S2Member Framework Setup Question

What do people do to set up a membership level for existing members? It is the one part of the set-up process I don’t fully understand from the wonderful videos and other set up documentation, simply because it is a topic which I didn’t see covered. Perhaps someone can point me to the right place if I’ve missed it or overlooked it.

I understand that level 0 is for “free” members and can be used with other resources to help people make the choice to sign up as a member or is a great place to hold onto people while they are resolving PayPal or other credit card issues which occasionally arise in the real world. I understand how to, and more importantly, why I should set up the other membership levels included in the framework (1, 2, 3, &4).

What I don’t understand fully enough to really plan it out well is what to do with my existing members? We had a membership site. We are upgrading our membership site and redesigning it. We weren’t using S2 previously but now we are going to use it.

So what happens to the historic memberships? They didn’t click any of those “user levels” that S2 PayPal buttons have created in my current set up, but they all of the existing members have current subscriptions via our merchant account and/or PayPal. So how do we deal with this scenario to get those folks access the protected content. I’m not understanding the payment process/registration process per membership user level enough to fully understand what I need to do.

Do I need to manually put these members in and create a separate level for them? Are they going to appear to S2 as if they were “free” (even though they are paying) and I’ll have to manually remove them if they discontinue their current subscription(s) at any time? I’d appreciate hearing suggestions and about the experiences of other people using S2Framework in similar setup scenarios.

Have an awesome day!

Hello-

When you set up S2Member levels, it creates a WordPress role for each level. Could you move all your existing paid members to that role through wp-admin/users.php ? I’m not sure what that will do to expiration dates (EOT). Probably leaves them blank.

S2Member Pro includes user export and import tools. Perhaps you could export all users, add EOT or other info in Excel, and re-import. There’s some documentation in the S2Member dashboard: from your WordPress admin dashboard, select S2Member > Import/Export > User/Member CSV Importation (/wp-admin/admin.php?page=ws-plugin–s2member-pro-import-export). One of the examples of import file headers includes this:

“ID”,”Username”,”Password”,”First Name”,”Last Name”,”Display Name”,”Email”,”Website”,”Level[0-9]+ or Role ID”,”Custom Capabilities”,”Registration Date ( mm/dd/yyyy )”,”First Payment Date ( mm/dd/yyyy )”,”Last Payment Date ( mm/dd/yyyy )”,”Auto-EOT Date ( mm/dd/yyyy )”,”Custom Value ( starts w/domain )”,”Paid Subscr. ID”,”Paid Subscr. Gateway”,”Custom Field ID #1″,”Custom Field Value #1″,”Custom Field ID #2″,”Custom Field Value #2″, …

Please back up your WP installation before trying these suggestions. I haven’t used the import tool myself.

Cheers-
Janet