About: Jason Christopher

hi mary – i have been debating over gravity forms and formidable forms plugins –
at present i have been able to prefill formidable forms with s2member login info – using s2member shortcodes in the formrmidable forms field set – up….but after three months i have realized that s2members – probably the best membership plugin out there, is still storing custom data in a serialized array…so it is extremely difficult to call s2 custom data into a formidable (or any) form…what is more it is much harder to write to s2member custom fields, but i think the membeship plugin in formidable witll alow you to write to login infields that are prefillable and can be view obnly also….

s2members has been talking about getting rid of the serialized array approach in there database storing of custom fields, thsi would alleviate the problem i and many others are facing and make your goal o so much easier.

it is supposedly a primary focus of s2members lead developers to accomplish this for the next release….

at present i think i would have to have a mix of forms to get what i need – s2memerb forms to sell custom capabilities and levels to user login, and formidable to sell registrations and events etcs to logged in users

PIPE DREAMS – but horizon of reality may be coming soon
i am thinking about even just using s2members to register people for their capabilities and formidable for all forms afterward….maybe using s2member to block access to formidable forms unless eligible for that page…the probelm is with events – if a person who is logged in with s2member sees an event formidable registration page (events manager and events espressso are my two options right now) and registers for the event ( i would want this because of the opportunity to work with the info formidable would store in its own databases and thus useful for reports and other forms later on), the paypal api call woul d have to come back to the event manager somehow…….then there is avatars – using user meta pro —
esentially i have a page or mix of pages with user meta plugin (user meta shortcode- not need pro just for avatar), s2member shortcode, formidabkle sbortcode, a paypal button, and event mamanger shortcode…..so i can allow a logged in user with s2member credentials to fill out a formidable form for an event and pay for it with payapl and return to the event manager that the user paid and should get a ticket with their avatar and user info mailed. theni workwith with event results with another formidable form that calls the event registration form info and puts data together in a nice report for results….

in all this due to the serialized arrays in s2members – but maybe not the custom capabilities user meta – i would h maybe have to manually write each members custom capability (true power of s2 members) manually after they fil out a formidable form to increase their leve. or i could just allow users to fill out an s2 member form to give them the custom capability automaitcally but them formidable cannot write to that field and update it later, so that removes user front end editing in formidable which for some fields you only want an adminsitrator anyway to edit it….arggggggh dizzy KISS

i wish s2members, and gravity or formidable (better right now in data management after IMHO), and events espresso or events manager, all get together and come up with something that integrates well….oh an d include user meta for the avatar…

I really want to nkow if there is a projection on the release of the new s2members – the developer of formidable forms just wrote me an hour ago saying that wshe was working on a workoaround to write to s2members custom fields etc when she encountered their support forums serialized array issue and that they are doing away with that set-up in the next release – so she wondered if it was redundant to come up with an alreayd known to be soon obsoleted integration path…..

s2members – save us all some money tell us what the status is on the next release and the end of the serialized array? please – i love everything else about s2members, and think it is a winner hands down for member management – just the integration….please please please?