Reply To: WP Symposium converter for bbPress
Sorry my dump wasn’t successful in helping you out here…
Your dump was fine, it was just for quicker for me to install the plugin and have the examples included, if I wasn’t so tired the other night I would have done that in the first place and not asked. 😉
Slug vs. stub, I missed that one, I tried your version on my test install and it works !! It converted forum / topics / replies. Thanks! Couple of issues, questions, comments…
Awesome
In WPS terminology, there’s one forum made of categories. They can be nested. Along with subforums, they may contain topics with replies. One of these cats may be made the “default category” which users will be prompted with when posting in the forum frontpage, that’s ‘symposium_cats.defaultcat’. If not set, the first of the list will be the default. I’m not sure what happens if two or more cats are made default…
Cool, for example per this picture is what you are saying if I understand correctly is that I could choose the ‘Sun Dreesses’ forum to be the default forum selected when clicking ‘New Toipic’ from the WPS forums hopme page it will default to showing the ‘Sun Dresses’ forum as the destination for my topic unless I select another forum?
If that is the case then we can ignore this as we do not have that functionality in bbPress.
‘Allow new topics’ will basically close the category to new topics. Likewise, in a topic there’s a checkbox to allow new replies or close the topic.
I already implemented this for topics and partially for forums, I will fix this for forums shortly.
‘remote_addr’ is for monitoring spammers, I don’t think it deserves much interest in importing forum content as it’s mainly a short-time asset.
We do use IP addresses for Akismet and spam protection, we have some upcoming updates for this that will also take into account the users existing history on the site and from emory this can include the users IP address so I will take a look and see what can be done to add support for IPv6 as currently we only support IPv4.
I’ll go through your callback functions tomorrow, but a quick comment about values in WPS: they are either ‘on’ or anything else, possibly not set, so it’s better to revert the switch and test against the “case ‘on’” and any other “default” ?
That is what I have done for closed topics and will do the same for closed forums.
The group forum post from my demo install was converted. In the list of topics it is indicated as ‘no forum’ which is true (as per my previous post). We should either create a forum (named like the group itself for instance) or discard group forums topics altogether (WHERE symposium_topics.topic_group != 0).
phpBB has a similar sceanrio for a special sticky post, it is not assigned a forum. bbPress supports topics not having a forum so this technically doesn’t break things but we don’t have a ‘view’ that can show us topic s that are not in a forum.
I haven’t tried the WPS groups but I will create one and see what we can (or cannot) do with them.
About importing users, you raise an interesting point. I’d like to understand if this tool is a converter or an importer. Being located in a folder called /converter/ I had assumed it should work within the same WordPress install and convert it from one plugin to another, but you seem to move it towards the import of data accross platforms. Incidentally, I have been wondering why I need to fill the ‘Database Settings’ with db name / user / password / prefix, while I’m converting an existing forum within the same base. I’m happy with both, although I would tend to consider that most WP-to-WP imports will be performed within the same site…?
I would say it is more importer than converter though interchanging those terms is not much of a stretch as we do not only import stuff we also convert stuff then import :/
In total aside from WPS the only other importers that are also plugins ontop of WordPress are Mingle and SimplePress, the other 23 in most sceanarios would be a seperate database from the WordPress database. To extend the same issue I stated previously on how to handle users the same case applies, you are not explicitly limited to adding the bbPress plugin to your existing WP/WPS install and importing your data, you can also create a fresh WordPress install with a fresh database and import your data into that. So in theory we could ‘hide’ the database settings IF we knew your intented scenario before the fact. It would be nice in a future iteration to make the importer a ‘step by step wizard’ and we could then do such things and many more things to make the process a little less daunting…
The other topics I’d like to bring at some point in our discussion are the attachments and the avatars. I’m not sure yet how bbPress handles attachments, for WPS they are physically stored in a location set from the “params” tab, and displayed either online or as links (depending on a setting). As far as avatars, once WPS is deactivated they are all gone, is anything possible or is this too dependent upon the plugin the admin may install for avatars ?
There is a post in the Kunena importer thread where @cybnet has written an attachment importer with details on how to change it for your own Kunena forum. The source is here and no doubt could be adapted for WPS.
Edit: I should have added that bbPress does not include support for attachments, there is one or two plugins that do add support for attachments so I would look to using one of those and use that plugins architecture to facilitate how the attachments are handled. We’d like to support attachments in bbPress ‘one day’ though we have some bigger implementation details to work out before we have a crack at this.
Avatars are a bit trickier as bbPress nor WordPress do not support custom avatars for user profiles out of the box. There are many plugins for this so at the moment this is not something we can support. We can’t make avatar import support the hundres of avatar plugins available.
