Raam Dev

Hi Ashia,

Please see my replies below:

1) I would like to be able to display a list of members from a particular membership level in a couple of different ways: First, by having a publicly-accessible page with, for example, name, company, city and link to view further details about a given member. But then the link to view a member’s “details” would take the site visitor to a member-only area requiring log-in. In other words, I only want members to be able to see other member’s detail info, such as email address and/or phone number, but have this detail view blocked from the public. Is such a configuration possible?

s2Member provides no “member directory” functionality for creating lists of members. You would need to add this functionality yourself (through another plugin, or by hiring a programmer to add such functionality).

The access restriction part of this can be handled with s2Member, yes. For member-specific areas, please see Video » s2Member (Client Portals?).

2) I additionally need the ability to add custom fields in relation to members — for example, I want to be able to list not just name and address, but also “specialty area” or “interests”. Is adding such custom fields possible?

Yes, s2Member as a feature for adding Custom Registration/Profile fields (see Dashboard -› s2Member® -› General Options -› Registration/Profile Fields).

3) I need for existing members to be able to be able to update their own profile information, including the entries for the above-described custom fields. But a site administrator should also be able to manually intervene (via the wordpress admin interface) to update a specific member’s information if needed. Is this combination possible?

Yes, s2Member provides the [s2Member-Profile /] shortcode that you would place on a WordPress page and point the member to (see Dashboard -› s2Member® -› General Options -› Member Profile Modifications).

This shortcode generates a profile editing form, which includes fields for updating the Custom Registration fields that you created. Administrators can manually update any of this information by editing the users profile from the WordPress backend (Dashboard -› Users -› Edit user).

4) The front end of this website will be in German; the back end (admin) can be in either English or German. Are German translation files (esp for front end) already available? And/or can they be added/edited from my end?

s2Member does not provide any translations for specific languages, however we do support translations. Please see Pre Sale FAQs » Can s2Member® be translated into other languages?.

Justin,

You may be interested in using the BlackBox Debug Bar WordPress plugin. It keeps those messages separate from the page content itself, making things cleaner and easier to debug.

Hi Andrew,

There is not currently any Custom Capability “expiration” feature within s2Member. If you want to give someone a Custom Capability and then specify an expiration for that access, you’ll need to write some custom PHP code that adds that functionality based on your business rules.

If you create a paid membership at Level 2 with s2Member Pro and then you want to offer select users the opportunity to sign up for Level 2 at no charge, you can simply use a Free Registration form (Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Pro Forms -› Free Registration Forms) configured to give access to Level 2. Then, you’ll place that form on a secret page and only give the URL to your corporate clients. That form will allow free registration and the users who sign up with that form will automatically be assigned Level 2 access.

The membership levels in s2Member are cumulative. This means that if you have content protected at two levels (e.g., Level 2 and Level 3), all Level 3 members automatically have access to content protected at Level 2, Level 1, and Level 0. However, Level 2 members do not have access to content protected at Level 3.

Hi Skip,

This is already possible.

Redirect from Membership Options Page:
http://www.primothemes.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=14947#p53487

Redirect from Login Welcome Page:
http://www.s2member.com/forums/topic/mailchimp-signup-before-viewing-page-content/#post-12419

Hi Brad,

s2Member uses the WordPress user base, which has no concept of members associated with other members. There are Administrator accounts that have privileges to create other users, however s2Member does not operate at that level: all users created with s2Member are assigned one of the s2Member Levels and those levels are based on the WordPress Subscriber role, which only has permission to view content (i.e., no access to the WordPress back-end is given).

If a member signs up at user level two they get the ability to add users to their account

That is not currently possible with s2Member.

Yes, if you enable logging (Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Options -› Account Details -› Logging), s2Member will report things like demotions in wp-content/plugins/s2member-logs/ and you can track what’s happening that way.

Barry,

You can use the wp_logout_url() function to generate a Logout link that redirects to a specific URL. Please see the documentation on the WordPress Codex for more info.

To check if a user has a specific ccap, you can use the current_user_can() function like this:

<?php if(current_user_can("access_s2member_ccap_free_gift")){ ?>
        Display info about the ccap free_gift here.
<?php } ?>

(For more info on s2Member Conditionals, please see Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting -› Advanced PHP Conditionals.)

To embed something like this inside a WordPress post/page, you’ll need to be using the Exec-PHP Plugin.

1. How can I configure S2Member so that new users see a welcome page, but existing users skip that page and go to another page/category listing/etc.?

For redirecting new members the first time they login, please see Dashboard -› s2Member® -› General Options -› One-Time Offers (Upon Login).

To redirect everyone else after logging in, you can either select an existing page or enter a specific URL in Dashboard -› s2Member® -› General Options -› Login Welcome Page.

2. If one category is restricted to members but another is not, what happens if a non-member tries to read a post that is included in both categories? Will the post show up in my “Public” category index listing (even though the member only category index listing for that post would not even be accessible to those visitors)? The reason I am asking is that my site has a variety of categories/child categories that only members can access, but also has a public category that anyone can see. I plan to associate some posts with both categories for marketing purposes.

This would depend largely on how your WordPress theme was coded, so the only way to know for sure is to test it. If you want fine control over various listings of things, you’ll need to modify the PHP code in your theme files.

That said, if a post is assigned two categories, one of which they don’t have access to, they will be redirected to the Membership Options page when they try accessing that post (i.e. they will not be able to access the post).

Alan,

You won’t be able to fully test things in an environment where PayPal cannot communicate back with the server. s2Member waits for certain messages from PayPal before proceeding with things like upgrades, where s2Member needs to make sure the payment went through successfully before proceeding with upgrading an account.

The success=”” attribute also uses the response from PayPal to redirect to the URL you specified (after a purchase on PayPal, the user is sent back to s2Member where it receives the response from PayPal and if successful redirects to the success page).

In short, there is no way to fully test a setup with PayPal without PayPal being able to communicate with s2Member. If you’re hosting s2Member on a site that is not publicly accessible, then PayPal won’t be able to communicate with s2Member and you’ll experience the problems that you’re experiencing.

Soosie,

The problem here is that your import file is corrupted and it looks like it’s corrupted because of what you’re doing to it after you make your changes.

As Cristian mentioned, looking at the example lines you shared, there is a problem with the double-quotes. You have several fields that are doubly enclosed with double-quotes, meaning that when s2Member runs the import, it sees nothing in the field (which would explain why things are not being updated as your expecting).

After you run an export and s2Member gives you the .csv file, you can open that in Excel, make your modifications to the columns, and then re-save the file making sure that it’s saved as CSV (Comma Separated Values) with “Double-Quotes Enclosing” fields. There is no need to manually add double-quotes to the CSV file and it sounds like that is the part where your import file is becoming corrupted.

Microsoft Excel has a lot of different options and it’s easy to choose the wrong settings when you re-save the file. The alternative to Microsoft Excel is OpenOffice.org Clac, which is a free and open-source suite of office-type applications.

I don’t personally have Excel on my computer so I have no way of walking you through the re-saving process step-by-step with Excel. (I do, however, use OpenOffice.org Clac.) The default settings with OpenOffice.org work just fine for re-saving CSV files, but I’m not sure about the defaults for Excel.

Hi Robert,

There are two ways you could do this:

1. You could create a Custom Registration field that shows up during registration, then use some JavaScript + PHP to fill in the value of that field with the API key that you generate, then finally hide the field using CSS so that the user never sees that it’s there. When the form is submitted, the API key will be recorded to their account. (You’ll need to use a plugin like Exec-PHP to run PHP on the page where you display the Pro-Form.)

2. The other way to do this would be to hook into the registration process using one of the Registration Hooks and then generate your API key and add it to the Custom Registration Field. However, with the way s2Member currently stores Custom Registration Fields in the database, adding the data via PHP might be rather tricky (see this thread for more info).

I have personally used the first method and it works just fine.