WishList Migration Kit

We get many requests from folks wanting to switch their existing membership site from WishList to DAP, or from Amember to DAP, from Magic Member, YourMembers, eMember, Membergate, etc. We’ve honestly lost count of the number of migrations we’ve done over the years. And every single one of those users who switched to DAP, has been thrilled with DAP and has continued to stay with DAP ever since.

In almost all cases, they all wanted to switch their main “bread-and-butter” membership site over to DAP, because of many things that DAP does that the others don’t. Or maybe because their current membership plugin doesn’t let them do what they want to do, or because their developers stopped supporting it (or support is non-existent), or they’ve gone out of business, or simply because the plugins just don’t scale well for a large membership site, like DAP can.

Anyway, we decided to write a blog post about how to do that for those of you considering doing it yourself.

[NOTE] You don’t have to do this yourself – we can do the migration for you for a fee. See this link for details about purchasing our WishList-To-DAP Migration. [/NOTE]

1) Migrating “Free Members”

Moving free members over to DAP is very simple. Export your old members as a CSV (comma-separated) file containing just email, first name and last name(optional) in the following order:

Email,FirstName,LastName

Lastname is optional. No spaces before or after the comma’s.

And then import them on the “Users > Add” screen.

You can read more about importing users into DAP in this post.

2) Migrating “Paying Members” With Current Subscriptions

This is a bit trickier than migrating just free members. You not only have to import existing member information, but you also need to migrate over their existing subscriptions to point to DAP.

How this is done, primarily depends on what payment processor you were already using, and wish to continue to use while making sure all new incoming subscription payments get processed by DAP.

But before you migrate over their existing subscriptions, you have to import all of them first using DAP’s “Users > Add” screen, which allows you to import multiple users into a Product, while also marking them as “Paid”.

Before you do the import, be sure to empty both the “Double Optin” and “Thank-you” email subject and body on the Product page, because you don’t want DAP sending out any double-optin or thank-you emails to the members you are about to import. We can send them a broadcast email at a later point, when we’ve fully set them up correctly in the system.

Then once you’ve imported them all, you can modify each of their records quickly to modify their start and end dates, to sync with wherever they were in your previous WL site.

Then once you have all of their dates set up, all that remains is to integrate DAP with your payment processor, such that both payments from both new members as well existing members, all get processed by DAP, so that DAP continue to manage their subscriptions, and start giving them access to the member’s area, going forward.

Paypal Integration

Your current WishList subscriptions are probably already pointing to a WishList specific “virtual” URL. Unfortunately, Paypal will not allow you to modify the IPN url in existing “stored” subscriptions that are current.

So you will need to put in a new rule into your .htaccess file at the root of your web site, to simply redirect all incoming IPN notifications (that come to your WL virtual URL) to DAP’s Paypal-specific file on your site, which is http://YourSite.com/dap/dap-paypal.php

Here’s the exact line of text to place within your .htaccess file that’s in your root…

RewriteRule ^index.php/register/pgiotv$ /dap/dap-paypal.php [L]

Be sure to replace the text “index.php/register/pgiotv$” by the IPN URL given to you by wishlist.

Once this is done, DAP will start processing all future subscription payments from existing members.

3) IMPORTANT

Before you create any DAP Products and start protecting content within DAP, make sure you have disabled the Wishlist plugin. Also be sure to disable any other “content protection” plugins, like “Maintenance Mode”, and Cache plugins.