[whitewall]

Thanks for the replies.

We have had some performance issues also with phpBB so far, especially with the latest topics and phpBB2’s search system. Also phpBB is too complex for our usage because we need to customize the board for our needs and integrate it into our webzine and other scripts we will use in our website’s next version.

Our combination would be a wordpress installation for a webzine which will be managed by only a small number of our editors but it would be nice to have all our registered users to comment the posts logged in with their accounts.

Then the bulletin board should be readable by all visitors but posting is for only the registered users. We should have our 52 forums categorized in 5 or 6 different groups. And there are also various private forums which should be readable and writeable only by a certain user groups. I guess this is not fully supported by bbPress or it’s plugings yet?

Then we would customize the user profile page and user registration and management system into our own, because there will be paid “VIP” members and free registered users and users should be also categiorized in different groups. Also we have our own solution for the private messaging. I guess all this could be done outside the bbPress.

There are also few scripts of our own such as event calendar, classified ads, galleries etc. which would use the same user management / login system.

So the main usage of bbPress would be handling the forum posting, editing and basic forum stuff and together with WordPress and our own extensions they would make a nice platform for a social networking online community. Maybe some of these customizations and extensions of ours would even be possible to publish as a plugins when they’re ready and working.

We have studied also vBulletin and SMF but so far bbPress seems to be the best bb for our needs.

[johnhiler]

That’s a really high number of posts and pageviews!

My bbPress forum is # 12 on that top100 list. It’s not nearly as large as your phpBB site but I’ll share the scaling problems I’ve come across, in case it’s useful.

Probably the biggest problem I face is that the Google Sitemaps plugin doesn’t scale very well. I believe the most popular Sitemaps plugin regenerates the sitemap upon every publish; this hangs my site every time someone comments on a post. I’m actually exploring the possibilities around upgrading or programming the existing sitemap plugins, to provide a more scalable solution here. But without a good solution here, my content isn’t as Google friendly as it could be.

Also, the Akismet spam solution is decent… but the bbPress moderation management tools aren’t as robust as they are on WordPress. So moderating the spam queue takes a decent amount of time a day, especially as the site has grown larger. If the problem continues to grow, I’ll look into plugin solutions to help out here.

Finally, the account management tools on bbPress aren’t very robust. For example, I get emails every day from users saying they forgot their username, or would like to reset their password. bbPress doesn’t currently have easy ways for users to retrieve a forgotten username or to easily reset their password (they can reset the password, but first they have to put in a username/password and fail a signin attempt). I’m actually working on plugins and theme changes to address this one now, but it currently creates a decent amount of work answering emails from confused users.

My final concern actually is around bbPress 1.0. I am very happy on bbPress 0.9, but version 1.0 is around the corner and seems to be a lot less lightweight than the current version. I’m also concerned about the lack of backwards compatibility with some 0.9 plugins. This wouldn’t be a huge issue, but bbPress 1.0 is currently necessary to ensure cookie/signin compatibility with the latest version of WordPress.

If you are considering bbPress as a standalone forum for a huge site, I’d definitely recommend it – as long as there are plugins for all the features you currently support on your forum.

If you’re considering bbPress in conjunction with WordPress, I’d hold off until bbPress 1.0 comes out of beta and/or a plugin supporting bbPress 0.9/WordPress 2.7 cookie integration comes out.

Just my two cents… hope that helps!

[whitewall]

We are looking for a new bb-platform for our online community which has over 20.000 registered users and our phpBB has now 1,2 million posts on 52 forums. There are 30.000 new posts every month and about 1,2 million pageloads per week. In the rush hours there have been over 500 users online at the same time.

I find bbPress very interesting but will it be able to handle the load our bulletin board will have?

[chrishajer]

I assume you’ve already been through these:

https://bbpress.org/forums/tags/phpbb

What version of bbPress are you talking about?

[Simon Wheatley]

Anyone know of a current phpBB to bbPress importer? I’ve got Jaime’s (http://www.iteisa.com/phpbb2bbpress/) which is getting me some way, but doesn’t seem to be aimed at the current DB schema.

I’m going to keep hacking away, but any suggestions would be gratefully received.

[Shivanand Sharma]

Apologies for my brevity. I did find some technical issues that I should mention here – sometimes the script will fail to import in case forum title or description have the (‘) character like the word don’t,can’t etc. in that case I had to change them to do not, can not etc..

Once you hit an error you must start from the begining by truncating the bbpress tables else it will throw error about duplicate keys etc. Hope this info helps someone.

[Shivanand Sharma]

A million thanks to you. Love you.

[circulartrend]

Hi there,

Question for all of you. I am currently using wordpress and bbpress for a forum and I want to know if its possible to transfer members/posts over from WP/BBPress to a PHPBB message board? I don’t know a ton about databases as far as back end coding etc, but I wonder if its possible and how easy/hard it would be to make it work?

Thanks for any information,

Adam

[pro101]

OK — I stumbled upon the FAQ and saw the htaccess code to add. I LOVE the URLs, could never get to this in phpBB. If this thing is secure, I’m going to love bbPress. Kudos to the dev team, very cool forum software!

And thanks Angie!

[mikedb]

I’m just wondering if bbpress has a few features that I require, I currently maintain a website that has wordpress and phpbb on it. The forums has a whack load of sub forums along with ones only visible by certain members, I’m wondering if it is possible to make sub forums along with special ranks along with moderator and admin?

Because currently trying to make my wordpress theme work on the forums is being a real pain, I’ve gotten it to work for firefox but in IE its a mess, so I’m hoping bbpress could be my salvation if you will.

I’m also wondering if bbpress is easy to setup with Yahoo Small business hosting? I also maintain another site in works that requires a way to post “ads” kind of like craigs list but can only be posted by an admin.

Help on any of these issues would be great.

[_ck_]

Yeah they do that for vbulletin and phpbb too, so I suspect it’s a problem they have to work out.

[_ck_]

Several month ago, Google started showing special meta data in search results for popular forums like vBulletin and phpBB, like how many posts in a topic, the last date of the last post, etc.

Unfortunately since every forum type is different, younger forum types were left out, including bbPress. I tried to find the right person to contact at Google to help them add bbPress, but to no avail.

However I was very pleased to notice tonight that Google is suddenly showing meta info for sites using bbPress forums!

Here is a search example:

http://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Abbpress.org+forums+browser

Here is a highlighted snapshot in case you have no idea what I am taking about:

http://img144.imageshack.us/img144/9336/googlebbpressdetectionok7.png

It’s only working on a handful of sites using bbPress at the moment but hopefully that will grow and this is a very good sign.

[vari]

Hi, Got my phpbb3 converted, only issue I have is that the member names are not showing up on posts within BBpress, all the members are listed on the members page but under the avatar and where it says “started xx minutes ago by” are blank spaces.

This also happens on new posts I make, no username appears.

Any Ideas?

EDIT I’ve actually managed to figure it out, The display_name field is blank in the sql table, not sure if this is brought over as part of the conversion and it just hasn’t worked.

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

There’s this:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/phpbb3-gt-bbpress-converter-beta-release

[martenk]

Mostly the ability to bridge it to other scripts. Such as Coppermine etc.

It could probably be done, but I don’t really have the time to write a bunch of scripts for it. Which is too bad because I’ve really come to like bbPress and will most certainly recommend it to other people seeking a light forum without the extra bells and whistles phpBB and the likes offer.

[copperblade]

lingmiester, I looked through the code and I didn’t see anything that sends email to anyone. I did see a “joke” about sending the emails to spammers though.

Is there any update on this, or newer script for importing phpbb2 ?

[John James Jacoby]

This is how phpBB already works.

I think its a good idea though.

[Tom Lynch]

I have recently migrated my entire phpBB over to bbPress and now want to move the bbPress users into wordpress mu so I can use wordpress integration the problem was that there is no easy way to migrate and check the users aren’t doubling up…

I wrote a simple php script to do just that and it allowed me to list out the users where manual attention is required, it can be run just from the command line like this…. ‘php -f file.php’ and will move the users over perfectly (at least for me)…

Note there has been no testing of this code it worked for me and may cause you issues, back up your database first!

Comments on the code appreciated for future improvement.

‘<?php

echo “n”;

echo “+

---

+n”;

echo “| bbPress to WordPress User Migration |n”;

echo “+

---

+n”;

echo “| Created by: |n”;

echo “| Tom Lynch |n”;

echo “+

---

+n”;

echo “n”;

echo “Messages:n”;

echo “n”;

echo “Username Messagen”;

echo ”

---

---

n”;

function printSpaces($username) {

$spaces = 25 – strlen($username);

echo $username;

for ($i = 0; $i < $spaces+1; $i++) {

echo ” “;

}

}

// Enter your database host, username and password here…

mysql_connect(‘localhost’, ‘username’, ‘password’);

// Enter your database name here (both tables must be in same database – sorry)

mysql_select_db(‘database’);

$migrated = 0;

$errors = 0;

$query = mysql_query(“SELECT user_login, user_pass, user_nicename, user_email, user_url, user_registered, user_status, display_name FROM bb_users WHERE user_pass LIKE ‘$P$B%’;”);

while ($data = mysql_fetch_assoc($query)) {

$query2 = mysql_query(“SELECT user_login, user_email FROM wp_users WHERE user_login = ‘”.$data.”‘ || user_email = ‘”.$data.”‘;”);

if (mysql_num_rows($query2) > 0) {

$data2 = mysql_fetch_assoc($query2);

if ($data == $data2 && $data == $data2) {

// Suppressing already migrated users error

//echo printSpaces($data) . ” has already been migrated by the looks of it!n”;

} else if ($data == $data2) {

echo printSpaces($data) . ” could not be migrated, that user name is already taken! (“.$data.”)n”;

$errors++;

} else if ($data == $data2) {

echo printSpaces($data) . ” could not be migrated, that email address is already taken! (“.$data.”)n”;

$errors++;

}

} else {

mysql_query(“INSERT INTO wp_users (user_login, user_pass, user_nicename, user_email, user_url, user_registered, user_status, display_name) VALUES (‘” . $data . “‘, ‘” . $data . “‘, ‘” . $data . “‘, ‘” . $data . “‘, ‘” . $data . “‘, ‘” . $data . “‘, ‘” . $data . “‘, ‘” . $data . “‘);”);

// Suppressing user migrated message

//echo $data . ” was migratedn”;

$migrated++;

}

}

$alreadyDone = ((mysql_num_rows($query) – $errors) – $migrated);

echo “n”;

echo “Stats:n”;

echo “n”;

echo “Users Migrated: ” . $migrated . “n”;

echo “Already Migrated: ” . $alreadyDone . “n”;

echo “Not Migrated: ” . $errors . “n”;

echo “=======================================n”;

echo “Total: ” . mysql_num_rows($query) . “n”;

echo “n”;

?>’

[John James Jacoby]

You know, I’ve thought about this type of thing, and I think that bbPress really tries to hide the forum layout as much as possible. It doesn’t surprise me that it would work this way, as super stickies tend to really act like forum wide announcements than as stickies. That being said, showing them in a forum that’s already halfway hidden is a little redundant.

bbPress really does work much differently than your typical forum, and it takes a little massaging to make it feel like phpBB or vBulletin.

[eclipsenow]

Thanks, that’s a really useful post.

Almost won over.

However, that installation + configuration video did freak me out a bit. I remember something about copying over cookies looked quite intimidating? How do I store the WP cookies the way the install video did, that didn’t seem clear?

Also, what’s your favourite theme been? I note that this thread alternates between grey and white, and that’s nice, but what happens when people just want it to be one colour and have quotes in some other colour? (So you can automatically tell, phpbb3 style, that someone is quoting someone else and replying to them specifically.)

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

The answer can only be found in what you want to do with your site.

If you want an all in one, integrated what not, you need a CMS. If you want a blog, I’d say you want WordPress (or similar). Functionality is the name of it all. Sometimes you find a tool you love so much you’re willing to forgo integration for features. Other times you decide you have to have it all be on. I’ve run Drupal, WordPress, bbPress, Gallery, PostNuke, PHPNuke, phpBB, SMF, InvisionBoard, MediaWiki, and more. They all fit the needs I had for the site I was designing at the time.

Figure out what you want to do, and what will be more important. If you have to have native integration, use a CMS. If you don’t, then your choices are infinite.

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

The answer can only be found in what you want to do with your site.

If you want an all in one, integrated what not, you need a CMS. If you want a blog, I’d say you want WordPress (or similar). Functionality is the name of it all. Sometimes you find a tool you love so much you’re willing to forgo integration for features. Other times you decide you have to have it all be on. I’ve run Drupal, WordPress, bbPress, Gallery, PostNuke, PHPNuke, phpBB, SMF, InvisionBoard, MediaWiki, and more. They all fit the needs I had for the site I was designing at the time.

Figure out what you want to do, and what will be more important. If you have to have native integration, use a CMS. If you don’t, then your choices are infinite.

[eclipsenow]

Yeah, point taken. And I have to say, I’m attracted to the design of WP and BBpress. But Malice, what didn’t you like about Joomla?

Honestly, I’m not here to troll but am keeping an eye on all developments across the Joomla / WordPress / Drupal divide. (But Drupal gives me the shudders because I don’t know php language).

Joomla has new extensions being developed all the time, and there’s a whole new 1 click blog installation coming out to. The “Agora” module is truly revolutionary with it’s 1 click installation into Joomla with complete integration. Also, the current “ugly” Agora forum templates are getting a total work over after version 3 is introduced. Agora is a complete package that does something like 70% or 80% of everything phpbb3 does, and so I don’t need to go hunting down 20 extensions.

So Malice, what’s not to like? I’m almost beginning to think that it’s what one encounters the best community support with first. “First impressions” matter, much like joining a new community, church, or whatever. Good experience first time and some small measure of progress made = lifetime member, and all other competing opportunities screened out as “too hard, I’ve made my choice”. It’s just the way it seems I function and many others… newbies that is. Maybe long term professional web designers and developers have made their choices on more rational grounds.

[eclipsenow]

Hi,

I am using phpbb3 for now, but I’m not really good at database stuff and admin stuff. I love all open source projects, especially phpbb3, bbpress, wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, etc… even though I’m not very “Geeky” yet and am only just beginning to learn the basics of CSS (let alone php etc).

So… I am speaking from the perspective of a non-technical forum administrator frustrated by various interactions of various software. I don’t mind doing the grunt work of setting things up IN the software, but don’t know the code to work ON software. EG: Once phpbb3 is installed, I can easily set up forums, permissions, etc. It’s just easy point and click stuff. But messing around in mysql and database stuff still terrifies me, I’m afraid of breaking something. It’s all too big. I just want to install it and have it work.

I appreciate that there are various philosophies behind each style of software, but here goes…

MY ULTIMATE WISH LIST

1. Nothing to do with you guys, but number 1 on my list is to have Fantastico (or something equivalent) that can make installation of WordPress / Joomla / Whatever EASY! (My client is a volunteer campaigning group that just happened to choose Brinkster which don’t use Cpanel, let alone have Fantastico).

2. After EASY fantastico installation, I install WordPress.

3. Then within WordPress I browse across to the various add-ons pages in the WordPress Control Panel (A VERY cool new feature of WordPress that Drupal and Joomla should add to their systems!) and then click “INSTALL FORUM?” and WordPress suddenly installs a completely compatible forum, just like that, with all the power of phpbb3 built-in.

4. I then choose 1 of say 20 or 30 “looks” (templates, themes, whatever) that are already pre-configured to allow sign-in of users on all pages, especially the forum page. If I want to change the colour of a background element or use a new image in the header, I just point and click to template editing and do it ala Blogger. (No CSS required).

This sort of software is on the way. Joomla now has “Agora” which is already fairly advanced. Once Joomla is installed through the 50 second Fantastico installation, Agora only takes about 50 seconds to install as well. EVEN I CAN DO IT! But the Joomla / Agora combination does not yet have Step 4, which is killing me… I have to muck around with all sorts of plug-ins and extra bits to get a horizontal log-in menu I can put up just under my header (so it’s in the same place no matter what template I’m in).

I saw the video of how to integrate WP and BBpress, and ran a mile screaming! It just looked very intimidating.

So anyway, the Joomla / Agora combination is hardly perfect, but as you know these things keep on developing and Hazzaa over at Agora is MANIC in the rate he’s developing his product. Version 3 is nearly out, and it’s only been 10 months.

Just thought I should give you guys the heads up. The competition is great, because it forces us all to evolve.

EG: I LOVE the sound of WordPress’s new one click upgrade function, and hope Joomla gets that soon! (It’s just me and database stuff again… eeerrgh!) Combine that with easy forum upgrades, backups, etc, and software that’s Mac-like in that it “just works”, and I’m a happy camper.

PS: I forgot to check this thread in case there were replies, because I automatically get an email from every other forum I belong to. Old habits die hard. Agora has an automatic emailing function built in, it’s not a plug in.

[deadlyhifi]

just found this post regarding the ‘inactive’ thing, although their fix hasn’t fixed my issue.

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/successful-convert-smf-gt-phpbb2-gt-bbpress#post-14831