Going Live Elegantly With Membership

Good morning!

I've been testing for a while with Membership Pro on our staged web site and I'm planning on going live soon. I want to make the process as friendly as possible to our members, many of whom are not very computer-savvy.

We have three memberships that I need to import from our offline national database, as follows:
1. Individual (1 user)
2. Household (2 users, one primary)
3. Student

The steps as I see them for go live are as follows:
1. With the setting to email new Joomla! users turned OFF, import all Individual, Primary Household and Student memberships & usernames for whom we have an email address on file
2. Go in to all the Household memberships and add the second member by hand (I think this may be about 50-100)
3. Verify renewal via paypal is working using my own membership renewal.
4. Turn back on the new Joomla! user notification.
5. Send an email out to our membership list announcing the site/renew on line, and sending them instructions on how to log in.

I welcome comments from anyone else who has rolled out Membership Pro via importing an existing list. I had wanted to import all members so that anyone (mostly expired) who does not have an email address on file would be able to have their member data recognized on signup, but I'm not sure that's feasible since the import requires email addresses, and the user association probably uses email address to recognize existing members.

Thanks in advance!

Hello

Just comment from me as the developer of the extension. Your process is OK to me, except:

- About users without email address: The system will requires an email, so for those users, somehow, you will need to create a fake email address for them so that they could be imported

- About Household subscription plan: I don't know how you handle this? Are you using group membership feature? Or you still add the second member as a subscriber of the plan? If so, how the two members are connected as a group?

Tuan

I read through the documentation on Group Memberships and set up the Household Membership as a group membership, yes.

Then it's good. For your information, group members can be imported, too. But it needs to be in a separate step (after the main member / group admin) has imported

Basically, group members can be imported in the same way with standard subscriptions import. The only difference is that it needs an extra column called group_admin_id . That column needs to store User ID (it's Joomla user ID) of the group admin. You can go to Users -> Manage, enter username/email of group admin to get his Joomla User ID

Maybe import will be easier and faster for you than entering these group members manually

Regards,

Tuan

That's good news, but still very manual, since I would have to visit every primary household member to get the primary household member's user id (as an aside, most of the primary members are "she/her" in this organization) -- is that maybe in the export?

It's also not clear from what you say here where I would add the group_id column to the Additional Member Import File Layout and whether or not to include all the other columns previously imported.

I just did a successful test run with all the Household, Individual and Student members. It looks like I need to add usernames to create the USERID.

I am ready to move forward with this when you can clarify (1) where in the layout sequence the group_admin_id field should be added and (2) whether or not the plan columns should be blank, since there is one plan for two users and this load is not for adding a plan.

Hello

1. group_admin_id needs to be a column (like other columns such as plan, first_name, last_name)

2. plan should still be included as standard subscriptions import

Tuan

Does the sequence of the fields not matter?

No, it does not.