import users/members

Nothing? I’m dying here as it doesn’t look like a straight import of a csv file into the database will work…will it?

What format is your member list in?

I’ve got it in Excel right now, can do anything with it. I was just looking at the db table for subscribe2 and noticed that it’s just ID/Email/Active so I’m certain I can manage that import. I was hoping to import the list as actual site members as well, did you have a suggestion?

It won’t be easy. Try changing the spreadsheet so it has the same columns as the wp_users table, then export as CSV and import that through phpmyadmin.

bloom, I saw your post before, but what you try to do is far from trivial and you did not describe your data either. Could you elaborate on “import his 1,000 entry mailing list into WP and make them site members”? It was never clear to me…

In principle, if you want to shift mailing list archives onto WordPress, consider conversion tools like MHonArc, which pre-process the raw text-formatted archives that mailman, for example, makes readily available. If you want an importer for such a rare type of migration, you will need to write it yourself and hopefully share it with the world.

Well, this is what I’ve been thinking. I have enough of the user information (first/last, email) to make up the rest. I can create a username from the email address and via Excel I can establish a random-ish 32 char numeric password for each user. I can populate the remaining data and do a .csv import using phpMyAdmin. The users would have to retrieve their password but we could send an email out to all of them with instructions on how to do that.

The problem is that I am not sure if WP will successfully decrypt a pseudo encrypted password field, and I can’t possibly manually enter all of these users ??

It sounds like what you need is a freelancer to hire — somebody who does not mind doing some data entry for a low cost. The job sounds very mechanical and I can’t think of any easy way of handling this other than a dual-head display with multiple text editor windows on one side (or a spreadsheet) and WordPress on the other.

Option 2: You could code something (or re-use) to have a password generator and dump a clean tab-delimited list of users to add. You could then write a PHP importer to parse the file or simply edit the MySQL data files directly, then restore (upload) it.

Someone on the WP Pro mailing list might be willing to write an importer for you. It should be trivial to iterate over a CSV file containing names and emails, construct user names, assign passwords to be the same as the email address, and populate the wp_users and wp_usermeta table.

I think what I’m going to do is simply import the user data into the subscribe2 table and send out a mailing that tells them all about the new site features. Then we’ll let people sign up by choice, not by default. We’ll also have multiple ways to contact users and we can offer cool tool incentives to become a site member, like the privatenotes plugin and whatever else you as a community come up with that will appeal to the target audience. Thanks for all the responses!

Was there ever a solution to this?