You can use member group sponsorship to let people purchase special powers (which might include the ability to add more listings than regular members) or let them have all their listings promoted to a special type at once for extra recognition.

For WSN 5.1.x:

As of 5.1.0, the process is simpler.

First, fill out the general settings at the top of Admin Panel -> Settings -> Sponsorship. You can use any of the three supported payment processors -- PayPal, 2checkout and nochex -- or you can leave all three of those fields blank and process payments manually.

Click the "Add Usergroup Sponsorship Level" link to add a level. Follow the instructions on screen.

After that, you'll see the levels you've created listed on the sponsorship settings page for you to edit.

If you want to require all registrations from non-admins to be sponsored, just create a sponsorship level which promotes to "Members" (you can have them revert to guests or to another usergroup you set up for expired members with guest-like permissions).

You can customize the payment buttons and the rest of the payments page at Admin Panel -> Templates -> Manage Templates -> "Sponsor Purchase - Usergroup". You can set the price in the paypal button to whatever value you want, and that amount will be credited to the account on purchase, and deducted at the rate specified by your sponsorship settings. In other words, feel free to have people buy in $100 quantities even if you want to deduct at $1/day.

You'll find a link (to membersponsor.php) asking your members to sponsor has appeared at the bottom of pages. This is in your wrapper template.

Notes

To test paypal using paypal's sandbox, you need to set the $paypalsandbox tweak -- and remove it before going live.

For older, WSN 4.1.x and 5.0.x versions:

WSN allows you to integrate with PayPal, 2checkout or nochex to allow visitors to purchase promotion to a new usergroup that gives them extra powers. If you want all registrations to require payment, you can set "Require all registrations from non-admins to be sponsored?" to "yes" and set the reversion group to 1 (guests) at Admin -> Settings -> Sponsorship.

To set up usergroup sponsorship:

1) Create your sponsored usergroup at Admin Panel -> Members -> Manage Usergroups and give it the desired powers.

2) Go to Admin Panel -> Settings -> Sponsorship. Select your desired payment processor and input details. Select to activate member usergroup promotion sponsorships. For "Sponsor Usergroup #:" type the number of the usergroup you want sponsors to be in (that you created in step 1 -- the manage usergroups page shows the group number at the top), and for "Revert to this usergroup #" you'll probably want to type 2 (which is the regular member usergroup) or 1 (which is guests, not having any member powers). If you want multiple levels of sponsorship you can type multiple numbers in these boxes separated by commas -- be sure to specify every level on every applicable line, including the reversion groups.

3) Still in sponsorship settings, set the "Incremental Fee" you wish to charge people for maintaining their position in the sponsored usergroup. This amount will be deducted from the member's funds each day if you've kept "Deduct the incremental fee every ___ days" set to 1. If you wish to make a one-time sponsorship which never expires you can set the deduction to be every 9999 days or every 0 days.

4) If using 2checkout, login to your 2checkout account and create a new product. Set the price to be the same as the price you set on your sponsorship settings page. Set the approved url for the product to be http://yoursite.com/wsnlinks/2checkout.php

5) In your sponsorship settings set the item number to be the number of the product you created in 2checkout, or to an item number you are not already using for something else in PayPal (use 1 if you're not already selling any other products).

6) You can customize the payment buttons and the rest of the payments page at Admin Panel -> Templates -> Manage Templates -> "Sponsor Purchase - Usergroup". You can set the price in the paypal button to whatever value you want, and that amount will be credited to the account on purchase, and deducted at the rate specified by your sponsorship settings. In other words, feel free to have people buy in $100 quantities even if you want to deduct at $1/day.

7) If you want to require all registrations to be sponsored, set "Require all registrations from non-admins to be sponsored?" to "yes" on your sponsorship settings page. If you want to have all listings submitted by these special members made special, set "Promote all links owned by member to a new listing type?" to the desired listing type.

8) You'll find a link (to membersponsor.php) asking your members to sponsor has appeared at the bottom of pages. This is in your wrapper template.

Notes

To test paypal using paypal's sandbox, you need to set the $paypalsandbox tweak -- and remove it before going live.