hi !
am working on moving my site from phpbb3 to bbpress, of course there is no converters out there for that purpose, so i decided to write my own.
am still testing it and trying to improve the code a little bit. right now it can convert the following :
1- forums
2- topics, completely with topic types and status.. announcements and glopal announcements are stickied to front page.
3- posts, all bbcode is converted into html, smiles are changed into img tags, so you might want to install allow images plugin.
4- users, including permissions .. notice that bbpress doesn't support per forum permissions as phpbb3, so it only convert users as following :
founder -> key master
inactive -> inactive
banned -> blocked
moderators and admins are converted into normal users, so you have to assign them again
because phpbb3 doesn't use md5 hashing anymore, the script copies passwords as it is. to solve that problem i modified the md5 insecurity for bbpress plugin to first check the passwords the phpbb3 way, if it matches, it will rehash it using bbpress functions.
the script converts all the table rows at once, so it's very heavy and consumes too much cpu depending on your forum size, i strongly suggest that you do the conversion on your own machine, not on a shared hosting account. you might also want to increase the php max execution time on your machine before starting the script cause it takes lots of time converting posts.
here is the steps for converting your phpbb3 board :
1- make a backup from your database and files.
2- install bbpress anywhere, just use the same database of phpbb3. this is important cause the script assumes that all tables are in the same database.
3- download the script from here. extract it, and you'll get 2 files.
4- copy the file phpbb3tobbpress.php to phpbb3 directory.
5- copy the file _phpbb3_pass.php to bb-plugins directory.
6- go to http://path-to-phpbb3/phpbb3tobbpress.php and start converting your board.
7- voila .. all your data is converted to bbpress tables, go to your bbpress installation and login. don't forget to visit admin->manage->recount to make sure your converted board is updated.
i can't stress enough on how consuming is the process of converting posts, my board has 25,000 posts, and it takes nearly 15 minutes to convert them on my local machine, so again : i don't recommend using this converter on shared hosting.
ciao !
