Store Setup Question

[El_Sye]

Hi! First and foremost, I want to say--s2member is a really fantastic plugin. The way is handles subscriptions is fantastic, and, in particular, the documentation included for every thing under the sun has saved me hours of configuration time. Absolutely awesome product.

I do have a question regarding a possible store layout, however. I'm sure there's an answer out there, but narrowing down just how to handle it is proving.. Tricky.

First, an explanation of the site setup:
The website I'm working on is for a music teacher's online lesson distribution--Primarily tablature (hosted on the server) and videos (hosted on Amazon's S3 cloud). There presently are two grades of membership: Level #0 (Silver Members) and Level #1 (Gold Members).

The thought behind this setup is that Silver Members may join at no cost and access things like freely downloadable products, as well as a store catalog, and have only the initial signup process to perform for a lifetime membership. Gold Members, on the other hand, are set up as recurring subscribers, ideally with free access to download all products from the store at no cost.

Regarding the store catalog, we're presently looking at using Posts as the infrastructure. This way, various types of tablature and videos may be categorized by the instrument they're for, to ease the browsing experience. Once a tablature or video is purchased, the Silver Member would then have access to download only that file.

Simple enough, right?


Now, to the questions:

.. Really, I'm curious how I might set this up as cleanly and efficiently as possible. Ideally, I'd like to have it function such that when a Silver Member purchases an item, they'll gain access to a single item normally available for free to Gold Members.

As an explicit example: Let's say there's a PDF file to learn the song Amazing Grace. If the account holder is a Gold Member, then they can download it freely. If they're Silver, then they get a page where they can purchase the PDF. Once they do so, they will then gain access to just the Amazing Grace page that's normally only available to a Gold Member.

Is it possible to have s2members function like this? I don't think it is, but I might just be suffering from Glazed Eye Syndrome, and missing something obvious.

If it isn't possible, are there any suggestions for how I might be able to get s2members to function in the way I'd like?

[Cristián Lávaque]

I think you can protect your content with s2Member's simple conditionals. You can sell the specific tablature to a free member (Silver in your case) as a custom capability using a Buy Now button. Then the conditional each tablature would check if the person can access Level 1 (Gold in your case) content or has the particular custom capability for it.

WP Admin -> s2Member -> API / Scripting -> Using Simple Conditionals
http://www.s2member.com/api-scripting-overview-video/
http://www.s2member.com/custom-capabilities-video/

I hope that helps.