member doesn’t log them out during an upgrade. If this is happening on your installation, you might check what Cristian mentioned. It could be a www vs. non-www issue, as discussed here in this KB article:
Knowledge Base » Don't mix www and without