About: CK MacLeod

Gaperville, this is a question that I researched extensively when setting up my site. I wrote about it here, but probably went in to more detail on my considerations than was useful. Anyway, I never got any responses on the thread.

At our site, users are asked to donate when they first sign up, and will be asked to donate again once a year. They can also register at any of four membership levels – which for us has more to do with identifying themselves than with different levels of access to the site. In other words, we recommend different donation levels, but they are free to register on-line for $.01 if they want to. They can also donate without registering, and they can also register without donating, but have to use a different, more cumbersome method (by e-mail, snail mail, possibly telephone): We do want to encourage them both to donate and to register during the course of a single visit, in a completely automated process.

You can see how it works here: Yoga Instructor Registry Registration. You can go ahead and click on any of the buttons to be taken to the custom Paypal Screen without committing to anything, just to see how it works. When the donor fills in the amount, and pays, he or she is taken back to the site to complete registration via the S2Member routine. So far it works smoothly, and without the Paypal IPN being enabled (it was generating fail errors, a common problem, for reasons I never did figure out – someday I may have to).

The other way to go is to generate a Paypal button either at S2Member or at Paypal (or both!), then hack it so that the customer fills in the dollar-amount before going to Paypal. This is relatively easy to achieve, and you can look at WordPress plug-ins like Custom Post Donations to see one example of how it’s done. The advantage would be, presumably, that you would be able to utilize S2Member and Paypal features that handle different types of subscriptions, site access, dripped content, end-of-term e-mails, and so on, but there seemed to me to be numerous potential complications that would have to be sorted out – for instance, would the customer or donor be able to set the amount again when it came time to renew, or stuck with the initial donation amount, and so on.

For the last and other reasons, I decided insteadto use the method I linked, based on simple Paypal Donate buttons, generated at Paypal, following the basic instructions from S2Member for adding redirects to the site and completing registration. At Paypal, when you create the Button, you have an option to provide a “Donation ID” as well. That’s where you can put the User Level (0,1,2,3,4). It works on Donate Buttons the same as the IDs work on “commercial” buttons. Everything else about the new membership – term of subscription, renewals, specific capacities, upgrades, and so on – I’ll have to handle myself. When you Edit the Button, under “Step 3: Customize advanced features (optional),” at the bottom there’s a box where you can add the S2Member return codes: custom=(your site url without http); notify_url=(site url)/?s2member_paypal_notify=1; rm=2 If you have a custom page style, it also goes here: page_style=(Paypal custom style name).

I do not know whether the additional variables you can set for commercial buttons (term, renewal, access restrictions) would work for the Donate Buttons, but I strongly doubt it, since Paypal doesn’t enable them for Donations either, and since S2Member doesn’t generate donate buttons. I asked on the prior thread I linked, and, as I said, never got a response. It would be great if S2Member expanded its own capacities in a way more suitable to non-profit/charitable uses, utilizing Donate buttons, but I have no reason to believe that that’s currently in the cards.