Kyle

Thanks for the quick response!

I missed that option in the docs but that should work!

We tested without any other plugins so it was not a plugin conflict. We ended up modifying the plugin to enqueue jQuery in the recommended way. That solved the issue as jQuery was not being used on any other part of the website.

Cheers!
– Kyle

Thanks, I am aware of the downsides and best practice’s of change the ID’s of an auto incrementing table.

For option 2 what are the hooks for using the source_original_id?

The documentation tab in the plugin did not make any mention of hooks provided by the plugin. Where can these be found? I ended up writing a quick plugin to import user with the correct user ID’s but would have loved to use a simple hook.

I think it would be a good Idea to inform potential that users that the plugin will reindex the user table and can/DOES break basic website functionality. This can prevent irreversible damage to sites and prevent headaches. Also, after reading a few reviews it seems that others have had the same issue. Like others have said, the first thing i did was read the documentation and I could not find the info I was looking for. A quick update to messaging would help the plugin a lot!

Also, to answer your first comment, despite the wp_users table being auto incremented you can manually force ID’s.

I have not had time to test and it has been a while since i’ve needed to do anything like this but I would look into two (2) things:

#1) wp_insert_user(). This function accepts an ID but I do not remember if it will use the ID when creating a new user (if unable to update).

#2) global $wpdb->insert(). I recall this can cause all kinds of issues if not done correctly. but you should be able to insert into the users and usermeta tables. Something like:

global $wpdb;

// User ID to use
$user_id = 3;

// Insert the user into wp_users
$wpdb->insert(
	$wpdb->prefix . 'users',
	array(
		'ID' => $user_id,
		'user_login' => '[email protected]',
	)
);

// Set the wp_usermeta with the custom user ID
$wpdb->insert(
	$wpdb->prefix . 'usermeta',
	array(
		'user_id' => $user_id,
		'meta_key' => 'user_custom_description',
		'meta_value' => 'custom description',
	)
);

There is some samples in the docs that do almost this exact thing:
https://developer.www.ads-software.com/reference/classes/wpdb/insert/

Thanks for the quick responses. I am not referring to the usermeta table but user data stored in the postmeta table.

After doing some testing I can confirm that reindexing the user table does break page/post meta data.

An example:

Over time our website has had new users added and other users removed. We are left with three (3) users on the website

ID: 1 – [email protected]
ID: 3 – [email protected]
ID: 5 – [email protected]

We have a post that has a custom field called ‘user_field’ (VIA ACF). This ‘user_field’ stores the ID of the user.

The value of ‘user_field’ is set to 3.

As seen above list of users, the user with the ID 3 is [email protected]

Now we need to setup a new website or a staging environment so we export this post using the native wordpress exporter/importer.

The new website is setup and the post is imported correctly with ‘user_field’ still set to 3.

Now we need to import our users. We export the users with the plugin however, when we import the users to the new website the user table gets reindexed. This now means that our 3 users now look like this:

ID: 1 – [email protected]
ID: 2 – [email protected]
ID: 3 – [email protected]

So now, on our new website when we retrieve the value of our ‘user_field’ using WP’s get_post_meta($post_id, ‘user_field’) or ACF’s get_field(‘user_field’, $post_id)) our value is still 3 (as expected), but the user with the ID 3 is [email protected] and not [email protected] like it should be.

—

The sample above is just a test situation, in our real production environment we are working with hundreds of users and thousands of posts.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 3 months ago by Kyle.

No Worries!

Sounds good and thanks for the quick response!

The CSV was created?via the plugin on a live site and imported into a development version of the same site.

Reindexing Users is not safe to do. Any post or page that has a user assigned in the post meta will no longer be linked correctly. It also breaks plugins that use user IDs for identifying/managing capabilities and roles.

A good example of a plugin that stores the user id is ACF:
https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/resources/user/

• This reply was modified 1 year, 3 months ago by Kyle.

Import and export users and customers
Version 1.23.5

WP 6.4.1
CENT OS
Plesk Obsidian 18.0.54
PHP 8.2

Cheers,

It Works like a Charm, Thanks a bunch!!