My palz Mikhail and Luke over at Blogs@Baruch needed an easier way to add users to sites in the WordPress network. They’d been using DDImportUsers, which worked, but was finicky: DDIU required you to specify too much information, its formatting was tough for instructors to understand, and, most importantly, it didn’t deal well with existing accounts, which it simply ignored instead of adding as new users to the site in question. So they asked me to modify the plugin for their purposes.
The result is a near-complete rewrite, released today under the name Simple Import Users. Instead of entering all sorts of information about username, password, display names, etc, Simple Import Users accepts only a single argument: email address. That makes it simple enough for anyone to use. Insert a list of email addresses into Simple Import Users, and it checks each email address in the following way:
- If a WP user is *not* found with the email address in question, SIU creates a new user with that address. The username is automatically generated from the part of the email address before the @-sign, which means that this plugin will probably work best for those setups where you can guarantee unique email prefixes (like schools). Passwords are randomly generated.
- Then the new user (or the existing user, if one was found) is added to the blog.
- The user is then sent a customized welcome email. All users get a message saying that they’ve been added to the blog, with information on how to access the dashboard. In the case of new users, it contains their login info as well.
- If you’re running BuddyPress, the email to new users also contains a message encouraging users to fill out their BP profiles, with a link to the Edit Profile page.
The plugin has no settings, and is intended for this very specific purpose. But if you’ve got a setup like Blogs@Baruch, it could save you a lot of time and effort.
Get the Simple Import Users here.
Oh, I really needed this plugin, thanks!! 🙂
I made it with you in mind, Jana!
Not really, but I hope it’s useful 😀
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I’ve got a vbulletin/wpmu bridged site with 30k+ members, 284k posts, that I have been absolutely dreading when I think about moving it to the new bp-bbpress plugin.
Because I started out using vb my usernames vary, some use email addresses, some use first/last name with a space, and some are ‘normal’. I had a quick mod built to allow wp to allow all these cases for usernames and it works great.
How hard it would be to modify the plugin to allow a second argument ‘username’ to be used, so that the user does not have to change their name, but will still receive the new welcome email with new pass etc?
I’m guessing it may just be easiest to pay to have a custom importer built as I have to bring over the posts and pm’s anyhow.
–will be interesting to see if the new bbpress plugin can even handle that many forum posts. I’ve heard wp has major issues with sites utilizing a ton of pages. (hope plugin uses posts and not pages)
Who knows, it may be a good testing sql for JJJ to work with when stress testing the new plugin. I suppose I will see when the time comes.
shawn – It’d be easy to modify to support a username. Actually, it’s already built; that was the previous version I built for the Baruch folks. Download it from here: http://teleogistic.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/import-users-deluxe.php_.txt
Like you said, though, it might be better to get a custom importer if you want to import a lot of content. And wow, that sounds like a *lot* of content. I have no experience with that kind of size, so I’m not sure whether BP will choke. It’ll be a real stress test!
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This is a very good plugin but I guess it will mostly helpful for big blogs.
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This looks really close to what I need, but not quite. I teach high school and my students create portfolios for their design projects. In the past I have had them do basic Dreamweaver sites and I could mass accounts on my Webserver using Webmin.
I can download class rosters and open in a spreadsheet and delete the columns of info I don’t need. I’d usually be left with First, Last, ID#, and DOB. Using a program called Passenger I could then create a all of the suer accounts for the Webserver and logins for Open Directory for the computer.
So, I have a CSV file with the usernames and passwords, but no e-mails. I have setup WP3.0 and BP and want to use that for the student portfolios, but the idea of creating 180+ accounts does not sound fun. I’d love to be able to create accounts w/o the e-mail, but username and password instead.
Happen to know of a plug-in that might do that? Or a way that I could easily collect student e-mails and have them put in a CSV with their username? Maybe some kind of form where they type their username and then e-mail and it gets dumped into one big CSV type file?
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I do notice one small bit of funny business in this program! The emails that new users receive say “your blogs@baruch account has been created.” Hard-coded in the plugin! I edited in my version, no problem, but maybe something more generic should be in the repository? I mean, much as we all love blogs@baruch… 🙂
Joe – I consider that funny business to be minimally funny, given that the readme did state that you’d have to manually change those values!
In any case, version 1.1 makes them customizable by the admin on every email send.
Joe, this is a great plugin. I was just wondering if it’s possible to get the username to be the email address and to stop it from cutting out everything after the @ sign.
Thank you.
Hi Boone, I am glad I found this plugin, as it describes what I would like to have in adding users in groups. I have uploaded the plugin, and sending out a test of several emails. The emails are being uploaded, but the Welcome emails are not being sent out. What might I be doing wrong? Maybe a specific setting in WordPress? I’m using 3.0. Any suggestions appreciated.
Norm – Are the users being created and added to the blog? Dashboard > Users
That’ll help to figure out whether it’s a problem with the email functions or with something earlier in the process.
Hi Boone, Thanks for the reply. Yes the names do get imported, as I can see them in the Users, as you noted.
Norm – are other emails getting sent out by your system? Try initiating a password reset, just to see if email is working more generally.
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