Can you export vBulletin over to a phpBB format? That seems to be the best common thread to imort into bbPress from forum packages that don’t have importers written yet. There is a great phpBB importer here in the forums that might be able to bridge the gap!
Trent
chrishajer,
It’s more the conversion that was the issue. Dunno what it was but when we ran it through the phpBB converter, it basically made a motza of the sql, preventing the posts from being brought into the new DB ( entry double ups, funny characters etc., etc)
While we have got everything else in with only minor work, we are having to totally hand edit the 370,000 lines that make up the bb_posts sql file as all sorts of strange thing have happened to it.
It’s all fixable but just time intensive.
I used phpbb for about 4 years and once I created a test site of bbPress, I converted over all my forums to bbPress and continue to help support a great product. As far as I can tell, almost all the ‘bloated’ features of phpBB that people love have now become plugins for bbPress, so if you like all or most of those features, you will love bbPress.
Trent
I second that motion… Obviously, on a bbpress board you’re going to get the home team’s opinion that bbpress is great. But, I was a former phpbb-er and I made the switch because I was tired of all of the security holes and spam in phpbb. If you like WordPress (and are proficient enough with PHP to manage a blog), you’ll LOVE bbpress. Plus, with all of the momentum it is gaining, bbpress just keeps getting better.
WP and phpBB … you can probably bend them to your will together if your php mojo is strong indeed.
I would recommend converting your phpBB forum to bbPress using a converter, because WP and bb go together like something awesome with something also very awesome. That’ll make your site look streamlined and funky like anything.
Hi there, yes I’m a noob here and I would like to say that I have been really impressed – after just finding out about wordpress, how simple it all looks.
I’m hoping that someone will be able to answer a question concerning this.
I have a site that it is a bit of a mess and I want to update it so it looks streamlined and funky, my idea was to use the WordPress for the actual main site and the forum to stay they same (in PHPBB already installed) but after reading about it, there have been a few problems – my php is haphazzard to say the least. Does it clash badly?
Hey Trent!
Don’t worry! I got it all figured out, it is because I didn’t setup a new database for bbPress (I use the same one as my WordPress)
Indeed, I did install phpBB and runs it for a week, not only I instantly start having spam, and the interface is just too busy to look at, I love the bbPress, it is simple, elegant and so fast…
Cool cool, you can check mine out at:
http://www.gaszappers.com/forums/
Solved how? Please share for the benefit of others. Thanks.
Can you do it from a command line rather than a web interface to avoid the upload problem?
Can you upload the file and then do something like this on the command line:
mysql -u UserName -p DBName < TheFullTargetFilePath.SQL
-p will prompt for the password on the command line
I imagine there’s probably a -h if you need to specify a different host too.
0 queries executed is a normal result after an import. That doesn’t mean it failed (the message by itself doesn’t, I mean.)
If it helps…. exact statement from MyphpAdmin on completeion is: “Import has been successfully finished, 0 queries executed.”
Hey fel64, I might get lynched if I drop off posts… quite a bit of great stuff there.
My import is up to around 30,000KiB, so that’s not the issue….
My SQL mojo man is AWOL, hence me coming here to look for some of the good SQL loving 
I vaguely remember from setting up bb in localhost and trying to copy my server DB into my local MySQL that PHPMyAdmin wouldn’t take more than 16 Mb when importing. That might well be a setting that can be set somewhere, I don’t know; I can’t find it in its config file, in any case.
Edit: my localhost version of phpMyAdmin says “Max: 16,384KiB” by the import dialog.
To get around this if it is the problem, can you live without 1/3rd of the posts? Then you could delete them in the original database via some query and export the remaining 2/3rds. It might be better to hold out for someone with more database-mojo to come along and see if there’s a non-destructive way. 
Hi all,
First time here but long time WP fan, hence moving my forum to bbPress.
Keeping it short, I have managed (after a LOT of work) to convert our phpbb DB over to bbPress with the aid of the converter from http://www.iteisa.com/ Be warned, I found that it did not convert correctly 100% and required a lot of manual adjustment to the rew sql file – easy if you have a small DB but our has 1500 members and some insane amount of posts and topics.
Anyhoo, I have managed to get just about everything into bbPress except for the posts. I have them converted and sitting in an SQL file (22Mb) but I can not get the file to load. Every other file has without issue except this. Our upload limit exceeds the file size and MyphpAdmin imports the file but does not actually bring in any data…. in other words, it spends 5 minutes uploading the SQL, tells me that it has successfuly imported the file but with 0 data.
Does anyone have any idea what’s going on? My members are itching to get going again and this is the only thing holding things up….. it’s a little odd having topics with no posts.
Help…anyone?
Thanks Trent!
I tested the change on one user, and I was able to edit his ID number to match the number from the old PHPBB. As hoped, his posts in the transferred Forum are now correctly attributed.
However, I ran ino a quirk. When I change the ID in WordPress, the user gets bumped in the User Role list. He went from “Subscriber” to “No role for this blog.” I manually promoted him to Author from the wp-admin/users panel.
What field in the wp-db controls the user roles? Can I avoid this quirk on future ID edits?
I’m running into a similar, if not “same” problem.
I had a PHPBB with approx 20 active users. The same users will be participating in a new page which is pre-launch.
That page is a WordPress installation with integrated BBPress. There are only 3 users in the WP/BB install. I imported the posts and forums from PHPBB using the PHPBBtoWordpress hack.
Since I’d already integrated the BBPress install, copying the data did not create the Users in the database, because they began with wp_ and it was looking for bb_. Now, most of the posts are either attributed to “anonymous” or they’re attributed to the wrong username. I don’t want to do the data retrieval over, because the PHPBB users are riddled with spambot entries, and this was an easy way to get rid of them.
Will it be safe to create my new WordPress users, then edit their ID number to match the IDs from the old PHPBB data? And will this change correctly attribute the posts in the BBPress forums? Also, if I change these ID numbers in the WordPress database… will their posts in WordPress become incorrectly attributed?
I’m not sure how it’s handled, but it might be worth looking at how phpBB or vBulletin or any other forum software does it.
Darn it….didn’t see this as I was gone for the last week (almost) and we lost one to phpBB. Sorry about that Kenneth! I would be happy to help if you are looking to come back!
Trent
Thanks for this great script. Unfortunately I got myself suspended from one of my webhosts since it clogged up the MySQL queue But I have only myself to blame, and they did let it pass only giving me a final warning.
Good luck with phpBB 3 dude, see you back in a couple of weeks 
:D:D:D:D
The Gathering theme is on http://spencerp.net currently… 
I could always import the content from WP to MT though, couldn’t I? LOL! I already had MT setup within 15 minutes on a sub domain name a few weeks back, shouldn’t take me too much longer to set it up this time.. whee!
Maybe could setup phpBB 3.0 whatever the hell the latest version is now… Got up that over here now: http://www.vindictivebastard.net/forum
I don’t know though.. hmm
spencerp
http://am-fem.com/candy/
A small, 18+ forum community for my online friends . I belong to alot of forums and wanted to run one of my own that was 18+ and more low-key then the typical XMB, SMF and PHPbb forums out there. I wanted a script that could have as little or as much as I wanted through plugins without all the un-necesary bloat and bbPress does that for me !
I’m using my own modified theme off of Kakumei.
Plugins include:
– Allow Images
– Avatars
– Memberlist
– Post Count
– BBCode
– Forum Restriction
– Onlinelist
– Since Last Visit
– User Time Zones
– Category Patch
A few more plugins and the forum will be exactly what I’m looking for.
I am in no way even considering using something like phpbb. I’ve had too many bad experiences with it.
What I am using my forum for (still looking to switch from Vanilla to BBPress possibly) is a support forum for a web design company. Each client has a specific category. Either, they are new clients that we are showing designs to or they are existing clients who sometimes have tech support questoins that require screen shots to be attached, or they want to upload pdfs, docs, fonts, etc to be used on the maintenance of thier site.
I’d love to see an attachments feature. It would help my decision of moving to this software.
hmm the phpbb->bbpress did not work well with me the 2 times i tried it out. i will check it again.
