Customer Registration based on ID

I have a subscription site that I might work on with S2 Member. The current model is a print suscription where the subscribers received the newspaper and have a unique user ID. We want to offer them the online and also print version of the newspaper.

The issue is that we don’t have email addresses for many subscribers, so we want to create an easy registration process so the users can add their email. What we do have is a unique custom ID or 3-4 digit code in the subscriber database that is in excel.

I’m wondering if i can import the excel spreadsheet and then somehow create a new account registration based on the users finding their custom id on their print newspaper (the code is in near the address info). I’d like to have them register with that user number, but also only make that registration or customer ID used once and only allow one customer number per email.

I realize this might be some custom code, but do you know any of any users with a similar workflow for S2 and maybe any solutions or ideas you can offer on how to best handle the functionality that is required?

You could import the Users ahead of time with s2Member® Pro.
See: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› Import/Export -› User/Member Importation

When you do the import, you can just put in fake email addresses if you like, so the import will succeed. Maybe run them like this: user1@example.com, user2@example.com, etc. Same thing with Usernames perhaps (or maybe create Usernames that match up with the IDs you mentioned). Passwords will be generated automatically by s2Member, or you can specify what you like (either way is fine).

Once you’ve imported them, you could associate data with these accounts, such as a custom access token or whatever you’d like to call it. This would be a secret token for each of these Users, which grants access to the account via links you would distribute to these people.

So you might have a link like this: /?free_access_token=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Of course you will need a custom script that matches the access token to the actual WP User account so you can log them in, or provide any additional first-time access functionality (like requesting an email address or something). Anyway, just an idea :-)

See: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_set_auth_cookie
See: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/update_user_option
See also: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_user_option
See also: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_users
See also: Knowledge Base » Changing Roles/Capabilities via PHP