public Members Directory and custom fields

I have been holding off development of a members directory and collecting anything other than minimal information from my users for 9 months now, and can probably hold off just into the New Year. It is becoming pressing however to find a solution.

If I build something with AMR users and try and get it to ‘play nice’ with S2 Member it looks like something can be wrestled into place with a certain amount of effort ( see http://wpusersplugin.com/3086/user-lists-and-filtering-with-s2member-fields/ ).

I am unclear however if it is best to add custom fields to S2 member (ugly) or to AMR? Either way at such time as a hoped for upgrade to S2 Member might arrive supporting public members directories (and custom fields that are not all mashed into one user-meta record), which approach is likely to present the easier migration path?

Either way doing anything ‘interim’ is likely to end up taking a lot of extra time – so I guess I am really asking if there are any tips on how to make it as smooth and fast as possible. Obviously should there be any Christmas cheer in the form of a beta release of S2Member on the way this would be fantastic!

Hi Laeon,

I’m not familiar with the details of such an integration, so unfortunately I don’t have any advice. You might try posting your question in the Community Forum to see if anyone else has done something similar. I also cannot speculate on a release date for the next major release, but I agree it would be nice to see a beta by Christmas! :) We can hope!

Hi Raam

The core question I have is about likely ease of migration. Thinking about it I would assume that if / when the custom fields are handled differently by S2Member that S2Member will likely offer a graceful upgrade path for customers who have custom data in the ‘old’ format… Indeed I might imagine that this is a time-consuming aspect delaying any beta, but hey, that would be idle speculation!

I am unclear however if it is best to add custom fields to S2 member (ugly) or to AMR? Either way at such time as a hoped for upgrade to S2 Member might arrive supporting public members directories (and custom fields that are not all mashed into one user-meta record), which approach is likely to present the easier migration path?

When we finally release a new format for the custom profile fields, there will be a way to upgrade from the current one in s2Member.

Also, the s2Member User Export/Import tools will be available and improved too. Moving the custom fields from s2Member to another system or the other way, should not be too hard if the other system (e.g. AMR) can import/export the data too.

Does that answer your question? :)

Thanks Christian – could not ask for more (apart from that beta release for Christmas!).

Great! :)