How to migrate from Wishlist Member to MemberPress

Introduction

Migrating from one membership plugin to another is, and always has been, a giant pain in the nads.

But if you have a step by step tutorial to guide you, it’s not quite so bad. (Or, you can just hire us to do it for you).

In this post you’ll learn how to switch your membership site away from Wishlist Member to the MemberPress plugin.

What you will need

1 – MemberPress Plugin

2 – MemberPress Installer Addon

3 – WishList Member (for the source of export)

4 – Application Passwords Plugin

Exporting Members CSV from WishList Members

1 – Go to WishList Member -> Members:

2 – We need to export a certain levels of members.

For this go to the Export Tab and Select Membership Levels.

Make sure to tick all of the checkboxes:

3 – Once you’ve done this, click the button Export Members at the top of the screen.

This will generate a CSV file that you can download which contains member data for the members currently listed:

4 – Save the CSV files, you will need them in the next steps.

A note about WordPress Users and members

Some membership plugins—most notably, Digital Access Pass—keep a user database which is separate from the WordPress user database (although they allow you to sync the two).

MemberPress, however, simply uses the existing WordPress user database.

You can find a list of all users in the WordPress Dashboard > Users section.

The only difference between a “user” and a “member” is that a member is simply a user who has a membership level assigned to him.

Install MemberPress plugin and MemberPress Importer Plugin

The MemberPress importer is a powerful tool that allows you to import important data into your system.

The most common uses for the importer is to add users and their subscriptions into MemberPress from a previous membership solution.

1 – Download the .zip file from your MemberPress account area and install / activate it.

2 – You will see a new option after the MemberPress Importer Plugin is installed:

Recreate Memberships in MemberPress from ThriveCart

If you use ThriveCart to sell products—as we do here at MemberFix—you can use the instructions described below.

If you use another shopping cart app, the process will look similar to this ThriveCart process.

Of course, if you have any questions for your particular situation, just leave a comment below and we’ll help out. 🙂

Note: This step is necessary if you will use MemberPress to sell products. If you plan to use ThriveCart, the integration of ThriveCart with MemberPress will be described at the end of the article.

1 – Go to ThriveCart Product Settings:

Here you can find the product information you’ll need to create your membership levels in MemberPress.

For example, let’s look at the Gold Product:

2 – Go to MemberPress Memberships:

3 – And click Add New button and fill in all of the membership information and terms:

4 – Repeat this process for all of your products:

Note: if your ThriveCart products are all simply different price points of one membership which protects all the same content, you can use a single membership level in MemberPress.

Configuring the Payments Gateway

The “Payments” tab in the MemberPress options is where you can specify which payment gateways your users can pay with.

MemberPress currently supports three of the biggest payment gateways:

A) PayPal

B) Authorize.net

C) Stripe

1 – To add a gateway, simply click the + button at the bottom of the page.

Each gateway has its own options that must be configured to connect it with your account.

For example I will set Stripe as my Gateway.

2 – Click the plus button and select the gateway “Stripe”:

3 – Name it whatever you want.  

This is the name that your users will see when they go to select how to pay.

4 – Go your Stripe dashboard to obtain the necessary keys: test secret key, test publishable key, live secret key, and/or live publishable key.

In Stripe, navigate to API on the left hand menu:

5 – Copy and paste the keys to your MemberPress settings.

6 – Copy your “Stripe Webhook URL” from your MemberPress setup page.

7 – Navigate back to your API settings in Stripe:

8 – Select Webhooks.Select “+ Add endpoint” and paste your unique Webhook into the settings.

Make sure to select the correct Live or Test events, that you are on the latest Webhook version, and that you have it set to send all event types.

9 – Update / save all settings.

Creating your CSV Files

With the MemberPress Importer installed you will be ready to start creating your first CSV files to import your data.

CSV stands for, “comma separated values,” which is a very common format used by Spreadsheets.

You can create a standard spreadsheet in Excel, Numbers, Open Office, or Google Sheets and then export a CSV file.

Note: The CSV should be in Windows CSV Format. If you’re using a Mac or some spreadsheet software that is not Microsoft Excel, then you may need to do a “save as” and choose a Windows or Microsoft compatible CSV option. You can also use Google Sheets for this.

All of the importers require their own unique data items to be present in the CSV file, but they will all follow a couple of common conventions:

A) Each CSV file must have a header row (first row of the file) which contains the name of the field.

Everything in the column under the first row will be flagged as being a value for the field defined in the header.

B) The columns of the CSV file don’t need to be in any set order.

The data fields are determined not by order but by the header name.

This file format is the most important thing when it comes to using our importer.

Do NOT think that you will be able to simply export a CSV file from somewhere and then import it directly.

That will NOT work.

1 – Go to MemberPress Subscriptions:

2 – And create test Subscription (The user for this subscription must be a real user from your Users list but you can create that user specifically for testing purposes):

3 – Now you can export the CSV file in the right format:

4 – Open this CSV file (for better visualization I’m using Airtable):

5 – Choose Import a spreadsheet and choose your CSV file:

You will see something like this:

==> Download Our Sample Subscriptions CSV

Migrating or Importing Users and User Data

The following are the only reasons why you should import a Users CSV file:

A) To import users who are not already on your WordPress site. 

MemberPress does not create a separate database of “users”. 

It simply adds people to the existing WordPress User database.

So if the user can be found in your WordPress Dashboard > Users section, they’re already in there and don’t need to be added in again.

They just need to have a subscription associated with them so that MemberPress knows what kind of member they are.

B) To update user info for users currently existing on your site.

Just make sure that you enter the username and email correctly to properly update a user profile.

Important Note: Importing a User CSV file will NOT and CANNOT associate the user with any memberships in MemberPress. To do that you’ll need to create either a single transactions CSV file for one-time subscriptions, or both a subscription and a transaction CSV file in that order.

Please be extremely careful to follow the formatting listed below EXACTLY. Failing to do so EXACTLY will result in your file failing to import correctly.

Click here for a sample Users CSV file. With that as your basic template, please see below for the required and optional columns of your CSV file.

Required Columns:

• username — This is the User’s user_login / username field. This is just a small text
• email — This is the User’s user_email. This must be a properly formatted email or the record could fail

Optional Columns:

• role — This is the WordPress user role. Can be ‘subscriber’, ‘contributor’, ‘author’, ‘editor’ or ‘administrator’. Defaults to ‘subscriber,’ even if you don’t specify otherwise with this column header.
• password — Allows you to set the users password. This password will be encrypted/hashed and stored in the database.
• first_name — First name of the user. Can be any small string of text. Defaults to blank.
• last_name — Last name of the user. Can be any small string of text. Defaults to blank.
• website — Website for the user. Can be any small string of text. Defaults to blank.
• address1 — Address Line 1 for user. Can be any small string of text. Defaults to blank.
• address2 — Address Line 2 for user. Can be any small string of text. Defaults to blank.
• city– City for user. Can be any small string of text. Defaults to blank.
• state — State for the user. Can be any small string of text. Defaults to blank.
• zip — Zip Code for the user. Can be any valid zip code string. Defaults to blank.
• country — Country for the user. Can be any small string of text. Defaults to blank.
• *usermeta* — Use the slugs for the Custom User Information Fields you created in the options here to import custom meta for your members. Please see our additional instructions for these field types below.
• registered — The registration date of the user. Must be in format “YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss”. Defaults to the current time during import.

Again, if the username of the user already exists in the system then the user record will be updated with the information in the CSV file associated with the username.

1 – Go to Members and Export table as CSV:

2 – And Import Members CSV to Airtable:

Creating and Importing Subscriptions CSV file

All you need to do is copy data from Members CSV to Subscriptions CSV, but in the right columns:

For example:

And Export this file in CSV format:

1 – Go to the MemberPress Importer and Upload this CSV:

2 – Go to Subscriptions:

Creating Rules

Now you can create the rules you need in MemberPress to protect content for the appropriate members.

1 – Go to Rules and Add New:

2 – Configure the conditions that you want for access. For example:

3 – Obviously, you’ll want to recreate your Wishlist member content protection rules. 

To make this super easy I’ve created a tag-based method and explain it in this video:

If you’re comfortable using MemberPress’s default rules options, feel free to do that too.

The method outlined in the video above is simply my preference as it makes content protection easier to administer for the end user.

MemberPress to ThriveCart Integration setup

1 – Go to ThriveCart Settings -> View Integrations -> Membership Platforms -> MemberPress:

2 – Fill up the form with your data:

3 – For Application Password, go to your website and install Application Passwords Plugin:

4 – Go to your Account (make sure you’re logged in as the site administrator) and create a password:

Testing

Before deactivating WishList Member test everything.

The best option is to use 2 plugins at the same time for a few weeks. 

It shouldn’t create any conflicts if your members have the appropriate content access rights within BOTH plugins.

In conclusion

Remember, if you have existing subscriptions for real customers make sure you understand everything clearly above prior to taking action.

Failure to take the proper steps outlined above could result in your customers being unable to be billed going forward or losing access to your membership.

If you’d rather delegate this project to us, sign up for a MemberFix plan and we’ll get going. 🙂

If you have any questions please ask them in comments.

If you will have some troubles, please, write into the comment and we will help you.