My pleasure. There is, unfortunately, no easy way to move data from the group forums to the sitewide bbPress forums, other than copy/paste or some involved database manipulation.

My suggestion, based on years of working with customers, is that you simply obfuscate the old forums from plain view in your navigation menus and pages, but then refer to them in a link or button at the top of your new forums pages for anyone who may with to refer back to them. This "human engineering" trick will likely satisfy those who seek to find the old content (like a dusty old book), but will force all new content to be added to the new sitewide forums.

This usually works like a charm, as the old content is always available (directly or in wayback machine or google cache), but people don't add to it anymore.

Cheers!
Spence
http://labsecrets.com

So I would like to move everything from the Buddypress Group Forum to sitewide bbPress. Is there a manual way to do this?

You can keep the previous forums, but the data from BuddyPress group forums does not migrate automatically into bbPress site wide forums.

http://labsecrets.com/2012/01/23/buddypress-and-bbpress-forums-made-easy/

Cheers!
Spence
http://labsecrets.com

Basically I have already been using Buddypress with its built in groups+forums, but I find a sitewide bbpress forum is better. I would like to keep all the previous discussions in Buddypress forums. Any help is much appreciated...

Writing an importer is a *lot* of work. Right off the bat a forum importer is going to be at least twice as much work as, say, a MovableType -> WordPress importer.

Now you have to take into account how many, ultimately, separate importers you would have to write. Let's see here... vBulletin, phpBB, Vanilla, punBB, SMF, IPB... and those are just some of the popular ones. So 6 importers *might* cover most off people's needs.

Then you have to keep in mind that the importers are constantly breaking because of software updates to the original forums packages. I'd say ever 2-4 months you can expect breakage due to an update.

Bottom line? You are looking at 6 importers (at least) to cover the popular forum suites, that not only would take a huge time investment to get off the ground, but would have to be constantly maintained and updated so they don't break or get out of date.

Is it do-able? Sure. However, if you want @jjj to tackle this don't expect to ever see another bbPress update or feature again - it's just a matter of time.

This is really where contributors need to step in and help out. This would ideally be written and maintained by different contributors.

Consequently, most of the people who would want to use bbPress probably are already using another forum script and need help migrating. It is collossal mistake to leave this for community plugins.

If I have a forum software in a production environment, then one of the major factors influencing my decision regarding migration is whether or not there is a robust, stable, tried and tested and reliable migration path to the target software. This is extremely important for me. In fact, I would suffer a somewhat inferior software willingly rather than move to a better software if there is no clear migration path or there is a high degree of risk in migration.

It is a mistake on part of bbPress to leave migration to community plugin developers. Even if there were some plugins out there that did the job, it would be much less reassuring to prospective users compared to a migration/import path created by the bbPress team. As it happens there are only 2 import plugins ( http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/forumconverter/ and http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bbconverter/) out there and both of them are broken and not supported.

WordPress does it right in building an importer directly into the core.

Over the next 18-24 months, I expect to see a mass exodus from phpBB as they rewrite the software from ground up ( http://area51.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=75&t=41583). If bbPress provide a good migration path, it stands the chance to capture some of fleeing population.

Task

I think it would be greatly beneficial to the project if the bbPress team build a bbPress importer that supports the top 4 forum software: phpBB, Invision, SMF and vBulletin.

Such a migration tool, importer or converter will:

i) import topics and forum hierarchies into bbpress

including the relations between forums, topics and replies
and slugs for forums, topics and replies
ii) generate an .htaccess to place in the old forum directory so that old URLs are 301 redirected to new ones.

iii) import users including profiles, passwords, signatures and roles

@jjj You have mentioned at http://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/1740 that this is more appropriate for a plugin and that bundling that code in the core of bbPress seems needless for many users that are starting off fresh.

I believe that this function is too important to be left to the mercy of others. There is a huge trust issue...if I have to entrust my data to someone, I want to make sure that they are reliable, trustworthy, good enough, and understand the software well.

I take your point about not bundling the function in the core. How about a migration plugin by the bbPress team?

Please advise if you find that this is not the case.

Cheers,
Spence
http://labsecrets.com

I have the same issue. Would love to hear if it worked out for you

Not sure it works, though.

I manage a community about electric cars and we have a wordpress with buddypress. Our buddypress installation is only used for the forum (+ profiles and IM).

I'd like to move from buddypress to BBpress. Do you know if there is a easy way for me to transfer all messages from the buddypress forums to the BBpress forums ? Do you have some advices to success my transition ?

Thanks

All I've tried so far is the default process:
Tools -> Import -> bbPress Standalone
I'm given a path to bb-config.php, at the root of my WordPress install, which seems to be correct. Going by these default settings has worked just fine on a much smaller test site. On this big one however, no such luck.

We have ~20'000 threads and ~15'000 users. If you've attempted to migrate a fairly large website to bbPress 2.0 from the legacy BuddyPress forum, kindly share your findings.

Thomas

if you have some deeper knowledge in php, mysql and regular expression - you can use the phpbb3 converter and make some change to the code. The code of the phpbb3 converter is understandable - you only must change the tables and row to match the database structure of the Woltlab Burning Board. Its only the question of understanding ...

http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/phpbb3-gt-bbpress-converter-beta-release

Greetz
Markus

Is it a big issue to restart with a blank, fresh forum?

Thomas

Do you not like the current software you have?

http://github.com/aufumy/migratefud2bb
http://github.com/aufumy/redirect_fudlinks

But I had to do a 3 step migration to do it: YetAnotherForum to vBulletin to phpBB to bbPress.

It's a tedious process, and not perfect, but I got the forums converted!

Basically, in all my research the only converter for YetAnotherForum.NET that I could find it vBulletin. So that's the first step. unfortunately it is commercial, and closed source, but a $100 is much cheaper than paying someone to convert it for you!

vBulletin has a tool called ImpEx that can import a YAF forum into vBulletin. But it is tricky since YAF uses MSSQL, and you want to convert to MySQL on vBulletin. I did all this on my local machine running Windows, with a MSSQL server to run the YAF database and WAMP to run vBulletin.

I did not have YAF installed locally and running, just the database. You probably want to get your YAF forums running on a local Windows machine as a first step. The YAF to vBulletin importer is old and totally unsupported, so it is crude, but better than nothing. I was only able to import about 80% of my forum content, and I lost a user account. But one user out of 600 seemed a small price to pay.

I think the loses were due to funky characters and long titles, so if you have a local install of YAF, you can fix those things before you import.

After you get the data into vBulletin, it is a much smoother process. There is of course a lot of converters for phpBB, and converting from phpBB to bbPress is pretty easy.

In the end, the migration went ok, I had some issues with the HTML code in the posts, had to convert some characters in the database, and install some plugins so that the HTML content in the old posts would work in bbPress. But it was all worth it to get away from YAF, the forum members all seem to be happy with the new forum, no complaints, just a few feature requests.

I have really been meaning to do several blog posts explaining how to do all this cause it's one hell of a project, but who ever has the time to do everything they want to?

If anyone else takes the plunge and tries to migrate from YAF to bbPress and has any specific questions, let me know and I'd be happy to try and give a hand!