Possible Solution – Trail of thought

Given that my ideal solution on how to integrate simple press to recognize a user capability to get give access to a forum or forum category isn’t a practical fix due to how simple press is built (I hope I got that right), I need to find an alternative solution that is still automating some of the user access control when it comes to both the wordpress content and their respective forum/category.

I have narrowed down the “type” of people that will access my site to:

Prospects
These people want to get my freebie downloadable and take the free
basic course. They also need access to some related forums that they
can see but not for the unregistered “guest” user as I won’t be doing
a public forum.

Product buyers – “One offs”
These customers bought a product downloadable and or a dvd that
they paid for once and I intend to mainly use these forums as a
support desk as I have still to determin/develop a further use
for them.

Product buyers – Students
These customers will pay a monthly subscription fee and there
are 4-5 levels of the course ranging from novice to expert.

These are intended to be setup as an apprentiship model where
they get the educational material, consumes it and then need to
implement it into their lives, document the results and when they
can show positive results in relation to their goals they will be invited
to “upgrade” to the next level or otherwise have a manual upgrade
process when they have passed the next levels entry criteria.

My current thoughts on a possible solution

It won’t be possible for me to have the fully automated modular integration
that I am looking for where the customer automatically get the right simple
press forum access when they buy a product or get upgraded.

If I lower my ambition to segment these products and types into bigger
groups I could automate some of these in order to decrease the amount of
manual work needed as manually adding people to their right simple press user
group is possible but not prefered for my customer or myself as it takes time
and is prone to human error.

As I have been writing about this I’ve thought about the entire problem/challenge
and realise that since my educational courses are fixed I can integrate the forum
access control by using normal wordpress user roles which effectivly fix 50%
of my problem.

My problem then is focused on my products that I sell that I want to have a forum
for each product in order to handle product support or other future areas of
development.

Here I cannot use the user role integration because the amount of roles needed would
scale up to quickly.

Do you have any ideas on how to get a solution going here (regardless if it is a manual or
other solution)?

Thank you so much for reading through this and taking the time to help me. It really means
a lot to me.

/ Tobias

I just realised this topic got created in the wrong forum.

Admin or Mod can you move this to the proper forum?

Not sure what IS the correct forum for this.

Personally – I still don’t see any way you can achieve the granularity you want without defining large numbers of ‘containers’. I understand why that is not ideal but I see no alternative.

But let’s see if this gets any other reesponses…