[Josh Leuze]

Steve, it looks like the link in the original post is working again:

http://members.lycos.co.uk/wmnkhayal/files/phpbb3tobbpress%20converter.tar.gz

[Josh Leuze]

Hi sbricchiLIN, I did come up with a solution to migrate a forum from YAF to bbPress.

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!

[Josh Leuze]

Disregard my last post, that link is ooooold as dirt

Let’s cross our fingers that someone is on the job though!

[Josh Leuze]

just had two revisions come through on 0.9 and trunk by mdawaffe. Is he our new esteemed leader?

It sure looks like he is!

[Josh Leuze]

It looks like the original poster’s link still works Adam:

http://members.lycos.co.uk/wmnkhayal/files/phpbb3tobbpress%20converter.tar.gz

Maybe it was a temporary outage?

[Josh Leuze]

@Ipstenu: I deactivated the Ajaxed Quotes plugin, didn’t seem to make any difference.

I then deactivated all of the plugins, that didn’t change anything either.

So I deactivated all the plugins and switched to the default theme. No changes. But when I reactivated those plugins, and switched to my custom theme, I am able to see those posts now, even when I am not logged in.

The “+2 more” link still remains at the top, but the posts in the thread don’t seem change between the regular and all views. So it seems partially fixed, but the more link remaining makes think that more posts could get caught in this limbo.

It almost seems like there was some caching involved and reactivating the theme and the plugins cleared this. But I don’t see that being the case with any of the plugins I am using. And it isn’t the brower’s cache, the problem is the same on multiple machines, any OS or browser.

[Josh Leuze]

@johnhiler: I am using 1.1, the latest version of Akismet.

I should also mention that I can’t replicate this. If I mark a post as spam, and then go in and mark that post as not spam, it shows back up just fine in the thread.

It only appears to be happening when Akismet itself filters a post as spam.

[Josh Leuze]

@chrishajer: I can sort of rescue a spam post. I don’t have any problem finding the spam posts in the admin panel, and marking them as “Not Spam”. They disappear from the spam posts and show up in the regular posts.

But in the front end, they do not show up unless I am logged in as admin and click the “+2 More” link.

I am using a custom theme, but it is built from Kakumei and should not be very functionally different from that. I switched back to the default theme, and everything functioned the same.

[Josh Leuze]

Hmm, I upgraded to 1.0.2 and the problem has not changed.

These are the plugins that I am using: Ajaxed Quote, Akismet, Allow Images, BBcode Buttons Toolbar, BBcode Lite, bbPM, bbPress signatures, bbPress Smilies, BBVideo, Post Count Plus, and reCAPTCHA bbPress.

I don’t see anything that could be causing this though, anyone else have any other ideas?

[Josh Leuze]

Thanks John, you’re right I should upgrade bbPress and see how that works.

No, I have not used bozo at on this particular forum.

[Josh Leuze]

You should be able to pull this off, but as far as I know there is no Vanilla to bbPress converter.

However, the phpBB to bbPress converter works well. Since phpBB is quite popular, you should be able to convert from Vanilla to phpBB to bbPress.

[Josh Leuze]

That makes sense, I’ll stick with a vanilla include then, I’d rather have my themes be fast and simple.

[Josh Leuze]

Thanks for the info _ck_, glad to hear that I’m not way off track.

Yeah, I have been loading the sidebar after the content, but just above the footer include, rather than in the footer, so that I can use different sidebars easily.

I wouldn’t want to take credit for Ryan Imel’s work! Only linked to Theme Playground as an example, but you’re right, he did an awesome job on integrating the forums into the rest of his site.

Now that I scroll down and read the comments on his post a little closer, I see that Justin Tadlock mentioned another way to add a sidebar, but it looks to have the same end result as a regular include:

require_once( bb_get_template( 'sidebar.php' ) );

I’m not sure if I can match Ryan’s quality design, but I’m going to try to do a few fresh looking bbPress themes to share with the community.

[Josh Leuze]

It’s on the drawing board yes. Can’t say when that part will get there.

It’s good to hear that bbPress themes will get their own home eventually. No hurry though, I don’t have any themes ready to share yet!

[Josh Leuze]

I dig the new look, a much needed re-design! Glad to see a bit of honey in the new design, adds a little fun, without giving me a toothache

The two column layout is a big improvement too, helps organize the content better and keeps it at out fingertips.

Can I infer from the “Themes” link that bbPress will have an official theme directory soon?

[Josh Leuze]

Thanks for the tip incirus, I’ll check that out.

Yeah there is something about the minimalism of bbPress that I find very liberating!

[Josh Leuze]

Thank you for the info, it was very helpful!

@chrishajer – I checked my .htaccess file, and the permissions were incorrect, II tweaked that, and bbPress added the rewrite rules without issue.

@incirus – Yes, my forum is converted from phpBB as well, I don’t know why I didn’t think of that before. I checked a new topic, the pretty permalink worked just fine. I checked an old topic in the database, no slug. i added a slug and it worked great.

Unfortunately I have 875 topics that I would have to edit my hand… That’s too bad, one of the draws of migrating to bbPress are the useful permalinks.

Has anyone out there come up with a handy script to solve this problem? I’d imagine the code is already there, since bbPress already converts your topic title into a slug, it would just be a matter of having it process all of the old titles. But I think that’s a bit out of my league!

Hell, I’d settle for a way to use slugs from here in out, but fall back on the default permalinks if there is no slug, but I think that would be more complicated.

[Josh Leuze]

I was converting another forum tonight and ran into a MySQL error while running the converter.

The error had the name of one of the forums in it, and that forum happened to have a contraction in it. I’m not sure how one could edit the script to accommodate apostrophes, but I simply renamed the forum and removed the apostrophe.

I reran the converter without the apostrophe, and it worked just fine. So if anyone else runs into an error, pay attention to what it is choking on, maybe you can remove some funky characters and sneak around it!

[Josh Leuze]

Bummer, I took a closer look at the YAF forum thread, and it’s actually to convert from phpBB to YetAnotherForum…

Anyone else have any other wild ideas?

[Josh Leuze]

Andrew, I just converted a test install of phpBB 3.05 to bbPress 1.0.1 without any problems.

[Josh Leuze]

I got it to work, the converter did a great job, thanks wmnasef!

I was trying to do the conversion on fairly standard VPS with a typical LAMP stack, I’m not really sure why it didn’t work on there.

But after that I tried the conversion on my Media Temple Grid Service account and it worked fine. (The forum is quite small, 7000 posts) So if someone else runs into a similar problem, try a different web host or a local web server, maybe you’ll have better luck too!

[Josh Leuze]

I got pretty close with wmnasef’s script, but I think I am having a problem similar to gavinj77’s.

SQL ERROR [ mysql4 ]

You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ‘opinions on current political questions.’, ‘0’, ‘2’, ’48’, ‘235’)’ at line 1 [1064]

I’m trying to convert an install of phpBB 3.0.4 to bbPress 0.9.0.5, a small amount of data did transfer over to bbPress before I received the error.

I tried to download matiaspunx’s edited file and I was also unable to.

Does anyone know exactly what I have to edit to “use the addslash function”, or happen to have a copy of this file they would be kind enough to share with me?

[Josh Leuze]

Thanks so much for the links Ipstenu!

I figured if there was a way out of YAF, it would most likely be to phpBB. Surprised I didn’t find this in my own searches.

If I can just get this data out of YAF, I think it will all be downhill from there

[Josh Leuze]

Just wanted to follow up with this. I tried the integration again from scratch with the same config as above, using WordPress 2.8 and bbPress 1.0-rc-3, but with the 1.0-rc-3 version of the bbPress Integration plugin.

The integration worked flawlessly, no issues with the code that bbPress Integration outputted, I can log in and out of both bbPress and wordPress, and access both admin panels.

Thanks for all of your hard work Sam, bbPress 1.0 is looking great!

[Josh Leuze]

Thanks for the information arturo84, I changed my cookie paths and now the integration is working great!