Mass Update User Profile Checkbox Options

Question

I created a checkbox option for the user_meta (user profile). They are checkboxes assigning users to categories.

The problem is that I need to do a mass update for all of my users 1500+ and going through them individually would take too long.

I need to choose the intended categories for each user. There are 180 categories.

This is a screen shot of the section of the user profile that I want to update:

I need a way of doing this. Im open to using a custom script (preferably not a plugin), csv import, or any other options.

The purpose of the category selections is so that I can save their descriptions in a meta field that will then be searchable with a custom query. This won't work if the users dont have a category(ies) selected. It's a pain now because there is a large amount that I need to do at once, but ideally the categories will be selected as new users are created.

Anyone with a way of achieving this please help. Please let me know if there is any additional info needed.

Thanks a lot

Answer 1

update_user_meta() is what should assist you in doing this. Feed what get_users() returns and update the meta data for each and every one of them with the required values.

Assuming that you are going to store a serialized array, your custom query will have to unserialize each result in order to perform a search. I may not know the full extent of your intentions, but I hope this helps.