About: Fred Riley

As a follow-up query, our organisation’s current members will need to be imported into s2member, with their organisation ID, membership end date, and various custom fields.

1. Is there a way to import new users and specify the ID number? For instance:

1234,"harryhamster",,"Harry","Hamster","Harry Hamster","harry.hamster@rodents.com","http://www.rodents.com/hamster","subscriber",,"04/01/2013",,,,,,,"1000 Rodent Road","Rodentsville","Rodent City","Elbonia",,10002,"IND","bc2 3de"

where the first value 1234 is the organisational membership ID. I think that the answer to this is no, going by the s2member import documentation, in that either you have to have an automatically-generated user ID in WordPress, or an existing record with that user ID. Which would be a minor pain as then we’d have two IDs per user – one for the WP database, one their organisational ID – so I might have to manually edit the ID numbers in WP.

2. When I import these users, WP will set the registration date to the date of import, but of course each will have paid their annual fee before this time. I will need to store the membership expiry dates such that the user/member will be prompted to renew a month before expiry. Do I need to set the “Automatic EOT Time:” for this, and if so how can I set up automatic renewal prompts with links to Paypal?

3. Are there examples in the Codex or Forum of other web administrators who’ve had to import existing members and how they’ve gone about it?

I hope the above makes sense, and doesn’t tax your patience. If I were starting up a membership site from scratch then there’d not be these complications, but I need to ensure a trouble-free transition for our members to the new membership site and that could be tricky.

Cheers

Fred

Thanks for the replies, Cristián. After a few days break in the hills, I’ve come back to this problem and it’s still a problem. I decided to go ‘back to basics’ and simply export a CSV from s2member and try to reimport it, following the tip on the Import (or Mass Update) Users page:

Do not fear. If you have any trouble, please perform an export first using s2Member® Pro. s2Member’s export files are already formatted for easy re-importation. In other words, you can use them as a guideline for building your own import files.

I created a test user ‘harryhamster’ using s2member => Add a Member, to add to the existing admin user. So the exported CSV looks like:

ID;Username;Password;First Name;Last Name;Display Name;Email;Website;Role;Custom Capabilities;Registration Date;First Payment Date;Last Payment Date;Auto-EOT Date;Custom Value;Paid Subscr. ID;Paid Subscr. Gateway;address_1;address_2;city;country;county;eurocall_id;id_type;postcode
1;admin;;Fred;Riley;admin;fred.riley@gmail.com;http://www.fredriley.org.uk/;administrator;;03/24/2013;"a:2:{s:5:""level"";i:1364154108;s:6:""level4"";i:1364154108;}";;;;;paypal;12 My Road;My district;My city;UK;My county;1000;IND;ab1 2cd
231;harryhamster;;Harry;Hamster;Harry Hamster;harry.hamster@rodents.com;http://www.harryhamster.org;subscriber;;03/31/2013;;;;;;;1 Rodent Road;Hamstertown;Rodentsville;Albania;Notts;1001;IND;AB1 2CD

I then try to reimport this file, unedited, and get the results:

Line #1. User ID# ID;Username;Password;First Name;Last Name;Display Name;Email;Website;Role;Custom Capabilities;Registration Date;First Payment Date;Last Payment Date;Auto-EOT Date;Custom Value;Paid Subscr. ID;Paid Subscr. Gateway;address_1;address_2;city;country;county;eurocall_id;id_type;postcode does NOT belong to an existing User.
Line #2. User ID# 1;admin;;Fred;Riley;admin;fred.riley@gmail.com;http://www.fredriley.org.uk/;administrator;;03/24/2013;"a:2:{s:5:""level"";i:1364154108;s:6:""level4"";i:1364154108;}";;;;;paypal;12 My Road;My district;My city;UK;My county;1000;IND;ab1 2cd does NOT belong to an existing User.
Line #3. User ID# 231;harryhamster;;Harry;Hamster;Harry Hamster;harry.hamster@rodents.com;http://www.harryhamster.org;subscriber;;03/31/2013;;;;;;;1 Rodent Road;Hamstertown;Rodentsville;Albania;Notts;1001;IND;AB1 2CD does NOT belong to an existing User.

When exporting, I chose the default CSV file preference for “easy re-importation”. Could you please advise as to why s2member is throwing these errors? This is now 6 hours on this particular problem on a test localhost server, so if it’s not possible to import CSV then I’ll cut my losses and enter all 300 or so users manually on the live online server.

Thanks for the pointers to the scripts, which I’ll try to look through carefully. If you get the time, could you please give me SQL examples of the UPDATE and INSERT queries that the import script generates? If not, I’ll throw some ‘echo’ statements in the code to see what comes out.

Fred

Thanks again, Raam. For the custom fields, I did set them to apply to all levels, but my error was to test the page with the shortcode whilst logged in as administrator. When I looked at the page in another browser where I wasn’t logged in, the custom fields displayed fine.

On the trial period thing, I think we’ll likely default to our current situation, which is that a subscriber pays a one-off annual fee and is prompted to renew before it expires, which currently our secretary does manually. Which brings me to a supplementary issue, that of reminding the member that their membership is due to expire and prompting her/him to renew. This is an important issue for our organisation. We don’t want to lock members into a recurring sub for various reasons, not least that it might put a good few people off joining, but we do want to encourage them to renew.

Looking at the thread “EOT event triggering” on the support forum, it appears that current s2member behaviour on a subscription expiring (EOT) is to just demote the member without notice, and that there’s no current facility for the member to receive an email a month, say, beforehand and encourage her to renew unless we write custom code for EOT hooks. Is that the case? I’m asking because I know that my colleagues will ask me the question, so I want to be prepared.

As an aside, I had a look at the PayPal API documentation on the developer site, and it’s pretty damned complex. I can really begin to appreciate the amount of work that’s gone into integrating s2member with PP – it’s not something I’d fancy doing myself even as an experienced coder. So, kudos to the s2member techs :)

Cheers

Fred

Thanks, Cristián, I thought that would be the case, hence my postings to the WP Codex, but I thought I’d best check just in case s2member had some hidden capabilities that would save me hunting through wp-plugins. I’ve already spent a few hours trying out various plugins and it’s been frog-kissing all the way :(

Cheers

Fred

Thanks again, Eduan. I’ll download the freebie and run it in a localhost WP installation to see what it does to the database, and of course I’ll watch the videos. I suppose my alarm comes from my database theory education, where I was told that it was very bad form indeed to have a multi-valued single field which is asking for update problems, and ever since all my DBs have only single-value fields. OTOH, if s2member has to work within the constraints of the WP database design then that might be an acceptable kludge.

Cheers

Fred