CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

So I'm assuming your members already have a Joomla login account?

First, understand how Civi works. Joomla maintains user accounts in jos_users table. Civi maintains contact records in civicrm_contacts. Civi joins the two with civicrm_uf_match.

If a user logs into Joomla, and no uf_match record already exists (so the J! user is not connected with a Civi contact record), Civi seeks to find a match (based on the email address) when the logged in user access. That mechanism is good, but not perfect. And for a database of 2000 records, I would not rely on that as my primary "connecting" mechanism.

What I usually do in a situation like this is import my records into Civi, then do an export with the internal contact id, contact name, and email. I then export my jos_user table, and use Access, Base, or some other db software to run a match between the records and create data for my "initial" uf_match table. That gives me more flexibility to review any records that don't create an obvious match (e.g. on email address) and address them individually. And it gives me assurance that all my existing J! users will properly link to their contact record.

That actually makes things easier because you don't have to worry about matching your J! users with C contacts.

You have two options --
1) You could create initial usernames/passwords for all your users, linked to their Civi record
2) You could just worry about the Civi records, and ask members to register through the site, creating the link at that time

The workflow for 1 is:
1) Import contacts to Civi
2) Export contacts and use Excel or something to construct the pre-assigned user/pwds for each contact
3) Import those records into Joomla (there are some extensions that allow you to import users)
4) Export the jos_user records from Joomla to create your uf_match data (connecting jos_users and civi contacts)
5) Import the uf_match records
6) (optional) Import the user login records into Civi

Step 6 is optional -- I usually create custom fields for the username and password in Civi and import back into it as it then let's me construct a mass mail in Civi where I can include the tokens (to let members know what they're preassigned credentials are).

As for those with no email, two options -- create a dummy email (e.g. username@yourdomain.com) and then snail mail their credentials, or don't precreate user credentials for those people and require they register with the site in order to connect to their civi record (though that can be problematic since they don't have an email address that will match an existing record).

I know there's a lot of steps, but it really is the most effective way of building those records while maintaining data integrity (i.e. through the uf_match connector) for a large initial import like this.