Connect your XenForo and WordPress Users Seamlessly With the New Bulk Actions Tool in XFtoWP 1.6.2

When making the choice to add a XenForo forum to your WordPress website (or the other way around), there’s often a disconnect with one of the most important aspects of your community:

How will your user’s adapt to the new environment?

Alongside the XFtoWP plugin’s valuable set of user syncing features, the newest release today, version 1.6.2, introduces a redesigned Bulk Actions tool that makes connecting user’s from either of your websites easier than ever.

What is User Syncing Across WordPress and XenForo?

By connecting (otherwise known as “syncing”) your users across WordPress and XenForo, you unlock the ability to perform advanced user actions across your websites without your user’s ever knowing.

A few possibilities:

• Login both users at once with the same credentials
• Promote and demote user permissions based on subscription
• Create a personalized experience across both websites based around the strengths of each software
• Funnel your blog’s readers to a private membership community

In the past, adding a forum to your WordPress blog or eCommerce site created two separate experiences. Not only did your website designs look different, but there was no way of connecting users to purchases or other kinds of account upgrades.

This created a fragmented environment for discussion, and made you compromise so much of your community experience and personality that it’s no wonder so many third party hosted platforms have risen in popularity.

With the XFtoWP plugin integration, and now with the enhanced tools in version 1.6.2, connecting your users across both sites is now easier than ever and sets the stage for you to finally create the self-hosted community experience you’ve always wanted.

…and bring your community members along with you!

Download the new companion addon to get full XenForo user syncing

Before we dive in to the features tour, an (optional) companion addon has been developed called the REST API Extensions Kit.

This is a lightweight addon for your XenForo forum that simply makes new data about your forum available over your private REST API.

Simply put, there is some useful data that is not included out of the box by XenForo that this simple addon makes available for your WordPress site to read.

The relevant data to this update makes it possible for XFtoWP to sync your XenForo users by primary and secondary usergroups. Without this addon active on your site, this part of Bulk actions won’t work!

All other parts of the Bulk actions tool work just fine without this addon. If you want to get a hint of some features coming to the plugin in the future, see what other data the REST API Extensions Kit makes available.

Finally, let’s take a tour of what’s new in XFtoWP 1.6.2 below:

A Smart Bulk Actions Tool for More Precise User Syncing

Right upfront, the Bulk Actions tool in XFtoWP 1.6.2 has been totally redesigned to handle a larger variety of user syncing criteria.

For small and large websites alike, this gives you more control over which users are synced, which actions should be taken, and from which source your data should be pulled.

Before we dive in, the sync processes that are available to you in XFtoWP 1.6.2 are as follows:

• Connect users: Find and connect users from WP or XF. By default, missing users will be registered and connected, but you can disable this before you run the action.
• Refresh users: Update user’s with the latest sync data across both systems. This is especially useful when implementing custom fields and you want to add/update values at bulk.
• Disconnect users: This process disconnects WP and XF users from each other, including custom fields. Does not delete users.
• Import WP users to XF: As stated, cycles through all existing WP users and imports them to XenForo.
• Import XF users to WP: As stated, cycles through all existing XF users and imports them to WordPress.

A key change amongst these processes is that each one strictly does what it says, and nothing more. For example, the two import processes strictly import new users, and no longer refresh preexisting users.

Additionally, the Refresh process no longer connects unmatched users and just skips them. By shaving off these extra steps, the Bulk actions tool will be more performant on large user bases. Let’s see what’s new:

Sync users based on attendance

The first new addition you will notice is the new data switching feature, simply triggered by clicking the new Reverse Arrow button in the Bulk actions interface:

This simple switch changes the data source from WordPress to XenForo (and vice-versa), which means you can cycle through either user base for your different syncing requirements.

In other words, if you started with a XenForo forum first and added a WordPress site later, you can choose to import all, or gradually import your XenForo users into WordPress (and vice-versa!).

This new data switching feature also makes it possible to sync much smaller batches of users, which follows one of the general principles of XFtoWP that not every user needs to be synced all at once.

Sync users by criteria

Let’s say you have an existing WordPress website that uses a membership plugin to change the role of users to who have purchased your course or product to a group called Premium member.

Your WP website also has free access, so the majority of your users are still in the default Subscribers group with no extra functionality.

When it comes to your forum, you have Premium member only sections that you don’t want unpaid subscribers to have access to, despite them also having full functionality of the forum otherwise.

To seamlessly migrate your users into this new forum environment, and ensure proper permissions in just one-click, you can simply choose to only import/connect WP users with a specific role from the Bulk actions tool:

Now instead of sorting through possibly thousands of unneeded users, the Bulk actions tool will only cycle through your premium members in WordPress!

With the WordPress criteria taken care of, let’s take care of the most important part on the XenForo side: assigning the usergroup(s) needed to give premium members the proper permissions on your forums.

This part assumes you have already configured usergroups in the XFtoWP settings, and once added, you can simply choose which usergroup(s) to map your selected WordPress users to by clicking the desired checkbox:

It’s as simple as that, and this process can be repeated infinitely to as many usergroups as you wish to sync across websites.

Keep in mind, that you can add and remove usergroups on any action from the Bulk actions tool, so there are many scenarios this tool unlocks that help you manage users easier than ever has been possible across your websites.

• Import WP users to XF and add the WP member usergroup
• Refresh XF users who have the Premium member usergroup only
• Disconnect all users and remove the Verified XF usergroup
• Connect WP users who are in the Moderator usergroup in XF
• Import WP users who are in the Editor role to XF
• …and many more combinations

In future XFtoWP plugin releases, this criteria will be expanded. Leave your feedback at the XFtoWP forums or XenForo community thread if you have anything specific in mind.

More helpful sync responses

As you run any process, the Bulk actions interface will now give you a more useful and tailored response message regarding the user’s sync status. This will help you understand what is going on during each process and which one to run next.

Get Your Users in-Sync with XFtoWP 1.6.2

If you’ve been on the fence about adding a XenForo community to your WordPress website, the XFtoWP plugin helps make your forum more integrated and usable to your readership.

The new tools in XFtoWP 1.6.2 take a big step towards perfect user synchronization, which will unlock many powerful features of the plugin you can use to enhance the discussion element of your WordPress website.

With this big update also brings a breath of fresh air to the development of this plugin, and over the coming weeks and months you can expect new tools that will help you finally build content rich and interactive websites that have never been possible without this suite of tools.

Login to your customer account to download XFtoWP 1.6.2 now.

Want to learn more about XFtoWP? Check out the homepage here.