[TroyWolf]

How about this…

Create 2 Membership Levels:

1. Special Membership
2. Standard Membership

Configure the exact same content access for both.
“Special” will have a price of $0.00.
“Standard” will be a $15 annual subscription.

Have the current members sign up for “Special” membership. This gets them into the system, lets them pick their own username, and gives them access to member content.

Once they create their account, I can individually edit their account to:

1. Set “Access Start” date to March 1st, 2016
2. Change their Membership Level to “Standard”

What I’m not clear about is what happens when I set their Membership Level to “Standard”, but the system does not have an PayPal data for the member?

Once all members are in and converted, delete the “Special Membership” level.

[TroyWolf]

They are NOT in the WordPress system yet. I need to put them in WITHOUT charging them anything (because they are already current, paid members of the club). I need to be able to set their expiration date to March 1st, 2017. I need them to have the ability to renew anytime they want between now and then.

From the perspective of the Club, they will be renewing their annual membership. From the perspective of PayPal, they will be creating their initial annual subscription.

[TroyWolf]

The site is brand new. I installed WordPress, installed Simple Membership plugin (and a host of other plugins), and now I need to add people to the system.

You say:

Assuming that these members had already signed up via the Simple Membership plugin payment system.

This gets to the heart of my confusion. It is my understanding that if these people sign up via the plugin, and the only Membership I have is “Member” and it costs $15 (subscription), then they can’t sign up without getting charged $15….AND the day they sign up will become their renewal date.

Do you understand my concern? What do I do?

[TroyWolf]

I appreciate your response, @mbrsolution. Also nice to see that you do now offer a CSV import tool.

My problem (and my post) is not about how to import users, though. Let me start by explaining how a brand new system would work without any existing users…as I understand it.

I launch my website with 0 members. A new member joins, creates their PayPal Subscription, gets an email, follows the link to complete registration–filling out my registration form. The system will show this member’s Access Start date as the date they joined. My annual membership will expire in 1 year. (As I understand, Simple Membership will NOT send any reminder emails when the user gets close to expiration–this is a separate issue I’d like to discuss.) Following your documentation, I can configure it so expired members can still log in so they can go to my Renewal page.

Since I’m using a PayPal Subscription, you could argue the member does not need a reminder as their membership will auto-renew. True, but I think it’s more ethical to remind a member that their auto-renewal will occur in “5 days”, and they can cancel if they prefer.

That scenario sounds pretty good. It works. Now here’s my REAL situation. I’m starting with 100 existing members who are paid up through March 1st, 2017. I want them in the system today as paid members with an expiration date of March 1st, 2017. Ideally I want something to remind them to renew their membership. But remember, these members will never have created the PayPal Subscription. So how does “Renewal” work for these folks? Can the renewal button be to create the PayPal Subscription?

[TroyWolf]

I wanted to follow up here to help others with this same need. If you want an easy way to have blocks of content that show or hide based on “MEMBER” or “NON MEMBER”, you can add these handy shortcodes. This requires you to edit a PHP file.

Edit this file /wp-content/themes/<your theme>/functions.php

Add this to the file–the bottom of the file works fine:

add_shortcode('MEMBER','show_member_content');
function show_member_content($atts,$content = null){
    global $post;
    if (SwpmMemberUtils::is_member_logged_in()){
        return do_shortcode($content);
    }
    return '';
}

add_shortcode('NON_MEMBER','show_non_member_content');
function show_non_member_content($atts,$content){
    if (!SwpmMemberUtils::is_member_logged_in()){
        return do_shortcode($content);
    }
    return '';
}

Using these shortcodes, you could, for example, have a block of text on any page that does something like this:

[NON_MEMBER]JOIN TODAY![/NON_MEMBER]
[MEMBER]Thanks for being part of our community![/MEMBER]

The appropriate text will display depending on whether the member is logged in or not. I used this for example to have a blurb on my home page to encourage people to join. If they are already logged in, I replace that with a bit of text thanking them for being a member. I also use these shortcodes on my “Become a Member” page. If a member goes to this page, the page tells them they are already a member and gives an overview of membership benefits. Otherwise, they see the JOIN button, etc.

I would suggest that these shortcodes should be part of the Simple Membership plugin by default.

[TroyWolf]

If possible, I’d like followup to what @mbrsolution posted about checking with the developers.

My new site is getting ready to launch and I still have some near show-stopper issues to resolve. This is a more minor one, but I know the users will not understand why they add an avatar but it does not show up in the forum.

[TroyWolf]

I found a solution that works for me. I posted about it here:
https://simple-membership-plugin.com/forums/topic/menus-content-protection/#post-8012

Out of the box it can be used to show/hide based on whether the user is logged in or not. That fits most people’s need. If you want to show/hide based on specific member levels, you’d have to expand it as talked about in the post.

[TroyWolf]

@johnsentgeorge, the table names you posted don’t really help. You and I will need to take this offline to share details that you do not want to share in a public forum. That is why I provided my email address to you earlier: troy at troywolf dot com

In order to help you I will need at a minimum your definition of user data to import. The easiest way is to share your user data CSV. I can understand if you don’t want to share your real user data with me, and I don’t need your real data. I just need the same CSV structure (same fields) with at least 2 rows of data (real or fake) to play with.

If the fields are not obvious, I may need additional explanation of what WP fields you expect the CSV fields to map into. We can figure that out when I see your test CSV file.

On my own systems, I can install a fresh WP instance and install the SM plugin to test the import. If, however, we find that part of what you need imported depends on other plugins you are using, things will get a bit more complicated. We can worry about that if/when we have to.

Once I think I have an import solution that works, we will back up your database as a precaution, then run the real import against your system.

[TroyWolf]

I am at a client’s office today, so I can’t test this until this evening, but I want to understand what exactly the SM user import plugin does–which fields does it try to copy?

I remain confident that I can figure this out and import your users, but we’ll need to communicate quite a few details, and I’ll need access to your database. Just getting that access may require me to walk you through quite a bit–depending on your technical understanding of these things and the access you currently have. (Some folks don’t even have command-line access to their server.)

To do this safely, I’d like to copy your wordpress files and your database to create a duplicate of your system to test importing. This allows me to mess things up, then restore the database to try again. Once we are confident the result is exactly what you want, we can run the import in your real system.

I could share what we learn with SM to potentially help them develop a richer user import plugin.

[TroyWolf]

Hmmmm…I THINK you are wanting your membership specific profile fields to get copied from the WP user’s meta data. Is this what you are hoping for?

I have not tested much, but I believe you are correct–none of the custom user data get’s copied into your member’s profile. From a technical perspective, without actually looking at the nitty-gritty details, I assume it would be difficult to know how to properly map the fields. Somebody could create a fancy plugin that lets you list all the custom fields for a WP user, then one-by-one map them to a SM profile field where it makes sense. Then copy.

Unencumbered by facts, if WP user records support custom fields (meta), why doesn’t SM just store user profile data there in the first place? I’m sure there’s a good reason–as I said, I don’t really know WP under the covers.

Do I understand the problem correctly?

[TroyWolf]

AHA! Then you almost have your problem solved! SimpleMembership has a plugin that makes it super easy to turn your WordPress users into members in SimpleMembership! It’s a free plugin, too!

https://simple-membership-plugin.com/import-existing-wordpress-users-simple-membership-plugin/

This also means you have solved my user import problem. 🙂

[TroyWolf]

@johnsentgeorge, I just realized you referenced a plugin designed to do exactly what we want.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/import-users-from-csv-with-meta/

You say you had “limited success”. What was this issue? The author offers, “Ask anything in support forum, we try to give the best support”

[TroyWolf]

I am a PHP developer and very comfortable with MySQL (the database) and importing data from CSV. The only variable I am missing is familiarity with the WordPress tables and what tables must be touched to add a user. It may be as simple as a single users table, but it could be more complicated.

According to this article, it looks like 2 tables are involved:

wp_users
wp_usermeta

…and it may not even be necessary to create the wp_usermeta row up-front. Easy to test this.

If I knew anything about writing WordPress plugins, I’d create an “Import Users from CSV” plugin for all of us.

@johnsentgeorge, if you don’t figure out a solution, I am confident I can import your users. Email me at troy at troywolf dot com. I have about 100 users I’ll need to import for another project, so I want to figure this out anyway.

[TroyWolf]

@johnsentgeorge, you are not alone! I also want this feature or plugin. That CSV plugin should work, but it is overkill and still requires a good deal of technical skill to use. Importing users from a spreadsheet/csv is surely a relatively common need, and thus a market.

[TroyWolf]

Thanks, @mbrsolution! Installed, activated, and available in my controlpanel now.

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