Moving a Multi-Author Blog Authors : Import-Export Users How do you move Wordpress users between blogs? That’s a tricky one. Wordpress doesn’t allow you to neatly import and export users so you need to result into some plugins and a bit of easy tweaking.

Ingredients :

  • Users to CSV is a useful plugin by Joost originally intended to start off your mailing list based on subscriber users or registered commenters, which you can consider if you’re into creating a newsletter for your blog (and you should). For me, this was helpful in exporting the userbase to a CSV file.
  • Import Users Plugin for WordPress is a small little plugin by Yoast that would allow you to import the users from a CSV. Though it does it job okay, I needed a slightly different thing, so I used a slightly modified version by Rodeworks.
  • A CSV editor. I simply used Excel 2007. Check this help page if you’re not sure how to import and export a CSV file with Excel (didn’t lookit up too long, you might be able to find something nicer).

What to do :

  • Activate the Users to CSV plugin and export your user base into a CSV.
  • Activate the Import Users plugin and go to the import page.
  • Open the exported CSV with a CSV editor.
  • Change the columns to fit the specifications on the import page.
  • Copy paste your adjusted CSV into the import page and import.
  • You’re done.

On some occasions, I’ve seen this need a bit of further role editing with the regular batch role assignment in the Wordpress admin console.

Hope that helps. If you know of anything simpler, I’m interested.