About: Stéphane Bergeron

Thanks ,

Not trying to be contrary and I’m sorry for the snippy tone of my previous reply, I was a bit frustrated. But, I’ve been working with multisite on almost every project for nearly 3 years now. A pluging can be more aware of users on the network than you seem to think. Look at :

http://codex.wordpress.org/WPMU_Functions/get_blogs_of_user for starters which returns an array of all blogs a user belongs to.

Also see this for getting a user’s data from a particular site:

http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/33456/get-user-meta-to-return-user-meta-only-for-current-blog-in-multi-site

This an other stuff I quickly researched yielded this hook that could be used to automatically copy Paypal info from the main subscription site to a sub site a user is being registered to:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Action_Reference/user_register

First example on that page would be a base to get the PayPal data from the main site to the blog the user has just been registered to (by an admin in my case) but using update_user_option which can be blog specific instead update_user_meta which is global:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/update_user_option

I’m just a hack building sites for my clients but my basic use case seems entirely possible from the above after 10 minutes of research. I haven’t tested any of this obviously and I may just try to do it myself but I would think a powerful membership plugin like s2Member should have this built-in or maybe true a smaller plugin addon one could install on sub sites.

But, like I said, it seems the functionality and workflow s2Member caters for is different from this. The first reply you quoted above does not pertain to this situation at all. I knew s2Member would not enable me to automate site creation. The second reply goes right to the crux of things though but, from experience on muiltisite, it contains inncuracies. When Raam says:

“That means you cannot share users, logins, or other data across the sites”.

…that may be true for s2Memebr itself in its current state but that is certainly not because of limitations in WordPress itself as far as I can see (I may be wrong but the obove ressources and my own experience with MS would tell me otherwise). I run another multisite network with 83 sites on the network. Users can be part of several sites on it and, in this case, they have their own site and also belong to a support and the main site. Much like my current project except there’s no subscription mechanism on the site at all. Client prefers to do this all manually and separately still. But basic user meta is shared and there’s site specific user meta too including the user role which is different for each site a user belongs too on that 83 sites network.

Just food for thought. For now, I’ll be moving on with the project doing these things manually.

Thanks!

Thank you very much for responding Jason.

Moving beyond licensing, if you don’t mind, I have just a couple more questions for you about the best way to install and run s2Member on this network for our need. So here’s a few more clarifications on our use case then a couple questions :

I thought that it would be necessary to activate s2Member network wide in order for it to control access to the sites so that only paying members can get in. We’d want to automate as much of that as possible like, for example, if a recurring membership lapses for payment failure for example, I’d want s2Member to prevent access to the protected pay areas of not only the main site but a second support site as well as a member’s private site.

The main site will not only have the s2Member signup forms and payment process but also documentation pages as well as pages with links to special offers to purchase equipment at 3rd party vendors and all that content needs to only be accessible to paying customers (with memberships in good standing… the service is based on recurring monthly payments). There would also be a second “support” site that all paying customers need to be able to access that will be used to provide a ticketing system, a knowledgebase and a private blog (this is powered by WooThemes’ SupportPress application theme). That site will be completely closed to public visitors.

If we could prevent ourselves from having to manually turn access to the main and support site on or off depending if a customer’s account is paid or if it’s unpaid or they cancel it would be great. Same with their private site once it’s created by an admin.

I though we’d have to activate s2Member network-wide to be able to do this. Is that the case?

When s2Member is installed network-wide, is it “network aware” in that, even if payment is processed only on the main site, is the user account’s status (paid/unpaid/cancelled) available to other sites on the network so access can be controlled?

If you could point me to specific documentation about these things I’d really appreciate it. Once I have a better grasp of these issues I can move forward with the project.

What we really do not need in our case is give the ability to any paid customer to create any site. That is not the nature of the the business or the service the site’s offering.

Thank you very much for your help!

• This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by  Stéphane Bergeron. Reason: Typos & other corrections

Hi Raam,

Well, I’m thinking my situation is not a blog farm as, no one but admins (me) or some kind of automated system linked to payment hooks will be able to create sites on the network. Users will basically buy access to a site we’ll create or the system will create for them. At first and until the service gains traction, blog/site creation will be manual and done by me of another network admin. I’m pretty sure that falls outside your definition of a blog farm right?

Thanks!