[Stephen Edgar]

How do you have bbPress and Private Groups activated? Network or Per Site ?

Also as long as you ran the repair tools after importing from phpBB it shouldn’t be an issue, if you didn’t there is a chance, slim but plausible.

[Tom Dyer]

Oh, and the bbPress forums were migrated from phpBB using the import tool… I can’t see that being a factor in this particular issue, just throwing it out there 🙂

[piratescott]

Resolved. I used https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/i-have-created-a-bbpress-starter-theme-with-a-phpbb-look-and-feel/.

[Stephen Edgar]

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.

Kunena converter for bbPress 2.4

Kunena converter for bbPress 2.4

https://github.com/cybnet/kunena-attachments-to-bbpress/blob/master/kunena-attachments-to-bbpress.php

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.

[jbuesking]

Apparently having a few broken attachments lingering from a phpbb3 to Kunena migration several years ago is what is giving me a problem now migrating attachments to bbPress.

The error I’m seeing in my logs is:

[15-May-2014 22:32:08 UTC] PHP Warning:  copy(http://www.mydomain.com/media/kunena/attachments/phpbb3/Cabs%201.jpg) [<a href='function.copy'>function.copy</a>]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found
 in /home/username/public_html/dev002/kunena-attachments-to-bbpress.php on line 45

I looked to see if there was a “Kunena fix for broken attachments” script but nothing popped up yet.

[fasttimes]

Hello,

I am in the process of importing my current phpbb forum to bbPress. Most of the data seems to have migrated but Convert reply_to parents failed. So any topic with multiple pages is not formatting correctly or is missing posts.

According to the sources the migration script does the following steps:

STEP 1. Clean all tables.
STEP 2. Convert users.
STEP 3. Clean passwords.
STEP 4. Convert forums.
STEP 5. Convert forum parents.
STEP 6. Convert topics.
STEP 7. Stick topics.
STEP 8. Stick to front topics (Super Sicky).
STEP 9. Convert tags.
STEP 10. Convert replies.
STEP 11. Convert reply_to parents.

The steps from 1 through 10 were successful. Migration script failed on the 11th step.

Site that we are importing from is: http://www.ridingfeelsgood.com/forum/index.php

The phpbb forums where resynchronized prior to import.

Being imported to WP 3.9 on testing server with new theme.

Can you please offer some help to correct this.

Thanks,

[Stephen Edgar]

@zefred I hate this issue, I hit the same problem myself last week. 🙁

The root of the issue is a row (in your case the 29299th reply) in the database has some issue. What these issues are I have not been able to work out, the data looks perfect to me and for some reason it causes the import to stop. Every time I come across this issue I analyse the row from the database to try and find what the cause may be and have yet to come up with anything. It is also non forum specific so could be phpBB, vBulletin, Invision etc.

The workaround is to delete that 29299th reply from the source database and try again.

I know this is not an ideal solution but until I can identify the issue I’m unable to make the importer ‘workaround’ that invalid data. 🙁

[Stephen Edgar]

Double check your database settings, it looks like you are using phpbb for the table prefix, most likely this needs to be phpbb_.

You can check these settings by opening your phpBB config.php file and get the settings from that file:

eg.

$dbname = 'db_name';
$dbuser = 'db_user';
$dbpasswd = '1234';
$table_prefix = 'phpbb_';

[Pietmar]

WP 3,9
BBP 2.5.3
Twenty Ten
Database = 48Kb (according to PHPMYAdmin) and about 10kb exported

Tick all options in Importer. Get this: (Although I can see this Table in my database. If I repeat the process, I will get message of another Table not existing.)

Any suggestions?

Repair any missing information: Continue
WordPress database error: [Table ‘goandsta_phpb1.phpbbusers’ doesn’t exist]
SELECT convert(users.user_id USING “utf8”) AS user_id,convert(users.user_password USING “utf8”) AS user_password,convert(users.user_form_salt USING “utf8”) AS user_form_salt,convert(users.username USING “utf8”) AS username,convert(users.user_email USING “utf8”) AS user_email,convert(users.user_website USING “utf8”) AS user_website,convert(users.user_regdate USING “utf8”) AS user_regdate,convert(users.user_aim USING “utf8”) AS user_aim,convert(users.user_yim USING “utf8”) AS user_yim,convert(users.user_icq USING “utf8”) AS user_icq,convert(users.user_msnm USING “utf8”) AS user_msnm,convert(users.user_jabber USING “utf8”) AS user_jabber,convert(users.user_occ USING “utf8”) AS user_occ,convert(users.user_interests USING “utf8”) AS user_interests,convert(users.user_sig USING “utf8”) AS user_sig,convert(users.user_from USING “utf8”) AS user_from,convert(users.user_avatar USING “utf8”) AS user_avatar FROM phpbbusers AS users LIMIT 0, 100No users to convertNo data to cleanStarting Conversion

[Stephen Edgar]

Not at this stage it isn’t ‘out of the box’ you could modify the templates (in a child theme of course) and get the desired effect.

A good starting point for this is the code behind the concept of the following topic:

I have created a bbPress starter theme with a phpBB look and feel

You also reorganize some of your forum structure:

eg.
From:

-The Hunt
–Worldwide
—Los Angeles / Orange County
—New York
—Online
—SF Bay Area

To: (As unless you plan on including other planets and galaxies worldwide is kind of moot 😉

-The Hunt
–Los Angeles / Orange County
–New York
–Online
–SF Bay Area

[DietPipsi]

Hello. I would like to know if there is a plugin or work-around to have a folder or drop-down list of folders to choose from a listing of pre-uploaded avatars, similar to other forum softwares.

I do not want users to use gravatar, twitter or upload their own avatars. I just want a listing from the folder on my website. However, I am having trouble finding a plugin or tutorial on how to do this.

I apologize if what I am asking for is something simple to do, because I am completely new to wordpress and bbpress (I came over from phpbb). I don’t mind editing core files if that is what needs to be done. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Stephen Edgar]

I created a fix for this a few weeks ago, details are here.

[Stephen Edgar]

I just moved @conundrum89 reply to it’s own topic:

Plugin: bbPress Go To First Unread Post

== Description ==

bbPress Go To First Unread Post is a literally named plugin that allows registered users to jump to the first Reply in a Topic that they haven’t viewed yet. This gives your bbPress forum the simple and expected functionality of non-WordPress counterparts like phpBB, without a lot of coding.

First, you activate the plugin on a blog that already has the bbPress plugin enabled. This is all you need to do to activate the basic functionality of the plugin, which includes:

* Automatic tracking of last reply viewed, per topic per user.
* Link next to the title of a topic if the user has unread posts (between the title and pagination)

The plugin also includes two template tags for extra functionality:

* Mark Topics as Read link
* Mark Forum as Read link

[Stephen Edgar]

I am now implementing this for the next version of bbPress to support importing anonymous/guest users, thus far I only have it working for phpBB and am now working on adding it to the other importers.

[Matthew Rowland]

Hey guys, I’ve just submitted a plugin to the WordPress repository that should cover the basic functionality you’re after. Here’s the description:

== Description ==

bbPress Go To First Unread Post is a literally named plugin that allows registered users to jump to the first Reply in a Topic that they haven’t viewed yet. This gives your bbPress forum the simple and expected functionality of non-WordPress counterparts like phpBB, without a lot of coding.

First, you activate the plugin on a blog that already has the bbPress plugin enabled. This is all you need to do to activate the basic functionality of the plugin, which includes:

* Automatic tracking of last reply viewed, per topic per user.
* Link next to the title of a topic if the user has unread posts (between the title and pagination)

The plugin also includes two template tags for extra functionality:

* Mark Topics as Read link
* Mark Forum as Read link

I’ll post again here with a link when it’s been approved!

http://wordpress.org/plugins/bbpress-go-to-first-unread-post/

[Matthew Rowland]

Hey guys, I’ve just submitted a plugin to the WordPress repository that should cover the basic functionality you’re after. Here’s the description:

== Description ==

bbPress Go To First Unread Post is a literally named plugin that allows registered users to jump to the first Reply in a Topic that they haven’t viewed yet. This gives your bbPress forum the simple and expected functionality of non-WordPress counterparts like phpBB, without a lot of coding.

First, you activate the plugin on a blog that already has the bbPress plugin enabled. This is all you need to do to activate the basic functionality of the plugin, which includes:

* Automatic tracking of last reply viewed, per topic per user.
* Link next to the title of a topic if the user has unread posts (between the title and pagination)

The plugin also includes two template tags for extra functionality:

* Mark Topics as Read link
* Mark Forum as Read link

I’ll post again here with a link when it’s been approved!

[jerryskate]

Hmm seems like this did the trick for most if what i wanted to do, need to style it up though: https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/i-have-created-a-bbpress-starter-theme-with-a-phpbb-look-and-feel/

[Halo Diehard]

I’ve been working really hard on getting this up and running for a loooooong time, needed to convert it from phpbb3 so users were integrated. Been playing with the css and getting it mobile ready, integrating it with BuddyPress and such. Still got some bugs to work out, but I saw this section and figured it was time to share what’s possible. This is using the Custom Community theme, modified with css in a child theme of my design.

http://www.halodiehards.net/forums (if the link doesn’t work, I’ve changed the url from ‘hd-forums’ to ‘forums’)

Edit: I designed it using @lynq’s work found here – http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/i-have-created-a-bbpress-starter-theme-with-a-phpbb-look-and-feel/

[jpgrilo]

Hello
I have successfully migrated my forum from PHPBB to bbpress, but i have encountered a problem that i do not know how to result this

Example
If you visit this topic http://www.bushcraft-pt.org/?topic=leather-work-by-jpgrilo and try to click on button of the page 16 it will return an error “This is somewhat embarrassing, isn’t it?
It seems we can’t find what you’re looking for. Perhaps searching can help.”
I have found that the software is malforming the url. Instead of this http://www.bushcraft-pt.org/?topic=leather-work-by-jpgrilo&paged=16 he is generating this
http://www.bushcraft-pt.org/?topic=leather-work-by-jpgrilo6.
The strange thing is, if i click in the button referring the page 2 everything works fine.
How can i result this problem, any ideas?

WordPress 3.8.1 running Twenty Twelve theme.
bbpress Version 2.5.3

Thank you in advance
Joao

[davidkooo]

Hi, I tried your “bbPress starter theme with a phpBB look and feel” (downloaded from github), I have placed all files in my theme folder, but I have several problems:

1. On forum index http://batman.scifi-guide.net/forums you can see title of the last Forum on the very top.

2. If there is no topic in forum section, freshness link is displayed and heads to the Category

3. sub forums page looks very strange http://batman.scifi-guide.net/forums/forum/arkham-seria when compared to http://teamoverpowered.com/forums/forum/general-forums/

I am using latest WP and bbpress.

How to fix these issues?

Thank you.

[Robin W]

If you want it to look like PhPBB then the following links should help

I have created a bbPress starter theme with a phpBB look and feel

Forums index in the same layout as other bb software

[publicjohn]

hello, I woul’d like to create a forum but I have a question. What is the difference between this forum and PhPBB (I use PhPBB for an other forum). Can you help me?

[Stephen Edgar]

I have created a bbPress starter theme with a phpBB look and feel

[20millionmiles]

Is it possible to make bbPress look like a real forum? I want the typical board view with the categories like on phpBB or vBulletin. Any solutions for this? It seems that I am not the only person who wants that.

[Stephen Edgar]

This started dues to an issue when importing from phpBB. If a user had depeted their own account on a phpBB forum, phpBB didn’t reattribute the post author to a different author, rather just removed the account from being able to login etc. phpBB stores the author name alongside each topic and reply so once said author has been deleted you have the option to also not delete the users topics or replies and when viewing said topic the original author’s name will still be attributed to the topic or reply.

The goal was then to bbPress support this as when you import from a phpBB if the user doesn’t exist then we wouldn’t create a new user and as seen above if the user doesn’t exist then each topic and reply is attributed to the ‘Anonymous’ user.

Over in bbPress Trac Ticket #2347 we came up with a solution.

If you take a look at the patch I currently have sitting there (Keep in mind the current ‘Example.php’ customised importer you are using)

https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/attachment/ticket/2347/2347.diff

The first part in the phpBB.php section I added parts to import the topics user name, the replies username and then added a flag on the user that was being imported _bbp_phpbb_user_type. That gets enough of the data that we need into the WordPress database to enable us to manipulate that once the data has been imported.

So at the moment if your Lotus DB has these details already attached to the topics and replies then adding this to your custom import would be the first step.

Firstly in regards to Anonymous users in bbPress, an anonymous user CAN have a username and/or display and this is stored in wp_postmeta table as _bbp_anonymous_name and is what my comments in my previous reply were alluding to.

Next up I added a new Repair Tool to basically post process this imported data, I create a query that joins all the topics data from wp_posts and wp_postmeta along with the topics old phpBB stored username. Once all that is in a SQL result table each topic that is by an ‘anonymous’ author is then updated to change the _bbp_anonymous_name associated with that particular topics store phpBB topic author name. Then the same process is repeated for each reply.

So now we have deleted, closed, spammed users that were deleted or deactivated in some way form the legacy phpBB forum but the topics and replies were never deleted to keep the context of the original discussions.

These are now all anonymous users in WordPress/bbPress but actually have the original display name/ user name keeping that same original context.

So that is my theory I was getting to, make each of your imported Lotus users an anonymous user using their old original user/display name to keep that context of conversation.

Now this is why you don’t need to worry about email addresses nor passwords as the accounts are not actual accounts just placeholders of the names from the original discussion.

The next part of the puzzle is when your users now sign up to reactivate and participate in the new bbPress they are free to create there account, choose their username, customise their profile, pick a password, use any email address they choose etc etc.

And the final part is now ‘Joe Blogs’ has created a new account on your site we just need a tool that will reattribute the posts currently under the anonymous user account ‘Joe Blogs’ to the now active user ‘Joe Blogs’ and the job is done. You can currently do just that with the standard WordPress User administration to delete a user and then reattribute that users posts to another user during the delete process. We just go and tweak that process to also allow/mimic/recreate that process to be able to reattribute the anonymous ‘Joe Blogs’ topics and replies to now active user ‘Joe Blogs’.

So how’s all that sound? Clear as mud?

I wrote another ‘post import’ repair tool yesterday that I had planned on integrating with the above tool today but time got away from me so hopefully I’ll have time in the morning to do this and will keep the scenario I outlined above in mind so it can be used for more than just imported phpBB forums and can be extended for other imported forums and custom imports.