Barely Okay

The Bad:

If you don’t like dealing with technicalities, do not get this plugin. I can code a little bit, but I’m not a techie pro. It seems a complete waste of time to me that their explanations on how things work take it for granted everyone knows coding. And that you can somehow read minds to know where things go.

Newsflash: people use WordPress because they *don’t* know coding. That’s why WP is so successful. Every time I look into something to make sense of their jumbled mess, I’m struck with the feeling that this program was put together by the kind of coding geeks who feel folks who don’t code (i.e. speak their language) are somehow inferior. I’m sure they’re not really like that; I’m just making an example.

The times I have asked for help in the forums the only person who has answered my cry was a fellow member.

I got this system to work in conjunction with Comic Easel. Hours of fighting it later (and losing money from not being able to deal with commissions over this) I finally got it partially set up to my needs. However, there was one very basic need the makers of S2Member left out: the ability to tell the system to skip a post when someone who does not have access lands on it and go to the next okay post. Rather, you are forced to have the system push these people to the membership options page, i.e. “buy now”! so that “buy now” is in their face whether you want it there or not. For a system that must be read in linear fashion, like mine, this is very bad as I am unable to restrict 99% of my content just to keep the website flowing evenly for everyone. I.E. if there were people who wanted to support my page by getting a paid membership, it’s been rendered completely pointless.

The same goes for their concept of a drip feed. You are forced to drip feed according to membership level and time they’ve been a member as opposed to the post’s age. Another strike against them. (All membership systems I have looked at seem to be like that about the drip feeds, to be fair. Which is insane that no one has thought perhaps there would be this OTHER option needed.)

The Good:

I tried all of the membership systems I could that didn’t want an arm and a leg upfront. s2Member was the only one compatible enough with Comic Easel for me to consider working with. So there’s hope.

If you go slow and take things one at a time you do eventually figure out how to set things up… except for the API Scripts. I’m sick and tired of rereading that mess.

They have an experimental feature in it that really polished off an issue I had with the setup. Hopefully they’ll keep it as I need it dearly.

There’s nothing else for me to go to. So I at least can offer one limited option for my readers. It’s not enough to hook them in, though.

It didn’t destroy my website. It plugged in and everything still looks great.

And finally, I’m sure with a little out of the box thinking I’ll figure out what I can use this system for in offering stuff to my readers. Unfortunately I have the silent, stoic kind of reader who really just wants pages and nothing else. I can think out of the box all I want. Until S2Member catches up with my needs (and thus the needs of the other thousands of people who do what I do) I can’t recommend it.

But I have hope. Can’t recommend it yet.