bbPress.org

You may need to extract the users out to a separate table, or you may be able to treat these users as “anonymous users”, I’d suggest first though I’d look at mapping some of the fields for the content only as that should not take much time to get up and running.

First you want to do this with bbPress 2.6 ‘alpha’ rather than the current 2.5.6 release as there are significant improvements to the importers in the upcoming version.

You can get your hands on 2.6 alpha via https://wordpress.org/plugins/bbpress/developers/ and it is listed under “Other Versions” as “Development Version”
Or the direct download link https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/bbpress.zip

Next you want to make a copy of Example.php from the includes/admin/converters folder of the plugin to MyConverter.php and in that file replace any instance of Example with MyConverter (this is case sensitive to be mindful of that)

Next up start mapping the fields from your schema to the fields in MyConverter.php

In the following screenshot I’ve mapped drawn lines to the easily concluded fields, any field mappings that you do not use you can simply delete, ideally using as many as you can will ensure the best bbPress experience for your data though.

Take a stab at doing the above for the rest of your database, topics, replies etc and get back to us.

If you need a place to host code snippets, use GitHub Gists: http://gist.github.com

Hmmm…. I’m assuming in that case then you have no other parts (or major parts at least) missing from the DB schema you posted in the original post? e.g. No topic_title table listing the topics separately.

If that is the case you’d now want to ignore those mappings I posted, rather remap them to the the topic and reply sections instead of the forums section.

This is now where we add some limiting SQL expressions to separate your topics from replies.

In the Example.php file at the end of the topics section you’ll see:

// Setup any table joins needed for the topic section
$this->field_map[] = array(
	'from_tablename'  => 'replies_table',
	'from_fieldname'  => 'the_topic_id',
	'join_tablename'  => 'topics_table',
	'join_type'       => 'INNER',
	'join_expression' => 'USING replies_table.the_topic_id = topics_table.the_topic_id',
	'from_expression' => 'WHERE forums_table.the_topic_id = 0',
	'to_type'         => 'topic'
);

We’ll modify that to the following:

// Setup any table joins needed for the topic section
$this->field_map[] = array(
	'from_tablename'  => 'forum_table',
	'from_expression' => 'WHERE forums_table.Forum_Parent = 0',
	'to_type'         => 'topic'
);

Similarly at the end of the replies section, we change that join expression to:

// Setup any table joins needed for the topic section
$this->field_map[] = array(
	'from_tablename'  => 'forum_table',
	'from_expression' => 'WHERE forums_table.Forum_Parent != 0',
	'to_type'         => 'reply'
);

Now assuming I’ve got the logic correct in understanding your Forum_Parent/Forum_Ancestor what equals 0 and what does not equal 0 then we should be good to go 🙂

So the topics join expression is limiting the queries for your ‘thread starter’ topics, then in the reply section expression we ignore those previously ignored topics already imported and are assuming the remaining entries in the table are replies to those topics. The Forum_Ancestor of each reply should then point to the “parent topic ID’ mapping.

I think that’s it, one thing you’ll notice is that we also are not actually creating any forums to import the topics into, all the topics will import without being allocated to a forum, this can be bulk updated later, actually we can set a default forum for topics and relies, I’ll get back to you on that bit of code that I can’t remember of the top of my head right this second 😉

Thanks Lisa, it all makes sense, I doubt I made my explanation any better 😉

I’ll take a closer look a little later but I think I’ve a reasonable solution in mind 🙂