Support Forum

Melanie Nelson said
Okay, I got it. Probably not as "easy" and "automatic" as you'd like, but the hard part (FWIW) is done.  Keep in mind this is based on a site that's using a combination of WooCommerce, Simple:Press, and WishList Member - so you'll have to make adjustments.

In any case, for the forum, you have to set up user groups that are mapped to your membership levels.  The site I'm doing this on sells online classes, so each "product" is actually a bundle of other products that contain file downloads, access to private posts, and access to private forums.  (The idea of the forums is to provide a space for each course where the course instructor can go in and answer questions of her students.) So we have "User Groups" set up with names that relate to each course (so it's easy to know which membership level goes with which course)  In these forum permissions, we have no setting for pretty much everyone but Moderators and Administrators - so *everyone* is blocked.  Then we add a forum permission for each one, and add the proper user group with "Standard Access" for that forum.

i.e. we have several membership levels (set via WishList members).  For example, we'll say "Woodworking Members" and "Sewing Members". In our case, we are setting membership levels to match what courses are for sale, just so we can easily keep track of who goes with what, but you can name them whatever you want.  Wishlist Membership levels are mapped to Simple:Press groups (and these groups have the same name as the Membership Levels - again just to keep things straight) via the instructions I linked to in an earlier post in this thread.

We have forums for these courses - again, keeping the naming convention - "Woodworking" and "Sewing".

Both of these forums are set with "group permissions" that are pretty much blank - just allowing Administrator and Moderator access.  Everyone else is denied.  So you go to "Woodworking" and "Add Group Permission", and select "Woodworking Members", and give them "Standard Access".  Go to "Sewing > Add Group Permission", select "Sweing Members", and give them "Standard Access".

At this point, anyone who has a membership level of "Sewing Members" will be able to access the "Sewing" forum, but not the "Woodworking" one.

Hopefully I haven't lost you yet.

At this point, I wanted to trigger the addition of a user to a forum group permission set when the purchase of the forum access was complete.  I had to tap into the WooCommerce functions to do this.  The function looks like so:

<br />add_action( 'woocommerce_order_status_completed', 'add_user_to_forum' );<br />function add_user_to_forum( $order_id ) {<br /><br />    $order_user_id = get_post_meta( $order_id, '_customer_user', true ); // gets the user ID for the order that was passed<br /><br />    if ( $order_user_id ) {<br />      $user = new WP_User( $order_user_id );<br /><br />     // Get products by $order_id<br />     $product_meta = get_post_meta ($order_id, '_order_items', true); // gets everything in the order<br />     $ids = array(); //set up the array of product IDs for later use<br />     foreach ( $product_meta as $product ) {<br />        $search = get_post_meta($product['id'], 'usergroup_id', true);<br />        if(!$search) continue;<br />        $ids[] = $search; <br />     }<br /><br />     //now we have an array of forum IDs from the sale, if any<br />     if($ids) {<br />       foreach($ids as $id) {<br />          sp_add_membership($id, $order_user_id);<br />       }<br />     }<br />   }<br />}<br /><br />

So when the item is purchased (and the sale is successful and complete), the user is 1) set with the membership level, and 2) added to the list of users for the usergroup that's attached to the forum.  

Now again, our setup was a bit complex - what with three major components (forums, cart and memberships), but if you aren't SELLING forum access, then you could simply do everything I mentioned above (before the code) manually (give the user his membership level in his profile, and manually add the user to the group permission).  

At the most *basic* level, you could just take Simple:Press, create the groups and forum permissions as I mentioned above, and manually add users to each group (through User Groups > Manage User Groups, and click "Add Members".)  it's a manual process, but it would do the same thing without using WooCommerce and WishList Members.

I hope that helps - someone, at least  

(and thanks to Mr. Papa for making it *seriously* easy by telling me about that sp_add_membership tag...sweet!)

Hi Melenie it's great to hear that you solved your situation. My problem still persist and after having been around looking for alternative solution I have found that simple press is the best solution for me regardless if I manually need to add members to their right simple press group.

Speaking of which,

I wonder if you would be willing to have a look at my site and see if it would be possible to do what you did with your site on my site as well? I'll be happy to pay you for your work.

I really only need to have woocommerce and simple press work well together as my "free" user accounts needs to proceed through woocommerce checkout and I realise that they are "buying" a product although they don't have to pay for it.