[@designserve Participant 5 years, 4 months ago]

I couldn’t stop. I persisted for another 30 minutes and I’ve had some success!

The plugin above is working. I successfully imported Topics into an existing forum. I have only managed to import 7 so far (out of a set of 175). The reason you see duplicates on the following link to one of my dev sites is because I thought perhaps some international characters were interfering with the import (one of my members had posted in French), so I tried deleting several rows and re-importing several times.

New Forum

No databases were injured in bringing you this message… Well actually the plugin did delete a forum when I used the wrong import setting, so be careful. The success I had was with importing to an existing forum (that I had created for the purpose of doing the import). The plugin allows you to select an existing forum from a dropdown list in the next screen when you select that option.

I was about to give up but now that I see this plugin can export and import I will try again sometime soon. For now, I have been awake for 24 hours so I must sleep 🙂

[@designserve Participant 5 years, 4 months ago]

Some of the info in the CSV thread could be useful to you. I don’t know but I feel as though the issues are connected. Linking you to Page 1 but see Page 2.

Import BB data from CSV file to bbPress forum

[@designserve Participant 5 years, 4 months ago]

I installed the following plugin on my dev site:

https://wpfavs.com/plugins/import-export-for-bbpress

Export is working perfectly (latest wordpress and bbpress).

Import not working at all but I might be doing something wrong. Very disappointing because this plugin looks so promising.

Giving up for now, I hope this helps someone I’ll actively update this if I make any progress.

[@designserve Participant 5 years, 4 months ago]

I forgot to add. The date format in one of Stephen’s files is not correct (the reply comes in several years before the topic). I’m adding this because it was asked and not answered on Github.

[@designserve Participant 5 years, 4 months ago]

Hi All,

I’ve spent the last 10 hours 36 minutes trying to import a few topics into my forum from CSV. I’ve tried many different techniques and plugins. I am updating this because maybe it will help someone, or you might be able to help me.

I’m assuming that Stephen’s method worked when he posted it. It appears to me that post_parent does not behave as it used to. I have used Stephen’s files from Github and imported them into my forum. I’ve very carefully followed every nuance of his post, as far as I can tell. Ultimate CSV Importer and WP ALL IMPORT EXPORT (I have the extended pro version) do not expose post_parent in the mapping. However, Ultimate CSV Importer (now known as ‘Import Export Post as CSV File’) does say in the documentation that it will pick up post_parent when importing. Unfortunately I didn’t check in the database before running the repair tools and they always seem to remove the hierarchy when i use them.

When I import using the fields bbp_forum_id and bbp_topic_id I am able to make some progress in that the Topics show that they are in the correct forum in the backend. But they don’t show up in the frontend.

See this post for some useful information:

Bulk-move bbPress topics

Anyway, when I import Stephen’s files, the Topics and Replies won’t show up for me. post_parent is incremented in the database when importing as far as I can tell. I have read many posts on this and other forums virtually begging for a bbpress csv importer and many of the replies mention post_parent as being central to the issues.

One example statement says “The standard WordPress Importer only sets a post’s post_parent if that post also exists in the import; it can’t map an imported post to a post that already exists in the database.”

With that in mind, I went into the database after importing Stephen’s files and I manually updated post_parent for the Topics and Replies. When I do that, the Topics and Replies show up in the frontend as they should. At least I’m understanding what needs to happen for the Topics and Replies to show up on the front end.

Having edited post_parent in the database (using phpMyadmin) I then ran the forum repair tools. Counts were updated and everything is where it should be.

I’m now almost at the point of letting sleeping dogs lie. However, I’m going to try an old plugin on my dev site and I’ll post the results of that shortly.

[@designserve Participant 5 years, 4 months ago]

Thanks I actually feel better too that I have some company!

So, so many late nights. I’m looking at very old plugins and searching around the Internet at the moment. Wondering whether to try installing old versions of wordpress and bbpress so that they will work with old plugins, and then transfer to the latest bbpress somehow. I’ve been scraping my sites to get the CSVs and now I can’t import them, I actually can’t believe the situation I’m in. I decided on bbpress with buddypress for my new system last year and I’ve spent months setting it up, I can’t bear to start from scratch again.

Thanks for listening 🙂

[@designserve Participant 5 years, 4 months ago]

Hi All,

I’m spending another weekend desperately trying to migrate my forum by importing by any method (preferably CSV but I’m willing to try almost anything at this point because I’m now having to transfer each member manually as they sign up on the former site).

Converting out to CSV took many weeks of research an effort, I thought that importing would be a breeze does anyone have any suggestions please?

Or a way for bbpress to recognise the Topics I have imported would help. I can see the topics in the backend and it says they are in the correct forum but I can’t get them to show on the front end (I’ve tried all the usual repair methods and the result is that they no longer say that they are in any forum).

Many thanks!

[@designserve Participant 5 years, 4 months ago]

I think I have a very similar issue (my replies are in the thread regarding CSV importing). Having imported Topics and replies WordPress is telling me they are in the same forum but I can’t get them to show up in the front end without editing them. I desperately need some help from a bbpress expert regarding importing forums via any reliable method please.

[@designserve Participant 5 years, 4 months ago]

I realise this is an old thread too but it does seem to be the place to discuss this.

I’ve spent many days / weeks trying to import my forums from a Concrete5 system to Bbpress. I have converted them to CSV but importing is failing every time.

I created the files from a combination of MySQL export and manual entry, to replicate the Github examples.

I’ve also tried exporting numerous examples, editing and re-importing them to no avail.

I’m using WP All Export and WP All Import. I’ve had great success in migrating my (11,000) Users but I can’t get Topics and Replies to work. When I Import Topics, they seem to be in the correct Forum but they are not visible. If I run a repair operation, the forum changes to “0”. If I edit a topic and save it (before running a repair operation) it appears in the forum (of course, I’m selecting the forum from the dropdown so it would).

I would also like to query whether the date and time formats are correct in the CSV files linked to in Github because they are different in each file?

I would really appreciate help with this. I have been trying to migrate my websites and forums out of Concrete5 for well over a year and it is a huge issue for me. There’s no exporter so there is a lot of ‘exporting from database and manually editing’ to do, alongside scraping my own websites. I can’t overstate the amount of effort I’m putting into this migration, with an aim to help other Concrete5 users to do the same.

I have also done a lot fo work with trying to import using ‘example.php’ but the C5 database is extremely convoluted and also my php skill level is not high, I’m just trying to run a good music website for my members 🙂

All help and pointers will be appreciated. Many thanks!