I have a membership directory website up and running. In general it works well. When a new person submits their listing they then need to make a payment on WooCommerce and the visibility of the listing is determined by their WooCommerce Subscriptions status. The problem is that the listing the user only becomes the 'author' of the post after payment is complete and if no payment is made their listing becomes live straight away. From the settings it looks like it should be 'Pending Review' upon submission rather than published.
So I just tested this, and I had a different problem, in that the post initially had a pending status, and then when payment was made and the order marked as complete, the post status was unchanged, at pending.
So I need to look into this further.
But one thing I wanted to clarify with your set up is, the visitors submitting the form to post content (that has to be paid for). Are they already users on your site, or are they guest visitors?
And does the payment method matter? As mine is just a test site I'm using payment by cheque for the payment type, and I then in the back end update the order as if payment had cleared and mark it as complete.
Does the issue on your site depend upon how payment is made?
For existing users there is a separate form where they can update their profile which works fine. So this is an issue for new users/members. If a new user/member makes a payment everything works fine so I don't think the payment method is a factor. The issue seems to be if someone drops out of the process before payment is made. Once payment is made an author is allocated and the status of the custom post type is correct.
Sorry for the delay getting back to you, things went horribly wrong on toolset.com and then we had a surge in support load.
Am I to understand, then, that guest users can pay to publish content without ever creating an account?
I'm unclear of the workflow .
A guest user begins the process of publishing content (they submit the form). They are then expected to pay, but don't.
At some point later, they make the payment.
How do we know what they are paying for? They don't have an account with a profile to find their way back into the checkout process for paying for the same content.
A potential member submits the form on hidden link;
The user is brought to the cart upon submission of the form and pays
The custom post type that was created when the form was submitted is put in pending until it can be verified/approved; the associated author is the person who submitted the form
Everything is hunky dory 🙂
A potential member submits the form on hidden link;
The user is brought to the cart but decides not to pay and leaves the site
No author is allocated to the post that was created in step 1
The submitted custom post type is published even though they have not paid or been verified/approved
