WPEngine doing away with HTACCESS

[ACOOK (Alicia Cook)]

WP Engine alerted us that they are doing away with HTACCESS. They also told us that S2 MEMBER is the only place on our website that will experience an issue when .HTACCESS is done away with in October. I was told to reach out to s2 Member to get an NGINX code that they can then go in and use in place of .htaccess.

I reached out to s2 member via email/chat and am still awaiting a response. I am writing to see if any guidance can be provided to me. I must note that I have NO web management experience, and our company is currently without a web person.

Any help is appreciated as we would hate to experience a major disruption in our website come October. Thank you!

[Cralamarre (Stephen P)]

I’m not a web developer either, but I found this thread that seems like it may help your situation. If you scroll down, it talks about getting s2Member working with nginx and WP Engine.

Files not protected in s2members-files directory

Thanks Camden, Using the mysite.com/?s2member_file_download=example-file.zip url method works as expected and redirects users to the membership option if they are not registered and downloads the file for members. I think that most users will not figure out to look for the path under wp-content/s2members…etc…, so using the above url should work fine. Thanks for the code you shared on stackOverflow. Thanks Again! Dan

[clavaque (Cristián Lávaque)]

Hi Alicia,

I saw your email, but reply here here so others benefit, too.

The thread Stephen pointed you to is good. I’d start a bit higher in the conversation: Files not protected in s2members-files directory

Felix’ reply seems like a good start for you to provide WP Engine (the backup-db one he included there is not s2’s).

s2 uses .htaccess to protect directories from direct access, the ones Felix put there: s2member-files, and s2member-logs.

s2 also uses .htaccess for protected file links that don’t use the querystring in the URL (the part that starts with the question mark and has variables), but this may not be something you’re using (and it’s not required, you can just use the normal querystring version). WP Admin > s2Member > Download Options > Advanced Mod-Rewrite Linkage

[openmtbmap (Felix Hartmann)]

Yeah no problems just block the folders in nginx config file. S2 runs perfectly on nginx.