Hello,

I have a client who keeps a subscription list for a magazine that she publishes quarterly. She has been keeping it on Excel and from there forwards it to the fulfillment house. It is growing rapidly and she is looking for a better solution. She needs to be able to sort by subscription end date as well as by zip code.

Does anyone have a better solution or can you help steer me to a site where I might find a solution?

Thanks,

Leanne

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Hi Leanne,

Let me see if I can understand this well enough to give you a response.

The client maintains an Excel sheet which has information about the subscriber which includes the end date of the subscription and the zip code; both of which she needs in order to send out to the fulfillment house. Then she forwards this modified list to the fulfillment house which then sends out the magazine based on that list of who is entitled to receive it.

Is this so?

And you are trying to find a list for subscriptions to do what? Are you trying to find a way to automate some of that process?

Thanks,

Janine

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Yes, I'm trying to automate the process with software or some kind of a plug-in (Her website is on WordPress) that lets the subscriber enter information (including address changes) and then from which she can generate a report for the printer or fulfillment house. She also needs to send the first issue of most subscriptions manually because they are ordered during the gap between issues.

Thanks for any suggestions you might have.

Leanne

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Just for clarification, are you doing this?

1. Step One - new subscriber joins via WordPress Website
2. Step Two - manually exporting the list of member subscribers from the WordPress website or maintaining a spreadsheet where the new member subscriber's data is entered into the spreadsheet.
3. Step Three - sending the spreadsheet file to the fulfillment house.


My first thoughts are to find a WordPress plugin that would allow you to export users information. I did a quick search on the Internet and found this one ( http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-export-users/ ).* Keep in mind that I have never used this plugin before and I am not sure what it is that you are trying to accomplish.

If it were me, this is how I would approach it:

Step One: Create new WordPress with membership plugin

• Locate, research, read install guide/planning for a new wordpress plugin specifically designed to handle memberships
• Go to hosting account
• create subfolder under domain folder
• Go to the hosting account MyPHP or whatever interface they have to -create or administer the SQL DB and create a new SQL DB.

Step Two: Export/Migrate Data

• Go to the hosting account MyPHP or whatever interface they have to create or administer the SQL DB and export the sql data information for the live wordpress website.
• Then import the file into the new SQL DB
• Test the usage of the new WordPress site. This is now your new test platform, so that live users are not affected.

Step Three: Configure New Site

• Apply the new WP Plugin to new inactive site
• Install download manager
• export the user data
• upload the user data file to the website within the download manager
• create a user account for the fulfillment house
• create a private page for the fulfillment house (i.e. password protect the page to limit access only to specific account users...this will be easy since there is a feature within the membership system)
• post the link to the data file on that page
• Conduct a dry run-through by asking the fulfillment house to access the data file and run a "test only" job.

Step Four: Go Live

• spend time cleaning up my site and making any changes to the site previously delayed to include clearing dead members or cosmetic changes/enhancements
• announce to users a specific date or date range that there will be site maintenance. Note: this will be your cut-over date typically over the weekend and even though it should only take a few minutes you should build in a few hours just to take a few minutes to test...pick a time that if things are going as planned that you allow time to roll back to the previous system as a back-up or fail safe.
• to go live simply go to the hosting account and point the domain name to the sub-folder where the new wordpress site is located. This way when the name resolves it will go to the new data location and not the old. It may happen within a few minutes or it make take hours for the domain name to resolve to the new place. It should be fairly quickly since it is on the same domain name server.

Step Five: Custom App for Export

• Locate a programmer (I suggest Odesk) or someone to create a custom app that would automatically export the user data file from the sql DB and save that file on the fulfillment house data page. I would create it so that a specific date of the month the query would run (let's say the 5th of every month) so that human intervention isn't required, however, I would always confirm that the file was posted.
• Back up the wordpress site
• have the programmer apply the changes and include in the price of purchasing the custom app support and maintenance or at the very least provide detailed documentation.

These steps are assuming that you host your own data.



*Here are some other plugins:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/...-users-to-csv/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/...-export-users/


I know that this is a long post. I hope this helps!

Thanks, PSI Girl, this is a great post. Since I posted I also found a subscriptions plugin
(http://www.subscriptiongenius.com/) which has a monthly fee, but didn't know how to test it.

Thanks again for your detailed help.

Leanne

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