[Stephen Edgar]

Thanks for the screenshots, indeed it looks like no forums or topics are actually being imported.

A quick look at your forums_forum` table leads me to the following in how the forum section of your custom importer should look like, it is not complete as you have more data that what I could see in the screenshot you posted.

		/** Forum Section *****************************************************/

		// Forum id (Stored in postmeta)
		$this->field_map[] = array(
			'from_tablename' => 'forum',
			'from_fieldname' => 'forum_id',
			'to_type'        => 'forum',
			'to_fieldname'   => '_bbp_forum_id'
		);

		// Forum parent id (If no parent, then 0, Stored in postmeta)
		$this->field_map[] = array(
			'from_tablename' => 'forum',
			'from_fieldname' => 'cat_id',
			'to_type'        => 'forum',
			'to_fieldname'   => '_bbp_forum_parent_id'
		);

		// Forum title.
		$this->field_map[] = array(
			'from_tablename' => 'forum',
			'from_fieldname' => 'f_subject',
			'to_type'        => 'forum',
			'to_fieldname'   => 'post_title'
		);

		// Forum slug (Clean name to avoid conflicts)
		$this->field_map[] = array(
			'from_tablename'  => 'forum',
			'from_fieldname'  => 'f_subject',
			'to_type'         => 'forum',
			'to_fieldname'    => 'post_name',
			'callback_method' => 'callback_slug'
		);

		// Forum description.
		$this->field_map[] = array(
			'from_tablename'  => 'forum',
			'from_fieldname'  => 'f_subject',
			'to_type'         => 'forum',
			'to_fieldname'    => 'post_content',
			'callback_method' => 'callback_null'
		);

		// Forum dates.
		$this->field_map[] = array(
			'to_type'      => 'forum',
			'to_fieldname' => 'post_date',
			'default'      => date('Y-m-d H:i:s')
		);
		$this->field_map[] = array(
			'to_type'      => 'forum',
			'to_fieldname' => 'post_date_gmt',
			'default'      => date('Y-m-d H:i:s')
		);
		$this->field_map[] = array(
			'to_type'      => 'forum',
			'to_fieldname' => 'post_modified',
			'default'      => date('Y-m-d H:i:s')
		);
		$this->field_map[] = array(
			'to_type'      => 'forum',
			'to_fieldname' => 'post_modified_gmt',
			'default'      => date('Y-m-d H:i:s')
		);

If you modify your forum section per the above I think you will find you will now have forums imported, if you have a more detailed i.e. “full” view of the forum data I can help work out what elese we can add for a more complete import, the same goes for topics, if you can add full screenshots of ALL the rows in your forums_forum and forums_topic tables I can work out what else needs to be added 🙂

[Stephen Edgar]

This can be quite complex and is really not a “bbPress”, it is more a Apache/Nginx “thing”, take a look at the following on Stack Overflow, it describes the changes needed to redirect via .htaccess an old vBulletin to bbPress site:
http://stackoverflow.com/q/13920322/1911294

[Stephen Edgar]

HI @maddogmcewan, as per my note above, I split this to a new topic as there are sure to be a couple of things that will get confusing if we continued in that same topic.

To start with you should take a look in your wp_posts table, you should be able to find bbPress three custom post types forum, topic, and reply in the post_type column.

1. Check if you indeed have some post types forum in your wp_posts table.
2. Now find a topic in the wp_posts table, look at the post_parent, the ID of that field should relate to one of the ID values of the actual forums you found in step 1.
3. Replies are the same, find a reply, look up the post_parent and check if a topic with that same ID exists.

I’m expecting you have some mismatched data from your import and it is a matter of digging in to find what is broken in the data relationships.

[Stephen Edgar]

Here is the resultant SQL query for your code above:

SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS wp_posts.ID
FROM wp_posts 
INNER JOIN wp_postmeta ON wp_posts.ID = wp_postmeta.post_id
INNER JOIN wp_postmeta AS mt1 ON (wp_posts.ID = mt1.post_id)
INNER JOIN wp_postmeta AS mt2 ON (wp_posts.ID = mt2.post_id)
WHERE 1=1 

AND ( ( YEAR( post_date ) = 2014 ) )

AND wp_posts.post_type = 'topic'

AND (wp_posts.post_status = 'publish'
	OR wp_posts.post_status = 'closed'
	OR wp_posts.post_status = 'private'
	OR wp_posts.post_status = 'hidden')

AND (wp_postmeta.meta_key = '_bbp_last_active_time'
	OR (mt1.meta_key = '_bbps_topic_status'
		AND CAST(mt1.meta_value AS CHAR) LIKE '%1%')
	OR (mt2.meta_key = '_bbps_topic_status'
		AND CAST(mt2.meta_value AS CHAR) LIKE '%2%') 
	)

GROUP BY wp_posts.ID
ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date DESC
LIMIT 0, 15

I think you are hitting a known limitation of WordPress at the moment nesting queries, take a look at Boone’s posts on the improvements coming to WordPress 4.1:

Meta, Date, and Tax Query improvements in WP 4.1

…classes currently accept a ‘relation’ parameter, which allows multiple query clauses to be joined with AND or OR. So, for instance, you can query for: posts that are in the ‘Boone’ category AND have the tag ‘Awesome’ AND do not have the term ‘Raphael’ in the favorite_turtle taxonomy. But this syntax only allows for so much expressiveness: you can’t mix AND and OR, and you can’t group clauses. These limitations make it difficult to use these queries in support of complex content filtering…

Then take a read of the follow up post explaining what has happened since that first post, I haven’t had the time to look at how this changes affect bbPress, they should not break bbPress, but these will be something we will take a look at to a) Ensure bbPress is not affected by these WordPress 4.1 updates and b) How we can leverage these improvements in future versions of bbPress.

Update on Query improvements in 4.1

[Stephen Edgar]

@richkraetsch I expect this to be more of an issue with the GD BBPress Tools plugin rather than bbPress, they should have support in that plugin for the custom HTML tags it is using.

You can also try this plugin (and remove that custom code you added), I just added div and sub element class to this and it should work for you, you will need to double check and modify it to remove any HTML tags you do not need, also the next release of bbPress includes some more changes to the allowed KSES HTML tags so you’ll need to update and possibly make some more changes once bbPress 2.6 is released.

https://gist.github.com/ntwb/7797990

[Stephen Edgar]

Does this help? You should be seeing the “Tools” section in WordPress 4.0 most definately.

[Stephen Edgar]

You will find it is a conflict between your server time and the WordPress time zone setting, contact your web host to find out what time zone the servers clock is set to, then update your WordPress time zone to match.

[Stephen Edgar]

The “Right now in Forums” meta box has been removed for the next release of bbPress.

[Stephen Edgar]

@bestru, to your four questions, no, no, oh, and no 🙁

Attachments are on the drawing board for a future release, it is a complex request because as attachments can be various file types and in particular size is the killer here, during import waiting for a file from what could be a remote source is what breaks this for us, I have a solution planned and have started testing this but at this stage it is a no go for now, avatars are also in this same boat.

For private message you will need a plugin as bbPress does not suppoort private messages out of the box, maybe BuddyPress would do the trick for you here, I’d like to be able to import private messages as BuddyPress private messages in a furture version though.

The post date should be accurate, you should have your WordPress install using the same timezone offset as your existing forum used and then times should match.

[Stephen Edgar]

As noted in your other topic, your replies here were marked as spam, I’ve unmarked them all as spam and deleted the duplicates.

Testing that same BBCode you have in your reply above (the one I left published) it does look like there is an error/conflict, I’ll take a look at this during the week and get back to you.

Again, apologies for your replies being caught by our spam filter. 🙂

[Stephen Edgar]

Fixed, sorry about this, all your replies in the other topic were marked as spam for some reason, I have unspammed them and deleted the duplicates.

[Stephen Edgar]

I just tested the topic tag import and everything appears fine for me.

* I created a WordPress post tag topic
* I created a WordPress post category topic
* I created a WordPress post and added the tag topic and category topic to the post
* Imported from bbPress 1.2 with topics including the topic tag topic

All results appear fine for me, I have posts/topics correctly associated with each taxonomy:
* http://example.com/tag/topic/
* http://example.com/category/topic/
* http://example.com/forums/topic-tag/topic/

[Stephen Edgar]

Stephen my rant was no way a slight against you and your work, assuming you’re the lead programmer? I know it’s been a hard road, I’ve been using bbpress since version .9, and seen a few leads over the years.

I didn’t take it that way at all 🙂

@JohnJamesJacoby is the lead developer, I’ve just hitched along for the ride since trying to migrate from phpBB to bbPress didn’t work, I do far more than just the import side of things now, I’m still learning PHP and constantly finding more and more ways to improve bbPress.

Much to my delight, the posts in the wp category were not deleted, just the category itself. So I just recreated the category and put those posts in it again.

Excellent

But the tags in the wordpress site were definitely overwritten in the migration, including any custom taxonomies using the same slugs.

Ok, that’s a problem, it is also a scenario I haven’t tried and or thought of even though bbPress does register its own custom taxonomy. I’ll take a look at doing some imports with existing taxonomies in WordPress (tags/categories) and see what happens.

I also hope for a bright bbPress future and I have a pretty big wish list for it also, some documented around the place, some not 🙂

[Stephen Edgar]

@bestru Thanks, there is a minor bug in the SMF, it has been fixed for the next release.

If you take a look at this https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/5332 and change that mistaken <tt> for <br> in the SMF.php file things should work just fine.

Let me know how that goes for you 🙂

[Stephen Edgar]

A sleepless week later, it is done.

Been there, done that 😉

First, it imported all posts, even years-old spam, so I deleted that migration and figured out how to really delete spam in the standalone, and then imported again.

Tough gig, but once it is done it is done…

Then I found out that tags were not integrated, rather if tags were in the forum, they simply deleted any tags or custom taxonomies with the same name in the wordpress install. The site relies heavily on these tags, so we we spent a few days re-tagging everything and re-checking.

Tags should indeed work and import as expected, for example, here on bbpress.org this was imported using the same importer you used.

The “profile” tag ~7 year old topics -> https://bbpress.org/forums/topic-tag/profile/page/7/

Now this morning I see that one entire category of the wp install was deleted. Luckily it was not a heavily trafficked section of the site. At this point we’ve put days of work into this data, so rather than roll back, we’ll recreate that category.

WordPress deleted a category or forum? or was the category/forum not imported?

bbpress has given our site community many things over the years, I can’t complain at all. But the new version is much slower than the standalone version, and much harder for us to edit and modify. My viewers actually have a diminished experience now.

We are improving performance for the next release and yes, things are different now that it is a WordPress plugin, I can’t even begin to count the improvements I’d like added to bbPress, there are many, but not so much time to make it all happen quickly. 🙂

The tide has turned over the years. While WordPress fumbled with bbpress and buddypress, Facebook came to the fore and basically sucked all the community out of the wp platform. It’s a shame, and not likely to turn around for any of us here. I applaud the hard work of the devs who worked on this platform over the years, but it has been an exhausting experience this last week, and I am not done yet. It will be another sleepless night.

Thanks for applause and migrating data from one platform to another is not the easiest thing in the world, I’ve tried to help make it easier and more reliable but again more can be done and not enough time to do it.

[Stephen Edgar]

@tehred Go to SMF’s website to find details on how to install SMF, you probably want to install the same version that the database backup is from (if you know it).

You should have a MySQL database backup, typically these are named filename.sql, filename.sql.zip or filename.gz, this is an actual export of the database data rather than the actual files used as part of the website.

You should be able to import (once you find it) that file into MySQL as a new database, then you point bbPress’ import to that database name in the import settings along with username and password and table prefix (most likely smf_).

Once you start running the import it copies the data from your old SMF database into the WordPress database you are using with bbPress, your original SMF database is not altered in anyway, it is still best practice to make sure you have backups of your SMF and WordPress database all the same.

[Stephen Edgar]

@bestru Your database table name is bestru_smf and that looks correct, your table prefix does not look correct, in the screenshot you are using _smf, I think you will find it should be smf_, see this screenshot showing the table names inside my import_smf database https://cloudup.com/cTo5XoXDEBn

[Stephen Edgar]

@ tehredThe database needs to be exported from any existing MySQL install and imported into the same MySQL server you are using for WordPress, you should be able to find details on importing and exporting MySQL databases from your webhost support or knowledgebase help sections of their website.

[Stephen Edgar]

I haven’t taken a close look for a while at attachment importing has some limitations that we really can’t do at this stage until some improvments upstream in WordPress Core are added.

For now the best solution I have seen would be to adapt the following for Vanilla 2.1

https://github.com/CybMeta/kunena-attachments-to-bbpress

Kunena converter for bbPress 2.4

Kunena converter for bbPress 2.4

Out of curiousity which attachment/file upload plugin are you using with Vanilla as I believe it doesn’t include one in the standard install.

[Stephen Edgar]

The top two importers included with bbPress are phpBB and SMF, primarily because these are the two most popular importers and where most feature requests come from.

I’d love to know some detailed information on what/why/where you think the phpBB import is broken and/or why you don’t think it works so well.

I haven’t seen any reports for quite a while on issues with the phpBB importer.

[Stephen Edgar]

It could also be an from the HTML entities not being correctly imported from a previous forum.

[Stephen Edgar]

The code /includes/admin/converters/SMF.php#L717 is replacing [tt] and [/tt] respectively with <tt> and </tt> and a quick lookup of the “teletype” HTML tag shows we should not really be using it all 😉

http://www.w3.org/wiki/HTML/Elements/tt

Can you post the HTML raw source of the post from SMF for me, this will allow me to see if it is currently doing it correctly, which I think it is per the details and screenshot below.

SMF Source: [sup]superscript[/sup]<br />[sub]subscript[/sub]<br />[tt]teletype[/tt]
bbPress Converted Source: <sup>superscript</sup><br><sub>subscript</sub><br><tt>teletype</tt>

https://i.cloudup.com/jnMQwRKTXA.png

We probably should rather than converting them <tt> / </tt> convert them to a span and/or p HTML elements:

e.g.

<span style="font-family: monospace;">
This is a sample.
</span>

[Stephen Edgar]

I had a quick look around to see if I could find if it was a port or fork of another forum project but very little info was around.

I’d suggest taking a look at either the phpBB or SMF importers, they are pretty much the top two importers that are included with bbPress and have the best “import” feature support for bbPress.

The ‘Example.php” importer also tries (I know it can/could/should be better) to explain some of the field mappings.

I made a start on guessing the field mappings for the forum section based on the phpBB importer:

Using a table prefix deluxebb_ should work fine with the field map 'from_tablename' => 'forums',, as the converter joins these staements together giving you deluxebb_forums 🙂

https://gist.github.com/ntwb/da6466dc2b057942f0fa

I’ll let you have a crack at the topics, replies and users and then I’m more than happy to tweak it with some of the newest updates that will be included in the next release of bbPress.

[Stephen Edgar]

Ticket created on Trac: https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/2698

[Stephen Edgar]

Thanks for the ticket in Trac, we will work on adding either of the plugins mentiooned in the Trac ticket to bbPress.

https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/2698