Setting up s2Member and Testing with Sandbox

[FrancescoRizzi]

Hello everyone - thank you for developing s2Member and providing it for free: I think it will help us immensely with our latest project for a local non-profit organization.

We are using WP 3.0.2 and currently have a multisite setup (we're not a blog farm - we just leverage multisite so that we have a 'live' version at .tld and a dev version at .tld/dev)

We want to have 4 levels of paid membership (let's call them bronze, silver, gold, platinum, right?), most pages and posts available to all users (anonymous, 'free' registered users, paid membership levels), some posts and pages accessible only to users that have one of those 4 levels of paid membership, and payments (for membership) implemented through PayPal.

Sounds like what s2Member was made for, right?

I'd like to get to the point where I can test my setup using credentials from my PayPal Sandbox account.
So, I created a couple of pre-configured test accounts in PP Sandbox (a personal account to simulate the buyer, a business account to simulate the seller).

As far as s2Member options: s2member PayPal Options:

> PayPal Account Details:
- Your PayPal Email Address: mytest-seller@gmail.com
- Sandbox Testing? Yes
- Enable Logging? Yes

> PayPal IPN Integration:
- on one hand, I grabbed the IPN URL listed here, logged on to PayPal Sandbox, and used their Test Tool > IPN Simulator to succesfully send an IPN transaction using this URL.

- QUESTION #1: I'm developing on a local instance of WP, so s2Member gives me an http://localhost/... IPN URL here. Would this be a problem for testing? When going live, the IPN URL will be different - I understand I'll have to add it to the actual (non-sandbox) PayPal account at that point, but will I also have to do anything else (eg: regenerate the buttons) ?

- QUESTION #2: Since I'm using a Sandbox account, I don't have an actual PayPal account where I should edit the IPN settings, turning IPN on and pasting the IPN URL from s2Member, as s2member tells me I should. Am I stuck?

> PayPal PDT/Auto-Return Integration
To be honest, I'm not sure yet if we'll use PDT. It seems IPN might be good enough for us to start, so I'm going to hold off on dealing with PDT for now - unless you tell me I *have to* set it up to A) test or B) go live
Just in case, I did grab the Signature field from the PayPal Sandbox account (> API Credentials > Signature field for the mytest-seller account) and placed it in the s2Member PayPal PDT Identity Token option.

> Specific Post/Page:
Although, as I mentioned, we will eventually have to distinguish between pages and posts that anonymous and 'free' users can access and those that require an active paid membership, I'm leaving this off for the time being.

...that was a lot of stuff. Then, in s2member > General Options, I tweaked the Login/registration Design, set the "Login Welcome Page" to an existing page ("Members"), set the Membership Options Page to a new page ("Membership Signup"), and finally used the s2member PayPal Buttons section to create a button, added it to the "Membership Signup" page, logged out from WP and accessed the "Members" page.

"Membership Signup" was correctly displayed, with the PayPal button (sweet!).
Click the button and get redirected to
https://sandbox.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webdescr
The page correctly lists the bronze membership I am trying 'to buy', and asks for email and password. I enter my test buyer account info.

I now get an error displayed: The link you have used to enter the PayPal system is invalid. Please review the link and try again"

QUESTION #3: What am I doing wrong, or what am I missing?

Thanks in advance for any help,
FR

[FrancescoRizzi]

Monday morning bump... full of hopes and dreams.... tell me someone can help me
Thanks