Tried to migrate to aMember 4.2.5 from aMember 3.2.3 - rolled back

We have been planning for a long time to migrate to aMember 4 and we expected issues like needing to change somethings manually, reprotecting content that had previously been protected with AMProtect, etc.

But I was REALLY dismayed to see these issues, and I'm really hoping it was something we've done wrong:

1. Affiliate ids changed - this is a deal breaker - an unforgivable. I'm hoping we did something wrong on the import of data to the new data structure. We followed your import instructions. Did anyone else experience this?
2. Product signup forms have to be created for each product instead of creating product URLs (is this true?) And does that mean product links will have changed completely? We have 94 products now and add 10-15 each week.
3. (possibly - couldn't confirm this yet) Affiliate banner / id links will be different because of the product URL changes
4. Active subscriptions didn't show up live in the sidebar as before (maybe a widget that we have to implement...)

Any help, experience, ideas?

Thanks

David

This is the answer from support on these migration questions. Truthfully, I never thought to ask if the affiliate ids or the member ids would change since that just seemed impossible to me.

The only reason I'm posting this response here is so you know exactly what you're getting into with an upgrade. It is fundamentally a different application from the member and affiliate id standpoint. If you have 100s of affiliates or just a few, and you rely on them, this will wreck your business.

Now, I'm still putting aMember 4 on my other sites. I love it. But man, the upgrade is a real issue.

dp

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thanks Alex - that's good news.

#4 was actually an AMProtect function I think where it showed the active subscriptions in the sidebar on the blog. Not an issue - I realize that's not in your scope.

Looking forward to the compatibility route. Got an ETA?

I upgraded one of my sites (> 3000 users) and successfully kept the user ids (and so, affiliate id etc) the same. The secret is to ensure you have no gaps in your old aMember 3 member table.

If you have never deleted any users, the upgrade will work just fine and all users will keep their original ID.

If you have ever deleted any users, you will need to go through your amember3 user table and 'fill in the gaps' - here's how I did it.

NB: Always make a BACKUP of your aMember files and database before doing anything.

1) I used a spreadsheet to create a batch of SQL statements which inserted a dummy record if none already existed and then pasted these commands into the table via phpMyAdmin. Each statement looks something like this:

Code:

INSERT IGNORE INTO amember_members (member_id, login) VALUES ('1', 'FILLERDELETE-1');

See the attached spreadsheet file for example of how to create a statement for each id in your member table, up to the maximum number of members in your table.

2) I then ran the following SQL command to ensure the members were in member_id order.

Code:

ALTER TABLE  `amember_members` ORDER BY  `member_id`

3) I then ran the import to aMember v4 and double checked that the users had indeed kept the same id

Hint: doing a test import to a separate install of aMember 4 rather than overwriting your original files right away is strongly advised ;-)

4) When all was complete, I browsed aMember 4 admin for all users starting with FILLERDELETE and then deleted them.

Hope this gets you pointed in the right direction

Cheers
Rob

Ps - You can use a similar process for your amember_product table if keeping the same product ids is also critical.

Pps - Always ensure you have a BACKUP of your database and files before messing about as described above. The instructions are provided for guidance only and you are totally responsible if you use them.

Has there been a fix to #1? Keeping the same user and affiliate ID's? This is still a HUGE non-starter for us.

Or, can someone please advise how to modify the AdminImport3Controller.php to force the same ID's to carry over from v3 to v4?

What does that mean? Is there a table that maps old ID's to new ID's if the affiliate link is formated am v3 style?

This is kinda a big deal for a client of mine. Their affiliates know their user/affiliate ID like they know their social security #. I can see the support tickets now of affiliates sending offers to someone else's ID by mistake.

Are you sure there isn't a tweak we can do in the import script that preserves the ID?

Thanks,
Gary

Hey... sorry, just found the answer to my question. Looks like you can click a checkbox to retain ID's during the admin-import3 process.

Just to tag onto this and clarify, we should not have to do the "work around" that ROBW stated above to retain members ID and Product ID association as we can retain the old user_id and product_id currently in the database. Is that statement correct? I am going to be working on a test import this weekend and possibly full migration.