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Hi. I've searched the forum but can't find an answer to this, though it seems like it should be relatively easy to do, given the power of the S2Member script.

I would like to set up a manual approval process for a free membership site. People who register should be directed to a custom "Pending Approval" page and blocked from the rest of the site. Then once an approval is granted, they can log in and go the 'Member Home' page. Can this be done from within S2Member or does it require custom programming. Thanks so much.

- Dave

s2Member doesn't have this yet. This other plugin seems to do the account moderation you want https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/register-plus/

User Moderation Need absolute control? Check out every new user yourself and hand pick who can stay and who gets the boot before they are able to login to your site. (Manage under Users > Unverified Users)

Hi Cristián,

Thank you for your response and referral to Register Plus.

It doesn't seem like what I'm asking for is that out of the ordinary and would almost be necessary for a true manual approval process. A user goes to a pre-approval page after registration. Then after approval, they can login as usual to the default home page.

In a month or so, we'll be getting an API that will automate the registration process. So this is just a short term work-around.

Since S2Member works great for our needs otherwise, I wonder how hard it would be for a good programmer to code this for us?

Thanks.

- Dave

Maybe not very hard to develop it.

Hmm... Well, here's an idea, why not let them register at Level 0, no approval needed, but your protected content (even if free) is restricted at Level 1. The approval process would then consist of changing the account's level from 0 to 1 in their profile.

I hope that helps.

Hi Cristián,

It turned out that trying to do a custom 'Pending Approval' page is not easy. I went and hired an experienced WP programmer last night who wrote a great little plugin. Unfortunately, he could not get it to play nice with S2Member and finally said we would be better off going with a different solution (Wishlist).

Might be good to add this as a feature request for future versions. Thanks again for all of your help.

- Dave

It's probably just a matter of him being familiar with the other plugin and not this one.

Did you try the solution I suggested above? If you have a Login Welcome Page for Level 0 users that says their account is pending approval, that's what they'll see until they get promoted by you to Level 1.

If you want to have separate pages for each level, you can use the login welcome redirection URL. WP Admin -> s2Member -> General Options -> Login Welcome Page -> Special Redirection URL

There you enter something like http://example.com/welcome-%%current_user_level%% Then you can create two pages, one for each level, e.g.

http://example.com/welcome-0 restrict it at Level 0
http://example.com/welcome-1 restrict it at Level 1

I hope that helps.

Hi Cristián,

I think that your suggestion may have indeed worked but we were already committed to the other solution. We also found that WL gives us better options for creating user profiles from registration and integration with auto-responders.

Again, S2Member is a great product and it is $0 vs. $97. There are features S2Member has and things it does better than WL, like Amazon content protection. Simply for our particular scenario, WL was a little better fit.

Thanks again.

- Dave

Thanks for the feedback! I hope it goes great for you and if you ever use s2Member for another blog and need help, we'll be happy to assist you.

You're welcome. And actually I spoke too soon, as we ran into a major problem trying to use WishList. For some unfathomable reason, WL does not create a user-editable profile during registration. Only Admins can make changes to the profile, not users.

Looks like we are going to try DAP next, since it seems to have all the features we need. But then there's the $167 price tag, which just reinforces the value of S2Member.

- Dave

I see, I'm sorry you had trouble with that too. Well, maybe you'd like to give s2Member another try with the solution I suggested above?

Sorry to interject, but does the Register Plus mentioned above play nice with s2Member?

I did not try using Register Plus with S2Member, so I can't give you any feedback on that combo.

- Dave

In case Register Plus didn't work, I suggest a couple other ideas for account approval in this other thread viewtopic.php?f=4&p=21887#p21887

Here's my report on Register Plus Redux plugin compatibility with s2Member (works well, but mind the configs).

Notice that Register Plus plugin was apparently abandoned and Register Plus Redux took over.