I have two installations. In both I use s2Member for only for content protection. I use Formidable Forms PayPal plug-in to take payments and Vladimir Garagulya’s User Role Editor to manually assign the appropriate s2Member roles to my users.
s2Member's future
Maybe we should open up a thread to compare the best solutions for how to sell/set membership roles - because content protection is what makes s2member great - all the rest is usable at best - if not simply clumsy and unreliable.
As written in another thread - ThriveCart announced to me they will fully support OptimizeMember very shorty! OPM is virtually identical to s2member for content protection - plus couple with the Awesome ThriveCart checkout - that’s a pretty good combo. Only think missing in my eyes is then better email integration. I still use s2emails reminder plugin from Jonathan Williams (Odd Jar) - that plugin is not available anymore since many years - but works more reliable then s2emails from s2plugins.com for me.
My problems with a woo commerce product checkout are that it’s not possible as far as I can see - to add time to an EOT - or am i wrong here? I need to be able to let my users renew their account (if they have no subscription) also long before expiry and have years added. Also I need different pricing based on new users vs existing users - without using coupons. If you go for a product based checkout then usually that would be different products and not compatible to add years on top.
Because one thing is clear. s2member checkout is really unusable. Just run A/B testing with a proper checkout cart like Woo or Thrivecart in comparison - or monitor the dropout rate.James and Lambert seem to agree here - as they also don’t use s2member checkout anymore. Formidable Forms I did not know so far - will look at it to see how it fares.
Felix has put his finger on it. If it is indeed the case that s2Member is great for content protection but not for subscription management then it does not make any sense to compete against plugins that do it better.
My love of WordPress comes from its plugin structure which is the best implementation of the “small parts, loosely joined” philosophy that I know. s2Member is a quite a low-level tool and so I suspect that many users be using it in this way.
My own membership site is still in development and I have not yet worked out my membership use cases but thinking aloud they must include,
- Selling different subscriptions
** Personal
** Corporate - Managing upgrades and downgrades
- Managing end-of-life
Let us assume that we use s2Member for content protection. This content protection is actually implemented through WordPress Roles and Capabilities. A Subscription Management Plug-in would manage payments and change Roles and Capabilities accordingly.
Formidable Forms works well, it is a medium-level forms framework like Gravity forms. It has add-ons that provide basic PayPal and Stripe integrations. It would be necessary to build your own business logic for the membership use cases which could be implemented through custom form “Actions” (events that take place on Submit), these developer written Actions could make the changes to the Role and Capability of the user.
So what will happen when gutenberg masonic plugin gets integrated into WP, does s2member stops protecting content or what exactly will happen i don’t get?
Hi,
Can programmers who know s2Member’s architecture (Krum?) tell me where are payment API files in s2Member Pro directory?
It could be quite easy to change the base code to update the official APIs and maybe even add payment features…
Thanks.
I have installed this Gutenburger plugin and it works fine i can edit by both ways and i see s2member restriction can be set and even of other plugins controls so i don’t see any problem, but yes i agree the plugin is dying compared to others.
Maybe for developers is not feasible anymore to support the plugin only if they changed the way they sell it and to update the user interface and do other improvements then yes it will survive.
Hi,
Thank you for your test of Gutenberg which is reassuring for the near future of s2Member.
However, there’s still a need to update the payment gateways APIs so that s2Member remains a functional plugin and better than many others in my opinion (no other plugin among those I have tried allow so much customization via PHP programming).
Thanks.
sitewide restriction can be set with Gutenberg - but also conditional with shortcodes? I guess if you do so at least it will get confusing as you need to switch backward/forward between html and gutenberg view - or am I wrong here?
I have not only s2member using conditional shortcodes - but also qtranslate-x (another very problematic plugin) plus shortcodes-ultimate - so I guess I will take some years before I would actually switch away.as my site relies way too much on shortcodes nesting into each other.
I do not use the shortcodes conditionals because I do not like shortcodes … I always prefer the real PHP code named PHP conditionals, which I strongly advise you to use instead of shortcodes …
The possibilities are then much better and it is very easy to use.
Thanks.
I can understand your preference against shortcodes but I think they are far too common and easy to use to ever consider doing away with them. One of s2members core strengths is the rich functionality and flexibility people have to choose from.
Hi,
I totally agree with that and I have never talked about removing them from s2Member.
I was just saying the next update named Gutenberg may have possible bugs with the shortcodes, that could then be replaced by syntaxes in true PHP 
Thanks.
Thank you for your test of Gutenberg!
Please do one more test for me: check if [s2M shortcodes] works well in Gutenberg blocks. Check both “a shortcode in a block”, “a shortcode inside shortcode in a block”. Also test with cross-blocks shortcodes (a shortcode starts in one block but ends in another), again with “single shortcode” and “complex shortcode”. I am curious to know results. If at least half of the test works well, we are safe for Gutenberg, at least for several months ahead.
Problem is that there is no a list with “API functions”, but it is possible to create a new gateway (like I build one for Bitcoin). I will care for this.
Hi,
As I told you in private, if you can fix and improve payment gateways that already exist, you can save s2Member plugin because this is the most critical point.
If you subsequently know how to reliably add other payment gateways, it will be a very great bonus.
Thanks.
They have ALWAYS been in SVN. They were and it appears still are mirrored in GitHub. In addition, many plugin authors use GitHub to develop, maintain and collaborate on their plugins.
I do not think this is accurate. Multiple people have tested s2member with Gutenberg. Most have reported that it works fine.
While I think more testing is a good idea, I am getting very frustrated by false and non specific claims. If you know of something specific, please tell us.
Otherwise, please stop scaring people.
Hi,
Krumch may have been a little defeatist indeed but I have understand that he wants to help s2Member and his community.
For this, he deserves the right to have perhaps exaggerated his words about death of this plugin 
Thanks.
Thanks @Seth78, but @Sonja is right: code stay both in SVN and GitHub (but I miss links to my plugins at GitHub as well, not sure why), thus my confusion, sorry…
I am not tested Gutenberg myself, but having “bad memories” with various other pagebuilders let’s me think that it is not a good idea. I ask tests above, please (if you can) do and tell me results.
I am pretty disappointment that Websharks abandoned the product without every saying so.
According to the linkedin, the CEO Jason Caldwell of Websharks left in June 2017:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaswrks/
And what’s worst is Websharks seemed to be now linked with a few russian employees:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/websharks/
Does anyone has any suggestion on what membership plugin to move to?