[PhillipGibbs]

Hi there,

I’m looking for a little help and guidance with the transfer of a forum.

We’ve been updating a website which runs a bbpress forum. We’ve developed the new wordpress site on a dummy domain using ‘Duplicator’ to copy the old website over and run the various theme / design updates. Whilst we have been doing this the current website has still be running.

We now need to copy the forum activity which has happened in the last 3 weeks from the current site to update the new design before transferring it all back the live domain.

Hope this makes sense!

For clarification we run:-
Wordpress 3.9.1
BBPress 2.5.4
S2Member 140614
Proper live domain:- lifeafterlondon.com
Dummy test domain:- lifeafterlondon.co.uk

[Stephen Edgar]

I’m not sure how ‘duplicator’ works but if it sync’s the database it should be fine to sync bbPress’ forums, topics and replies as they WordPress ‘Custom Post Types’, topic tags are a taxonomy and users are users.

So presuming Duplicator is copying/replication WordPress’ posts and pages which are stored in wp_posts and wp_postmeta adding support for bbPress should ‘just work’ if Duplicator supports custom post types.

[Stephen Edgar]

Also you can export Forums, Topics, and Replies using WordPress Export (Tools -> Export)

You could then export updated topics and replies and import them again into your other install.

The issue of needing to use the a custom importer that you added a comment on in #2605 is to maintain legacy user meta.

[PhillipGibbs]

Hi Stephen

Thanks for your help…greatly appreciated. I have one more question:-

The forum on the site we copied (SITE A)(which is now 12 weeks out-of-date) holds the following data:-
Forums 445
Topics 409
Replies 2036
Tags 385

The forum on the site that we kept running (SITE B) while re-designing holds the following data:-
Forums 445
Topics 464
Replies 2258
Tags 448

When using the WordPress Export (Tools->Export) on SITE B and then the bbpress import (Tools->Forums) option on SITE A will the system duplicate the old entries and therefore only transfer the new Topics, Replies and Tags? Or will I need to do something else first to clear the old data and allow the entire forum data to be imported.

P.S – I have already imported all the users via an S2 Member export and import so all the user ID’s should be in place already.

I’m getting there…I think!

Thanks again
Phil