[hlwinkler]

Hello,

I would like to be able to move over to the bbpress 2.0 plugin. Unfortunately, a year ago when I created my forum, I chose to put it on a separate database from my WordPress database since there was no reason to integrate them.

Now it seems as if there is no path to bringing over a bbpress forum (with both users and posts) that is on its own database into a bbpress 2.0 plugin install, is this correct? Is there a method for me to get my separate-database bbpress install useable for import into the 2.0 plugin install or am I out of luck entirely? I have tried the following:

1. Doing a user import using the 2.0 plugin import tool (fails drastically, not surprisingly since it is not intended for that purpose)

2. Doing a forum import using the 2.0 plugin import tool (works great but all posts are anonymous)

3. Trying to do WordPress integration in bbpress to prepare to try #1 again (this just resulted in all posts in bbpress being set to anonymous and the keymaster account being removed despite having mapped the user roles, and no user accounts were added to WP in the process so I don’t quite know what happened there but I had a backup so it was no big deal).

One (very unattractive) option seems like it would be to somehow manually create all of the bbpress users in WP, and then try option 2 again, and then somehow manually assign all of the correct posters to the anonymous posts, but I don’t really have that kind of time to be honest. I guess I’d probably do it if it were the only way, since I don’t want to be permanently stuck with a legacy forum version and there are a couple of aspects of the plugin that prefer to the 1.0 implementation.

Anyway, I hope someone can give me some help, especially since I’m sure this is not an uncommon issue since there wasn’t a strong impetus to choose to use the same database previously.

Thank you!

[John James Jacoby]

All of the options you’ve mentioned are what I’d suggest. Since you have two sets of user tables (WordPress/bbPress) there’s no way to automate the merging of them. You’ll either need to do it manually, or pick one set over the other.

Either way you’ll need to spend some time manually finishing what the importer cannot.

[hlwinkler]

Hi John,

Thanks for following up. Can you give me a very granular definition of ‘manually’? You mentioned that in the plugin discussion but it isn’t clear to me at all which parts need to be done manually and via what interface (i.e., am I creating accounts in the WP front end and then running SQL commands on the WP database, or doing something in phpMyAdmin, or?) which is the reason I started a topic for it.

[John James Jacoby]

There’s not a clear path honestly, since everyone’s installations can be markedly different. To guess at exact SQL queries you would need to run would do more harm than good.

If it was me, I would spend a lot of time analyzing the data in the 2 databases with something like phpMyAdmin, and come up with a plan on how to combine the two databases and WordPress/bbPress users tables together into 1.

[hlwinkler]

I guess that would be easier if I could make WP integration work on my existing install, since I’d be able to look at a bbpress database that was already mapped to WP roles. Do you know why my integration attempt resulted in all of my bbpress user accounts being turned into anonymous? There was no error, I just had no more accounts when it completed. They keymaster was also logged out and removed.

[John James Jacoby]

Most likely because it used your WordPress user tables and not your bbPress ones. So all of your topics and posts technically don’t have user accounts connected to them anymore

[hlwinkler]

Oh, I just noticed this:

Since you have two sets of user tables (WordPress/bbPress) there’s no way to automate the merging of them. You’ll either need to do it manually, or pick one set over the other.

I don’t actually care what happens to my WP users TBH — there is only one account attached to all of the blogging and page creation and I can recreate that account (that account’s pages and posts, not so much). Is there anything I can do in this scenario if I don’t care about maintaining my WP users or don’t mind recreating them? I’ll still need to have one WP admin user at the end of it all so I can actually log in, of course.

[hlwinkler]

Most likely because it used your WordPress user tables and not your bbPress ones. So all of your topics and posts technically don’t have user accounts connected to them anymore

Is that an expected result of using the integration tool in 1.0.3?