[wmnasef]

no worries about subforums, they will appear as with phpbb3, but bbpress doesn’t have the hidden forum option so they will be viewable to everyone after conversion.

maybe you can use that plugin to hide them again after conversion.

[hhberthelsen]

Sounds awesome, will test it one of the next days. We have nearly 200.000 posts – will be interesting to test, and surely on my own dedicated server 😮

Any concerns regarding subforums or “hidden” forums, that i should be warned about?

[John James Jacoby]

I think you summed it up awesomely. I know that I’ve only recently discovered bbPress, and that right now my contributions are minimal and certainly don’t justify the attitude that came out of my fingers. I do sincerely apologize for venting my frustrations, but Chris is totally right as far as login and theme integration go.

I graduated to WordPress from phpBB and the CHBB categories hierarchy spin-off of phpBB2.x. What I love about WP, I hate about phpBB, and what I love about phpBB, I hate about WordPress. What the phpBB team always did well, was catalog and document their code and coding guidelines, almost always and from the start. Even though different authors wrote different pages, the code always looked the same and worked the same, but WP and BBP aren’t like that. Finding and repairing WP/BBP issues is becoming increasingly difficult as there are functions hidden within functions that add one extra capability just to echo other functions.

If I could have a dream job right now, it would be to get paid to be the code janitor to the automatic teams code for the wp3.0 and bbpress 2.0 milestones. To refresh the codebase for the major revisions. Also coming from phpBB, I’m surprised to see WP uses so many echo statements all over the place. I feel the template engine that the phpBB Categories Hierarchy uses was just so amazing and worked so well that moving to WordPress felt like a step sidways.

Anyhow, I’ve taken this topic way off topic, and I don’t mean to vent my ill feelings in what should be a celebration topic. If you mods want to clean this up or split this apart I would totally understand.

Cheers!

[_ck_]

I just disagree with promoting a product before it’s even usable.

bbPress is very usable, just not finished. But it’s certainly *not* being promoted. All we have is this support forum. If it was being promoted, it would be listed on WordPress.org/WordPress.com and there would be hundreds of thousands of users. bbPress currently has less than 10,000 active installs. That should change by this time next year.

bbPress was originally written by Matt to simply give a support forum for WordPress (WordPress.org). Everything from there was just Matt releasing the source. There never was a general plan after that until Matt started talking about TalkPress which is still very far away by my best guess.

bbPress’s greatest strength is it can be integrated in many websites easily and made to look like them easily. But it’s still a growing child and very young. If you are looking for a polished product, you need something with over half a decade of development like phpBB, vBulletin or SMF. The downside to them is they are very rigid and hard to develop for. bbPress is incredibly easy to develop for, I only learned PHP a few years ago and look what I’ve managed to do. Just imagine what a person who knew what they were doing could do

[wmnasef]

hi !

am working on moving my site from phpbb3 to bbpress, of course there is no converters out there for that purpose, so i decided to write my own.

am still testing it and trying to improve the code a little bit. right now it can convert the following :

1- forums

2- topics, completely with topic types and status.. announcements and glopal announcements are stickied to front page.

3- posts, all bbcode is converted into html, smiles are changed into img tags, so you might want to install allow images plugin.

4- users, including permissions .. notice that bbpress doesn’t support per forum permissions as phpbb3, so it only convert users as following :

founder -> key master

inactive -> inactive

banned -> blocked

moderators and admins are converted into normal users, so you have to assign them again

because phpbb3 doesn’t use md5 hashing anymore, the script copies passwords as it is. to solve that problem i modified the md5 insecurity for bbpress plugin to first check the passwords the phpbb3 way, if it matches, it will rehash it using bbpress functions.

the script converts all the table rows at once, so it’s very heavy and consumes too much cpu depending on your forum size, i strongly suggest that you do the conversion on your own machine, not on a shared hosting account. you might also want to increase the php max execution time on your machine before starting the script cause it takes lots of time converting posts.

here is the steps for converting your phpbb3 board :

1- make a backup from your database and files.

2- install bbpress anywhere, just use the same database of phpbb3. this is important cause the script assumes that all tables are in the same database.

3- download the script from here. extract it, and you’ll get 2 files.

4- copy the file phpbb3tobbpress.php to phpbb3 directory.

5- copy the file _phpbb3_pass.php to bb-plugins directory.

6- go to http://path-to-phpbb3/phpbb3tobbpress.php and start converting your board.

7- voila .. all your data is converted to bbpress tables, go to your bbpress installation and login. don’t forget to visit admin->manage->recount to make sure your converted board is updated.

i can’t stress enough on how consuming is the process of converting posts, my board has 25,000 posts, and it takes nearly 15 minutes to convert them on my local machine, so again : i don’t recommend using this converter on shared hosting.

ciao !

[the_Wish]

I was looking into this the other day since I know that phpBB has a plugin to do just that, show a downsized clickable Image to prevent users from messing with the layout.

Here’s the Demo: http://phpbbegypt.com/PHPBB/viewtopic.php?t=70

My users are annoying in that aspect. : /

Wonder if this could be translated into bbPress.

[wmnasef]

i used phpbb for like 5 years now, it’s a great forum software, but i have to say that i admire the simple/plain approach of bbpress.

so, am working on a phpbb3 -> bbpress converter. so far i figured all i need to convert forums, topics, posts, user info. i only have a problem moving user passwords, so does anybody know of a way of importing user passwords from phpbb3 to bbpress ? the problem is that phpbb3 doesn’t use plain md5 anymore, and i don’t know exact details about the new hashing method.

am thinking about importing all users without passwords- or even with unified password, then generate new passwords for them all through bbpress admin panel and send it to their emails, but if i can import passwords it would be far better.

anybody interested in helping me ?

[John James Jacoby]

@elwagar: Conversely, once they are registered you can assign them a role by going to the bbPress admin, WordPress Integration, and remapping. I feel like a plug-in could help this registration laziness along, but I also think this should just work correctly right away.

I actually had a similar issue years ago integrating phpBB 2.x and osCommerce together, trying to get one to work inside the other with cookies and what-not was a really big problem, one that I never really did get working 100% correctly.

I have no experience with bbPress Live, but it might be worth looking into. CK posted a really nice SQL example on how to grab information without a plug-in, so if you can’t get that to work, you could always put in a little manual labor.

[nicknichols]

Greetings…after becoming disenchanted with phpBB our science forum is looking for a new home. But we need to be able to upload large documents, spreadsheets, PPTs, etc. for each other to view. If we can do the uploads/downloads of data….bbPress would be GREAT! But from what I can see one can only attach 100K docs. Is there a plugin for larger uploads? Server space is no problem for us.

Thanks! –Nick

[sidisok]

I am also curious as to when a converter would be available. The only thing holding me back from switching to bbPress is the lack of an easy way to import a phpBB3 database into a bbPress installation.

[bryan868]

Is there an ETA on the converter?

[Paulo Espíndola]

great post problem solved

[Paulo Espíndola]

I’m using a translator, I would like to import my phpbb 3 for wordpress the easy way and practice …

[techypenguin]

Thanks but the quiries doesnt work. might be because of my theme. anyway, most of the paid server out there are much faster than the virtualhost. all other cms template like phpbb3 and mambo i’ve tried are slower than the previous version of them. i already max out my cache on the server but it’s still slow . sometime it’s crash after a week or so. dont have budget for the bladeserver though.haha

[mxadness]

A simple phpBB3 to bbPress converter would be great. I really hope this gets done soon — bbPress + WordPress absolutely rocks.

[chrishajer]

You would need to map all the old phpBB URLs to new bbPress URLs, one to one, since it doesn’t look like there’s an easy way to create a rewrite rule. Once you have all the URLs before and after, you can create 301 redirect rules in your .htaccess file.

[stevedrum]

as someone who has used phpbb 2, phpbb3, invision and many other smaller packages i was probably a little bit biased towards forums. but then i started blogging with wordpress, and hence to bbpress.

let me say first of all that i like bbpress. after using those other bloated packages for years, it’s refreshing to get back to what it’s all about: a lightweight forum that’s just for… talking.

but i agree with the guy who wrote the original post. there are some things that a forum package needs. using bbpress straight out of the box is like stepping back in time.

here are my personal bugbears…

1) guests need the ability to post. you can’t build up a forum from scratch without that — it’s near impossible. because no one bothers to sign-up until the forum is relatively busy.

2) you need some kind of permission system. otherwise how can you talk to the other moderators? there is no PM system (which is fine) — but the only way you can do it out of the box is by email. you need to be able to create a forum that only the moderators can see, and other stuff like that.

i haven’t looked at the new version you’re working on, so maybe they are included in the new one. but leaving stuff like that up to the plug-in makers is crazy. Not that the plugins wouldn’t work fine, because no doubt they would — but nobody could be certain that a plugin will still work when a new version comes out. it could potentially wreck the usability of your board.

i think when you leave simple stuff like that out all it does is put off the people who might otherwise be prepared to switch over from packages like phpbb.

i do like bbpress though, and i am still going to carry on using it. …so i say these criticisms with love!

[_ck_]

Heh, Kevin you made what I had been working on at random times. A phpbb template for bbPress. Except my project was to use real phpbb templates and translate them into bbPress templates from the raw files. Kinda gave up on that one after the first week so I’m glad you made it happen (at least the default template).

To the best of my knowledge, no one has made a theme with non-table front-page/forum-page. But hey I have 5000 bbPress sites sitting in my db so I can do a scan for you later and let you know if any of them managed to pull it off.

This is a list of all the existing, public/free bbPress themes to date:

http://bbshowcase.org/forums/view/available-themes

Oh and yes, there is no documentation. This has always been a complaint, but no-one has risen to the task. The problem is bbPress has been constantly changing – there isn’t even an official/final 1.0 release yet, which is probably why no-one has pinned it down. The database from 0.9 to 1.0 changed somewhat radically too. Now that 1.0 beta is in sight, someone should probably start working on some notes for plugin and theme developers.

What would probably help is an official codex for bbPress. There’s an unofficial wiki but it’s barely used. If it was a tab here, that would be entirely different.

ps. I completely disagree with the idea of trying to uses lists where tables currently are. Tables have vertical rows that can be sorted which would be 100x times harder with lists. Javascript has specific abilities on tables that don’t exist in lists. Lists do not have vertical relationships between their “cells”.

I am not at all discouraging you from trying it as it would be interesting to see. But lists for the sake of simply not using tables is wrong IMHO.

[fontadoni]

Hello Ipstenu, thanks for your response. Sorry, I should have mentioned that the new bbpress board is actually on the same folder as the previous phpbb one (/forum), however, I get people coming from google trying to find phpbb pages like:

/forum/viewtopic.php?p=66sid=c72c343df3c37339b4d5094a1296566d

,but the new pages now look more like: forum/topic.php?id=38 on bbpress.

I was wondering if there’s a code I can add so people coming from google at least can be redirected to the forum’s index, right now they’re getting a 404 (sorry, I said 401 previously) because the old page can’t be found.

At least until google indexes everything again.

Thanks.

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

You mean to just redirect one folder to another?

Pretend your old forum was at http://www.domain.com/phpbb2 and the new one is at http://www.domain.com/bbpress

Delete the phpbb2 folder and in your .htaccess add this:

RewriteRule ^phpbb2(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/bbpress/ [L,R=301]

That will make what’s called a Permanent redirect, and in theory teach site crawlers what’s up. Mind, a 401 is for unauthorized access, which is an odd error to get.

[fontadoni]

Now that I converted my board from phpbb to bbpress I need to know how to redirect the old stuff to where the new board is (so people coming from google can at least get to the new bbPress index and not just get a 401 – which is what is currently happening). I suppose I need to do this in my htaccess file. Does anyone have the code for this? Thanks.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Thanks mate,

it’s definately a work in progress. the plan of it was not to emulate the CODE of phpBB press, but instead to emulate how it looks. As you can see, the difference between having the positioning and CSS in before the TR / TD is worked out allows theme developer far more options.

And oddly, screen readers and modified browsers LOVE LOVE LOVE lists (ul/li, or dl/dt/dd). they have buttons to skip right past the ones you don’t want based on criteria and this means sifting through the parent/child heirarchy so much easier than tables. For tables screen readers (much like the DOM itself) skips line by line.

So on my website, if you chose Eurpoe, and the first forum was UK. with Nested divs and Lists you could hit next and go to Ireland. With tables you’d go to the next TR, which would be england, then london, then scotland etc.

I want to stress here 2 things,

1) i in no way want to turn bbpress into phpBB, i just figured i’d use it as an example win my layouts, because as bloated as it is, it actually does the nesting output really well.

2) I in no way want this singular issue to be the only thing we’re discussing here. It’s one of many examples where i think we’er going down a particular route.

Finally…@Ipstenu : “I can’t visualize something ‘less rigid’ than the current iteration of bbpress type forms, since tags gives you a rather light level of ‘org’. “

This is feel is the crux of the problem, as long as we have tags (which are great) we feel we’ve a fluid cross pollination forum going on. But if you take tags away for a sec (lets say the users didn’t put them in); then what your left with is 1 list of topics and 1 list of forums. That’s the definition of rigid.

[John James Jacoby]

Wow…

It looks darn near perfect…

If your concern is catering to screen readers, then you know that phpBB is hardly the place to start, as reading the screen outloud to yourself makes no sense at all. Imagine if you couldn’t see what you were listening to, it would be impossible. That’s why (properly coded) tables for forums make sense.

I noticed the topic view was buggered, didn’t want to load and show anything, so I assume that’s under construction… But, that’s pretty super awesome…

[kevinjohngallagher]

Before i run off, I made this today:

http://www.kevinjohngallagher.com/___alpha/bbpress_as_phpbb/

Now, i’ve left $show_children=true, and added a crappy padding-left:20px to the CSS so that you can see the potential (though it totally looks crap).

The point of this is that 1) it works with existing plugins and 2) it doesn’t require plugins to work and 3) can be flicked back to the good old fashioned table stucture with a flick of a variable 9or removing the CSS padding).

The difference is that mine can be iterated through via the DOM and have the DOm understand the parent child relationship, and can be read successfully in the same way by a screen reader.

Also the HTML TAGS (in this case divs) for categories, parents, childs, siblings etc, are set up via a variable. So can be tables, divs or lists. All with the flick of a variable.

My point all along, has been, if we build something that can output one solution, then we’ll only ever meet the needs of that solution. If we build something that CAN meets the needs of many, then we meets the needs of the original (list all forums in a table) AND the needs of others.

P.S.

Anonymous posting is on, as is instant password if you want to register a fake account and have a wee look.

Now this is todays work, so dont expect too much, it’s merely a vehicle to show the potential.

EDIT: some of the forums are marked as hidden, so you may want to make an account. sorry, wanted to show it doesnt’ break forums and then went and hid one of the big ones. D’oh.

[John James Jacoby]

lol I gotchya…

I have been working with bbPress for 2 days now, so I can openly admit that my knowledge on the inner workings of it (and maybe its limitations) is limited to those 2 days of study.

From my experience with forum software, the category vs forum debate and struggle basically exists in a similar way, at least I know it does for phpBB. A category is just a forum without the ability to post directly to it, and I think that’s really the only way to do it without joining or adding an additional query that isn’t really necessary.

I think what it sounds like you’re asking for is something more official like what WordPress has in terms of development cycle, acknowledgment, and respect from its developers. I also think that because almost everything for bbPress is a plug-in, that the opportunity for those plug-ins not to play nice with one another is greater.

So, the dilemma is to package these as features within the forum, or allow the community to create those features when they are needed. The big guys bloat their forums with tons of stuff and allow the admin to turn them off, and bbPress does the opposite.

I’m not sure bbPress really has a development plan anymore other than tweaking and steamlining the code to work better with WordPress, and maybe eventually import/export posts from other forum software. I personally think that better user management would be nice, but that brings up how WordPress doesn’t really care about users at all. Ha!