Jason (Lead Developer)

Thanks for your inquiry. ~ We appreciate your patience :-)

What I’m trying to achieve is to have user’s access to product A end 1st of March and access to product B ends the 15th of March. After 15th of March, account is demoted to ‘free subscriber’.

So you want each of these purchases to result in a demotion once they expire;
exactly one month after the date or purchase. Is that correct?

If so, you’ll want to generate a Payment Button or Pro Form that provides fixed-term access through “Buy Now” functionality. After the purchase is made, an EOT Time is set for the User, and s2Member® will expire them automatically. If they purchased one month of access, they will expire after one month automatically.

See: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Options -› Automatic EOT Behavior
See: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Pro Forms -› Membership Level # Forms
See also: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Pro Forms -› Shortcode Attributes (Explained)

The Pro Form Generator will configure your Shortcode for you automatically, but just to point out — the relevant Shortcode Attributes are: rr="BN" (Buy Now) and rp="1" rt="M" (1 Month of fixed-term access).

IMPORTANT NOTE: s2Member does not support multiple simultaneous Subscriptions or EOT Times. Therefore, EOT Times against fixed-term access that I described above will only work one at a time. If you sell an existing Product A customer Product B — before Product A has expired, the following will happen.

Timeline:
– Product A purchased on Feb 1st (good for one month).
– Product B is now sold to existing Product A customer on Feb 5th (good for one month).
– Product A is removed, and Product B takes it’s place. The EOT Time is reset to one month after the purchase of Product B now (e.g. this is treated like an upgrade or downgrade, where everything is reset to the configuration of the customer’s most recent purchase).

Product is probably not the best word to use here, because with s2Member® this is normally associated with Membership Level Access, not with Products. However, in this context the term Product demonstrates this limitation a little more clearly I think; because that’s what you are trying to accomplish.

A Possible Workaround For You

Custom Capabilities can be sold to existing customers on a “Buy Now” basis. So this could be a viable alternative for you, if you really need to achieve this functionality for a certain business model.

Timeline:
Customer buys access to Product A on Feb 1st (i.e. Membership Level #1 — lifetime access).
On Feb 5th you sell this existing Level #1 Member an additional Custom Capability (lifetime access).
See: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Pro Forms -› Capability (Buy Now) Forms

Now, you will want to integrate a custom CRON job to remove Capabilities at certain custom dates that you prefer. The customer is assumed (in this scenario) to have lifetime access. However, your custom CRON job can dictate otherwise.

Example of adding/removing Custom Capabilities from existing Users in WordPress®.

<?php
$user_id = 123;
$user = new WP_User($user_id);
$user->add_cap('access_s2member_ccap_music');
$user->remove_cap('access_s2member_ccap_videos');
?>

See also: Knowledge Base » s2Member® Roles/Capabilities
See also: Knowledge Base » Changing Roles/Capabilities via PHP
See also: API Function: s2member_paid_registration_time()

Setting an automatic EOT Time for a customer via PHP.

<?php
$user_id = 123;
$eot_time = strtotime('+30 days');
update_user_option($user_id, 's2member_auto_eot_time', $eot_time);
?>

See also: http://php.net/manual/en/function.strtotime.php
See also: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/update_user_option

Details received. Thank you!

I just reviewed your installation and I do not find a timthumb directory or timthumb.php file mentioned in your Apache logs. So this leads me to believe that you have a plugin or a custom script, or a browser which is attempting to reach this URL for some unknown reason and Apache is choking due to a configuration issue.

It really should be reporting a 404 error, but it looks like you’re having some trouble with Apache overall. I’m seeing several core dumps in your web directory. I would suggest that you hire a system administrator (or contact your hosting company) to resolve this for you. I don’t see anything here that is specifically related to problems with s2Member®. This appears to be caused by server configuration issues.

See also: http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/httpd-client-denied-by-server-configuration/

[Wed Feb 06 18:45:17 2013] [error] [client 217.160.223.166] client denied by server configuration: /home/asians7/public_html/wp-content/plugins/s2member/includes/timthumb
[Wed Feb 06 18:45:15 2013] [error] [client 217.160.223.166] client denied by server configuration: /home/asians7/public_html/wp-content/plugins/s2member/includes/timthumb.php

Details received. Thank you!

I just reviewed your installation. Your GA Ecommerce Tracking code looks good; as does your main GA tracking code. However, please be sure to paste your GA ECOM tracking code into both fields: Signup Tracking Codes and Modification Tracking Codes. If your Users/Members are purchasing while already logged into the site, that is a Modification and not a Signup. Most sites will want to track both scenarios.

See: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Tracking -› Modification Tracking Codes

ECOM tracking data takes awhile to show up in your GA account. I’ve seen it take up to 48 hours in some cases. So this takes time to see results. Please let me know if you continue to have trouble.

Thanks for the follow-up :-)

No, please look for this to come later today in the release of s2Member v120214.

Thanks for your inquiry. ~ We appreciate your patience :-)

There are two ways to set this up.

1. You can introduce a ccBill Payment Button to a potential customer without them being logged into your site. You can place the ccBill Button Shortcode anywhere you like. Upon clicking the ccBill Button, a potential customer will be transferred to ccBill and upon completing checkout, they will receive an email that allows them to register a Username/Password for access to your site. This is the default behavior.

2. You can enable Open Registration with s2Member and allow potential customers to register a Username/Password and create a Free Subscriber account first. Then upon logging into the site you would present them with a ccBill Button (normally inserted into your Login Welcome Page and wrapped with Simple Shortcode Conditionals) so that it’s only visible to Free Subscribers and not to existing Customers/Members. Upon clicking the ccBill Button they will be transferred to ccBill. Upon completing checkout their existing Free Subscriber account is automatically upgraded to a paid status (i.e. Membership Level #1,2,3 or whatever you’re selling them).

Setting this up…

See: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› General Options -› Open Registration
See also: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› ccBill® Buttons -› Membership Level # Buttons
See also: Knowledge Base » Simple Shortcode Conditionals

Example of a ccBill Button Shortcode in your Login Welcome Page,
presented ONLY to Free Subscribers that need to upgrade to a paid status at your site.

[s2If current_user_is(subscriber)]
	[s2Member-Pro-ccBill-Button ... /]
[/s2If]

As mentioned in this post http://www.s2member.com/forums/topic/ccbill-test-transaction/ it can take some time for Email Confirmation with important details to be delivered. If possible, we would like to avoid that. The most important from the business point of view is that nothing will stand between making a payment and registering.

ccBill does not provide s2Member® with any immediate details related to a transaction after checkout (at least, not in a Return-URL). s2Member® has to await Background Post processing (aka: IPN processing) before it can handle post-processing of a transaction and send an email receipt.

That being said, this normally takes just a few seconds (up to a few minutes in some cases). It’s not normal for ccBill to linger on this. s2Member® will only take as long as it takes ccBill to send us the transaction data.

See also: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› ccBill® Options -› Background Post Integration

Please let us know if you have any other questions/concerns :-)

Is this possible in an S2Hack by specifying a URI (to the PM screen) and restricting access to it for x amount of day?

I would suggest the use of Custom Capabilities for this.
What you would do is add a snippet of PHP that requires a particular Custom Capability to PM others in your community. If this action (i.e. to PM someone) is performed at a specific URI, you might have something like this.

Please create this directory and file:
/wp-content/mu-plugins/s2-hacks.php
(NOTE: these are MUST USE plugins, see: http://codex.wordpress.org/Must_Use_Plugins)
(See also: http://www.s2member.com/kb/hacking-s2member/)

Video » s2Member (Custom Capabilities)

Thanks for the follow-up :-)

I’m not seeing any significant lag there. It does appear to be loading about 200ms slower than average across other s2Member® installations though. Do you have output compression enabled at the Apache level? That would cut things down a bit further. It appears that you’ve implemented this already.

Have you made any modifications or added any MU plugin files to your WP installation?

Even with that extra 200ms, your latency on this is not that bad. s2Member® is going to increase load time slightly, if it’s JS/CSS files are included. No way around that. If you would like to optimize things further though, you can selectively load s2Member’s JS/CSS files if you like.

For CSS, please see: http://www.s2member.com/faqs/#s2-faqs-stop-loading-css

Here is another way to completely disable s2Member’s JS/CSS inclusion.

Create this directory and file:
/wp-content/mu-plugins/s2-hacks.php
( these are MUST USE plugins, see: http://codex.wordpress.org/Must_Use_Plugins )

http://www.kevinleary.net/faster-wordpress-move-javascript-files-footer/

Thanks for your patience.

The fix for this issue is in the s2Member® Framework. So updating your copy of the s2Member® Framework to the latest development release should correct the issue for you. The issue being numeric Usernames were causing s2Member confusion. s2Member® was passing that value to WP_User(), which considers numeric Usernames to be User IDs; resulting in a failure to redirect — reverting to the default WP behavior, which lands a User/Member on the Dashboard Profile page instead of what is expected w/s2Member. This incompatibility will be fixed in the next maintenance release of s2Member®.

See also: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› General Options -› Member Profile Modifications

@ Brian Bennis

Details received. Thank you!

Investigating now.

Thanks for your patience.

I believe that we’ve identified the underlying cause of this. An issue related to this was addressed in the latest release of s2Member® and s2Member® Pro. See: s2Member® Unified Changelog » v130213

Please let us know if problems persist :-)

Thanks for your patience.

I just reviewed your log files. Yes, this is the same thing we’ve seen in the past, and PayPal® has consistently told us that it’s because of fraud filters. Honestly, I’m not totally convinced of that yet. PayPal® support says a lot of things that don’t convince me :-)

If it’s possible for us to run a couple of live test transactions against your installlation, I’ll be happy to make an attempt to debug this further. I’d really like to get to the bottom of this. I thought we had (and maybe so), but if you will allow us to run a couple of test transactions, perhaps we can uncover something more.

If so, please submit a Dashboard login here:
s2Member® » Private Contact Form

If it’s a test site, that’s fine. I just need a Payflow account where this is occurring so we can make an attempt to debug this again. Our own accounts do not exhibit this behavior unfortunately.

Thank you. I’m going to review these shortly.