S2 Membership Plugin

It’s never too late!

You could certainly use s2member on this site. But there are many alternative options so, before I make any suggestions, it would be better to hear what sort of thing you would like to accomplish. Then I (and others) can focus on what would be most helpful to you.

OK. The purpose of my question was to try to work out how best to automate what you want so that it is easy to manage and profitable.

But I can’t really work out from your response how you plan to make money if you aren’t going to be charging your users. Are you saying that you only want to charge new users, or that you want to charge only for new content (so that even current users would pay for new content)? Or are you saying something else entirely?

And can we have an idea of what your site is about? That would also help to work out how to organize things.

That’s a coincidence; I’m just listening to Ian Dury.

As for your site, the tricky bit is working out how to get your members to pay without immediately locking them out of everything that they are used to accessing.

I suggest something like this. First, decide which parts of your current site you are happy for the current members to access, and which parts you now want them to pay for. It will be easier to achieve this division if you can divide the content by categories, tags, or URIs. (If you do this by category, it will be much easier if you also install the WP Show IDs plugin, because that will tell you the ID number of each category).

Then decide if there’s any current content that you would like to make available for free even to new members. If not, you should turn off Open Registration (under General Options).

If you do wish to offer some content for free, then you simply don’t need to do anything with it.

For content that you are happy for current members to view, you need to set that at level 1. Content that even current members must pay for should be set to level 2.

Next, you need to decide what will be your home page. I assume you’ll be keeping this as it currently is, but you must not put any content you wish to protect on the home page because this must be accessible by anyone, even if they are not logged in.

Then you need to decide on which page to direct members to when they log in. s2Member calls it the Welcome page, though you can actually choose any page as the Welcome page. You can have different Welcome pages for level 1 and level 2 users (and, indeed, for free users, if you choose to have them). In the box headed Always redirect non-administrative users ... choose Yes.

Next, you need to create what s2Member calls the Membership Options Page (MOP). You need to read the instructions (in General Options) on how to do this. But basically this is the page to which anyone who is not logged in or who is not at the right level gets redirected. You can put different messages here within shortcodes, offering users the ability to pay for access. So you’d put PayPal buttons here too.

But: a word of warning! Don’t tell s2Member what your MOP is yet. If you do, you’ll lock everyone out!

The next bit is a bit tedious. You need to use s2Member’s export feature to export your list of users to a CSV file. Make a backup copy!

Now take one copy of this file and change your members’ user role from Subscriber to s2member level 1. It will be much easier to do this in bulk using LibreOffice Calc (or MS Excel, if you must) than changing all 58,000 by hand within WordPress!

Check that you haven’t changed your own role!

Then reimport your file back into WordPress. You should now see all the members with the correct roles.

Now you should put a message on your home page that all current users should go to the Lost Password location to have a password sent to them. And now you can select your MOP, which will bring s2Member to life!

Good luck!