S2Member with Comic Easel

  • Man Oh man I wish there were less drama filled ways to do this! LOL.

    I do an adult (not porn) little comic entitled The Heavenly Bride. I think I have 8 loyal readers and counting. (And 1000 other people who also read regularly but are invisible.) It’s not a very supported webcomic, really.

    That being said, I recently moved the comic’s system from Comic CMS to WordPress with the Comic Easel plugin. It’s using the Comicpress theme. And I wanted to turn part of it into a membership area.

    *All* I want to offer is the ability to see the next page in advance as well as the occasional art for art’s sake associated with the comic. No more. No less. To be honest I don’t expect to get more than one member for this, so I’m keeping it as simple as possible.

    At times I’d like to age screen my readers. I don’t do porn, but the comic does have occasional risque moments. And a planned big moment in the future I’d like to keep specifically paying members only.

    Of all the membership systems I have tried in the past few days, S2Member was the only one that integrated well with Comic Easel’s “comic page” system…. sort of. (Comic Easel doesn’t make posts per se. It has a specialized post system called comics.) But man things are too complicated around here.

    I wonder if it’s possible to set it up like the following:

    1. I want a drip feed situation that goes like this: Member A is a nonpaying member. Member B loves me and pays up. Member B gets to see the next page of Heavenly Bride when it comes out. Member A (and visitors) don’t get to see it for two more weeks. – currently I’ve went around this problem by manually blocking off posts. This is a clumsy and inefficient way to do it.

    2. Currently when Member A clicks on a page they’re not supposed to see yet they’re redirected to the membership conditions and sign up page. This is real bad. I’m running a webcomic here, and folks are prone to wander around. Is there no way to simply make the page (and link) invisible to Member A period? Or some solution like that?

    3. Currently the final page is what shows on the website. But it will be blocked to Member A and visitors, creating further problems. Is there no way to have it so that the last “cleared” page is what shows up on the website? I could simply do a static front page but I’ve learned over the years that this is a no-no with webcomics. It chases readers away. They need to see that final page. It draws them in.

    And finally… if anyone can help me, can you… keep it to dumb person English? One person very thoughtfully tried to help me with their system and I could barely read their email much less follow the tutorial. I need a walk through. Sorry for being so bad with High English! (But no videos. OMG no videos.)

    Thanks to everyone in advance… and, if this has never been address before, I hope this thread helps others.

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/s2member/

Viewing 11 replies - 1 through 11 (of 11 total)

  • So far as (1) and (2) are concerned, you should be able to do what you want by using the examples set out in the s2member back-end at API/Scripting - Simple/Shortcode Conditionals and API/Scripting - s2member Content Dripping.

    Don’t be put off by the slightly intimidating titles of those sections: the explanations and examples there do a good job of walking you through what you need. You won’t actually be doing real scripting: just using a couple of shortcodes.

    I am not entirely clear what you want in (3). Is the last “cleared” page the last page of the previous edition, or of the current one, or something else entirely?

    Thread Starter rainbowprophet

    (@rainbowprophet)

    Okay, yes, the titles are very intimidating. LOL. But I”ll see what I an find.

    I’m sorry I wasn’t clear. What I mean by “cleared” page is the last page in the line of pages nonpaying members can see. Having the site open up to the members page because the last page showing is a page only paying members can see would be a big turn off.

    Well, that’s going to be much harder because there’s no easy way to identify what that post (and it will be a post, not a page, I think) is going to be. It won’t be the most recent post (which would be easier to find) because that would be for paid members only.

    This is a WordPress issue, by the way, not one specifically related to s2member, which at least means that there might be a plugin in the repository that you could use to achieve this. (Try searching for something like “Display Post on Page”.)

    The main problem you might find is that such plugins might want to display only a title or an excerpt, and to do so in a widget in a sidebar, but you should take a look first and see what you can find. If there’s one plugin that uses a shortcode, that might do the job, so long as you can work out how it is going to identify the relevant post.

    Thread Starter rainbowprophet

    (@rainbowprophet)

    I took a look and, on top of not being able to follow much, I get the gist this isn’t going to work in my situation. It blocks content. Day 3 of their registration? No, I need it to be day 14 of it being online because I want visitors to see it when it ages as well.

    Also, Comic Easel displays comics by using the featured image function.

    Oy. (disappoint! LOL)

    Thread Starter rainbowprophet

    (@rainbowprophet)

    Oh, yes,I should look into the display on page thing. Maybe there’s an answer there. I hope! I don’t mind releasing pages manually here and there up to a point. But that at least I hope to fix.

    You have probably seen them already, but I have just discovered both a ComicPress theme and a ComicEasel plugin in the WordPress repository, so maybe they will provide the functionality you’re looking for. Good luck!

    Thread Starter rainbowprophet

    (@rainbowprophet)

    Yeah, the Comic Easel I’m using is the plugin. And the theme is ComicPress. The site looks okay but the functions I am looking for are not to be found. Alas!

    Thread Starter rainbowprophet

    (@rainbowprophet)

    Well the good news is I checked the alternative view protection option and the site is now putting the last “okay” page up. Anything that’s members only doesn’t show on the front page. One issue down! Three to go!

    Been having similar issues about wanting to drip feed comics.

    However, I was able to come up with a tiny plugin that let me drip the ‘comic’ custom post type that Comic Easel makes, while using the base level restrictions that s2member defines.

    Comic Easel <3 s2member

    Right now it’s hard coded for letting restricted members to get 1 month early access, then it opens up automatically to everyone. Also the Custom Post Type slug *must* be ‘comic’. I will be creating a back-end UI so that can be changed among other things. Consider this an extreme beta version.

    Anyway – don’t know if that will work for you, but since I was making it anyways I thought I’d throw it up here.

    ^.^

    Thread Starter rainbowprophet

    (@rainbowprophet)

    Smudge, I will be more than happy to test this for you!!! And thank you!!

    Currently I’ve got the entire website locked down and if I were to unlock anything I’d have to do it all manually. That’s a lot of pages.

    To lock down the wallpapers and not have them interrupt the story feed, I got a plugin to import them into a page and post them in news feeds. This is good for wallpapers, but I’ve been planning some little side stories for a while now and have no good way to do that.

    Just to be able to not have manually okay a bunch of pages is a big deal. I’d pay for this service, I so would.

    Ha! Not even 48 hours and I found a bug (though very minor). There was a name conflict in the fact that WordPress Updater kept confusing it with Comic Easel. I’ve renamed the plugin slightly to keep this from happening and have updated my post page accordingly. If you grabbed it before I did the update, I recommended deleting the old one and installing the newer version. Because of the name difference it will not overwrite the old version, but instead install along side.

Viewing 11 replies - 1 through 11 (of 11 total)
  • The topic ‘S2Member with Comic Easel’ is closed to new replies.