[adressler]

Makes perfect sense. I will start to familiarize myself with your patch and massage it to fit my situation. Really looking forward to your new repair tool as well. Thanks so much Robin and Stephen for your time, it is very much appreciated! Thanks to you two, the end is finally in sight!

[adressler]

Hi Robin,
I was able to export users from Lotus into a new users table. The table structure is:

users {
   user_id INT(11) PRIMARY KEY AUTO INCREMENT
   display_name VARCHAR(250)
   user_nicename VARCHAR(50)
   user_login VARCHAR(60)
}

Data sample:

+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  user_id  |   display_name   |   user_nicename   |  user_login                |
+-----------+------------------+-------------------+----------------------------+
|   555     |     Jane Doe     |     jane-doe      |  old_123456789abcde12345   |
+-----------+------------------+-------------------+----------------------------+

You will notice I was not able to export any email addresses, or passwords from Lotus. I linked up my custom converter and was able to import users successfully into BBPress without the need to include a bogus email or password. In the WP database, all of these “old” users have an auto-generated password, and no email address. Now, at least all of these old user display_names are showing next to the posts they authored (instead of all “anonymous”).

Is it still possible to write a loop to link these old user accounts to the newly registered users even though there’s no email addresses? I’m okay with the forum working the way it is now, but if there’s a way to link newly registered accounts with the old ones, I’d sure like to try. I’m guessing the only way to do it is to match by the old user display_name, which, from what I can tell, is unique to the users db; no two people have the same name. It would just depend on people remembering the name they used to registered on the old site (some people are registered as “John and Jane Doe”). And if someone signs up who coincidentally has the same name as an old user, there could be some confusion.

I just had a thought, what about a checkbox during registration like “Attempt to link my old DynamiteOnline account”, and when checked it would try to link up the names?

You’re right, nothing is “simple”.. lol. I really appreciate your ideas here, and thanks so much for your time.

Aaron

[adressler]

That sounds like the way to do it. I’m rather new to WordPress but I have a decent knowledge of PHP / MySQL. If it’s not too much of a pain, I’d really appreciate looking at some code to use as a starting point.

[adressler]

Thanks for the reply Robin,

Ideally, it would be really nice not to have to manually register the 600 or so active members, but it’s doable if that is the only logical route.

Long story short, the old site was built by a senior Lotus Notes dev, and he wrote so much custom code to get the site to do what it did. Whats worse is this guy passed away a couple years ago, and there is no commenting in the db. There is likely no way I can export all of the data, I consider myself lucky to have exported what I have now, which is just barely enough to get things converted to WP. This should be okay though, I can generate unique UserIDs and FKs with PHP and MySQL before importing into BBPress.

My crazy idea that I had was to import these “old” authors as, effectively, name placeholders. Bogus/null values for user_pass and user_email, a php-generated user_login (something like “judygarland-old”, “abcdef12345-old” or similar), user_id (unique Auto Increment #), display_name (“Judy Garland”), and maybe user_nicename. These would only be used to show the Authors first + last name next to all of the old topics and replies I just imported from Lotus (they will not be logging in). When users re-register, they would create a completely new WP user (I’m using s2member to handle subscription info). I realize that “new” users will not be able to see their “old” user’s topic / reply counts, and total user counts will not be completely accurate, but that’s okay and manageable. At least they could create their new user accounts themselves, and I wouldn’t be responsible for making s2member link up properly with these old users.

I guess I will try a few approaches and see which works best, and for anybody else doing something similar I will post my results. Thanks Robin for the ideas.

Aaron

[adressler]

Thank you Stephen! Just noticed a typo on my part, fixed it and mostly everything imported perfectly. Just finding a few data anomalies (thanks to Lotus Notes…) but I should be able to fix them within BBPress. Thanks again for your support on these forums, I appreciate the good work you’ve put in.

Aaron

[adressler]

Thank you @netweb. I tried your code you provided, unfortunately the conversion results were the same as I described originally. Same results running the tools after the import/conversion as well.

I am going to run some test queries on the databases just to try to figure out where things are breaking down, probably tomorrow. 🙂 Do you know of a way to echo the SELECT queries to the old Database tables forums, replies, and topics during import?

Thanks again.

[adressler]

Thanks for the reply Robin,

-“Recalculate the parent topic for each post” did nothing
-“Recalculate the parent forum for each post” set all of the Topics in Admin panel to “(No Forum)”, where before that was the only text that was actually displaying properly.
-“Count topics in each forum” reset forum topic counts to 0
-“Count replies in each forum” reset forum reply counts to 0
-“Count replies in each topic” reset topic reply counts to 0
and the rest did nothing.

It just seems strange that before I tried the tools it was properly mapping topics.forum_id to forums.forum_id to retrieve the forum title that was displayed in the Admin Topics page, and only on the Admin Topics page. When I view the public Topic page, the forum is excluded in the breadcrumb.