Free Membership Renewal Button

[bbouse@asahi-america.com]

Hello SWPM Support Team,

We’re trying to set up a membership renewal flow and need your help making sure everything is configured correctly. Here’s our situation:

Our Current Setup:
We offer several free membership levels, each providing access to different combinations of protected content.

There is no payment involved as all membership levels are free.

An admin manually approves new member signups. During this manual approval, the admin assigns the appropriate membership level.

We want each membership to expire 1 year after the admin sets the level (i.e., from the time of manual approval).

We’d like to send email notifications before, on, and after expiration.

We are using the following addons:

Simple Membership After Login Redirection

Simple Membership Custom Messages

Simple Membership Form Builder

Simple Membership Google reCAPTCHA

Simple WordPress Membership (core)

SWPM Email Notification and Broadcast

SWPM Misc Shortcodes

SWPM Partial Protection

What We Want to Happen:
First-time membership approval is a manual process: Admin approves the user and sets their level.

When the account expires after 1 year, the user should be automatically downgraded to a “Holding” or “Expired” level with limited access.

Upon login, they should see a renewal button.

When clicked, the button should:

Automatically restore the member to their previous (original) level — no admin intervention required.

Reset the membership start/expiration date to start a new 1-year period.

Skip any approval — this should be fully automatic for returning members.

Our Main Questions:
How can we store and later restore the member’s original level after a downgrade due to expiration?

How can we build a renewal button (shortcode or other) that:

Automatically resets the level to its original setting.

Resets the expiration date

Does it not require admin approval again?

Is there a built-in way to accomplish this with your plugin/addons, or would we need to implement a custom solution?

We’ve tried using [swpm_update_level_to level=”X”], but that only works when we know the exact level in advance. We want this to be dynamic, so it works regardless of the member’s original level.

Thanks so much in advance for your help — we appreciate it!

Best regards,
Biff Bouse
https://www.asahi-america.com/

[admin]

Regarding the free level change/update shortcode feature you mentioned, please note that it does not have any built-in functionality to remember or restore the membership level a user had before their account expired:

https://simple-membership-plugin.com/simple-membership-miscellaneous-shortcodes-addon/#allow-members-to-changeupdate-their-membership-level

To achieve this functionality, a custom solution would be required. The custom implementation could follow a logic similar to the following:

1) Store Previous Membership Level on Expiry
When a user’s account expires and the system auto-downgrades them to a free level, a custom mechanism would need to save the user’s current membership level (before the downgrade) in their member meta data:

https://simple-membership-plugin.com/auto-downgrade-an-expired-members-account/

2) Restore Saved Level on Button Click
Then, when the swpm_update_level_to shortcode is used, the feature can be extended to check for a previously stored membership level in the member’s meta data. If found, it can update the member’s level back to that value instead of using the level ID defined in the shortcode.

[Author]

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