Upgrade membership without "Adding to Cart"

Hi

I'm basically looking to have members upgrade to a certain membership level FREE OF CHARGE, at least for a while....
Or if new users can automatically be on the premium membership (free) straight after signing up.... 

But at the moment, even if the new membership level is set to £0, a user would still have to go through paypal which would even complain about the amount being "0".
Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Any help?

Let's discuss what you wish to accomplish.  You could go into the actions on Standard and allow everything you are thinking about for Premium; after all, it is not the name that matters but what actions are allowed; thus standard is premium.

If you are thinking about a trial of Premium; then in addition to the zero price, you need to set a flag that shows the person has used their trial, otherwise they simply keep signing up for the trial over and over.  This of course is going to require custom changes in the code.

Thanks for your reply...
I'm happy with the "Standard" and how it works.... and I've also got custom "Premium" ....What I want is to have the first 100 site members or thereabouts to automatically be a "Premium" member free of charge. Then after that, everything would be reverted to how it works (where new members are on "Standard" until they maybe pay to upgrade to a "Premium" membership)...

If I change the permissions for "Standard" and give it "premium" privileges, it'll mess things up when I want to revert things back to how they were... Get me?

This is going to require custom coding.  This would need to be done post-joining so I am not quite sure where it would need to go.  The logic is to check the id number of the person that has just joined and if the id is <= to 101 (as admin you have already acquired ID 1) set that person's membership level to Premium (each membership level has a number that you can find in the database).  You would also need to set the ending date of the membership unless you don't want them to expire.  The snag here of course is that a bot joining or a spammer joining would take a slot; however, during the first launch of the site you probably won't get bots or spammers.  No way around them really.  The ID field is auto incremented each time a person joins.  Deleting a member does not reset or renumber the ID field; that can be done in phpMyAdmin.  However, you could increase the number; as in id <= 104 at any time to account for deleting a couple of spammers.

Lol, I know exactly what you mean, but I don't actually have a clue where to start from...

I guess I'll have to do the pain job of telling members in the "new member" email that their account would be upgraded within 24 hours....and then manually do that for all members until the required number is reached. :/

That would work.  Simply say the first 100 gets a free membership upgrade once they have confirmed their account.  You could add that if they don't see their membership upgrade within 24 hours or whatever time frame to contact you.

Yupp. Thanks

When a member upgrades to a purchasable membership, they get added to a table that holds their id, the membership number, the start and end date for the membership.  It is possible to run a query on the database that will look at the two tables, the membership table and the profile table and check to see if the member has an entry in the membership table; I forget the exact table for the membership, and if they don't then add it.

The easiest though may be to just manually add them as they join.

Yh, just doing it manually...members ain't flocking in yet, so doing it manually isn't a problem at the moment.