Importing Users

I have a few questions in regards to importing users.

What we are doing is switching our paid subscription site from a custom CMS to WordPress and using S2member for our membership plugin.
We have close 1000 paying subscribers and will need to import those into S2Member. When we make the switch and go live with the redesign (using WordPress and S2Member) we want it to be as seamless as possible for our members.
I’ve looked over your user importation tool and have a few questions.

1: Do all the relevant user fields have to be in the specific order described under the csv importation tool in the plugin?
eg. “ID”,”Username”,”Password”,”First Name”,”Last Name”,”Display Name”,”Email” …….in this exact order?

2: The CSV from our old site, instead of a password, a salt is listed. What will happen if I put that salt in the “password” column and import? Will WordPress (or S2Member) translate the salt automatically? Or would you advice going an alternate route?

3: If there isn’t a way to use the existing salt, is there a way to prompt the user to create a password on their first login to the new site?

I know these are tough questions, but I would really appreciate your input!

-thank you

Hi Cheryl.

1: Do all the relevant user fields have to be in the specific order described under the csv importation tool in the plugin?
eg. “ID”,”Username”,”Password”,”First Name”,”Last Name”,”Display Name”,”Email” …….in this exact order?

Yes, they have to be in that exact order, and without skipping any, even if you leave it empty.

2: The CSV from our old site, instead of a password, a salt is listed. What will happen if I put that salt in the “password” column and import? Will WordPress (or S2Member) translate the salt automatically? Or would you advice going an alternate route?

The salt will be the password then. You can use that if they’re all unique, and have the users update their profiles with a new one after logging in.

3: If there isn’t a way to use the existing salt, is there a way to prompt the user to create a password on their first login to the new site?

To login they’ll need a password in the first place. You can generate a temporal password for all and import that, but make sure they’re unique and not the same for everyone, for security reasons.

You can also just leave the password empty and then one will be generated by WP, the same as if you didn’t allow custom passwords on registration. But no emails will be sent to the users on importation, not even one with the generated password, so when you do it like this, you need the users to use the Lost Password page. /wp-login.php?action=lostpassword

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I hope that helps. :)

Thank you for the reply! Appreciate it very much!

No problem. :)