Any updates on this? I have a 3K user Ning network that wants to switch. Lots of data too. Anything I could do to help out..?
Unfortunately, the further you get from the Ning fiasco, the less people have been interested in conversion to wordpress.
I was able to use ning to buddypress plugin from WPMU DEV:
http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/ning-to-buddypress-user-importer/
I was not super happy with it, but I got most of the stuff moved with it. My biggest problem was that it emailed all of the users when I ran it. I highly recommend editing the source to remove that stupid feature, because there was no way to turn it off. I see no scenario where I would want to email all users before I even know if it all works…
I don’t remember now if there were any other bumps, so I can’t give it a full recommendation, but it might be worth a try… and as I recall, it was the only option we found, and it got enough done to get by. We did this 8 months ago…
We didn’t use buddypress though. I am not sure if I installed it to convert and then uninstalled it, or if it just worked for all of the non-buddypress features (standard wordpress user info).
There was a post in the forum at wpmu dev about how to turn off the email feature.
Hope that helps…
Thanks! But what are the alternatives for not sending out email directly? (Which, I admit, is a very annoying “feature”..) Can you get hold of your new nick/login name some other way..?
We emailed manually in a mass email since the usernames had stayed the same. In that email, we asked the users to use the recover password feature to set a new password.
That password bit might not be ideal…
An alternative would be to run it on a test server without the email feature active or on a limited, test-set of users. Make sure you are happy with the results. Then run it on the new live site and let it email the users.
I mean. The email feature is a good feature, because it is the only way to give users a unique password on the new site. You can’t get them from Ning of course. It just should be something you turn on/off I think. Or, it probably would have been ideal as something you run after you successfully import and review the users.
