Community Support Forums

First off, an aside: I have tinkered with S2Member a bit, and am equally impressed by the thorough and very nicely laid out documentation provided in-line with the plugin, as well as the enormous flexibility the plugin offers. It is an enormous project to maintain, let alone develop further, and I truly hope that the undoubtedly fast growing user base reciprocates in its more material recognition. This is one of the plugins that make WordPress such a fantastic platform to work with; especially for member-based non-profits as is our case it would simply be impossible (not to mention: outright not affordable) to do this with the same degree of reliability, ease of use and efficiency. So, tons of respect and appreciation are due.

Now the question: I occasionally run into a member who is so anxious to not let the membership run out, that (s)he wants to renew a bit in advance of the expiration date. In the case of a professional association, that's not too surprising, but I acknowledge that it does present a problem on the backend side.

After carefully going through the in-line documentation (truly fantastic, again kudos for the mammoth effort) I reckon it should be possible to accommodate something like that, through some conditional logic, by "getting" the currently existing EOT date, then calculating the new (i.e. intended) EOT based on the new membership term duration added to the end of the current EOT, and sending that off to PayPal, and then listening to / plugging in the resulting transaction details into the S2Member data.

The ramifications aren't as straightforward as it may seem at first glance, I realize, given the additional conditional logic that would need to be applied to the modified renewal page / form (after all, this is not a more traditional upgrade / downgrade scenario) so here I am: has there been a previous S2Member user who ran into this or a similar situation, and has crafted a solution that (s)he is willing to share?

Much obliged, again!

Really, no-one has (or had) a similar issue of members wanting to renew before expiration?

Hm. Oh well, thanks for looking anyway!

So I take it you're doing a non-recurring subscription? And you want them to stay at the current level?

You know I'd like to know exactly how this works too. If somebody buys a 1-year non-recurring subscription and they buy another 1-year before it's ended, does it just add onto their time? I thought I had this figured out in another post but I'm getting confused here....

Correct: I (well, we) have non-recurring 1-year subscriptions; we've had complaints from people about the subscription "unexpectedly" taking money out of their card (i.e. simply forgetting about the payment subscription, or just not understanding the concept) and especially given the longer-term duration of the membership / subscription (i.e. one year, not a week or a month) I can understand that, so I've taken out the subscription and have it simply as non-recurring payments. The big drawback of that approach is that renewing before the EOT is a b-word.

Bottom line is, with an out-of-the-box install, you simply cannot renew before the expiration date. One can work around it in a somewhat complicated manner, e.g. by using an "upgrade" function to in fact allow for midstream renewals, but that's very messy IMO. That's why I'm looking for a solution / workaround to get to a "real" premature renewal functionality working, which would - as you say - correctly compute the new expiration date based on the old one with a whole new term added to it. This isn't as simple to accomplish as it looks though, and sadly the logic of the payment processors (i.e. PayPal) don't make that any easier. Still I suspect it's somehow possible, it's just not easy to accomplish.

I know this is an old thread, but has anyone ever found a solution to this problem? Is there any way to allow a user to renew his Buy Now subscription before the EOT?