I eventually wish to use BuddyPress on a site, but feel I need to do this is stages.

At the moment this site consists of WordPress on one database and BBPress on a different database using the most recent versions of both scripts.

I started integration but stopped because I saw a potential problem.

I have about 70 registered users on BBPress

I have about 10 users on WordPress, these are mostly Authors.

I gave the users the same rank on both, making the WordPress Authors, Moderators on BBPress

Still, I suspect that I could be making a huge mistake if I don’t merge the User tables before integrating, and of course I would want everything setup correctly for interrogation before playing around with MU and BuddyPress.

Now if I understand this correctly the User table for an integrated site should be WordPress, not BBPress?

Is there such a thing as a script that would allow me to make all BBPress users WordPress users?

Or am I looking at this all wrong?

Or is it possible to set up MU/BuddyPress and merge all users onto that?

[@johnhiler Member 15 years, 4 months ago]

You definitely want to use the same users table for both installs.

I’ve had to eventually integrate bbPress and WordPress users after not integrating them upfront, and you definitely want to do it sooner rather than later. It wasn’t fun, but it’s definitely doable.

There’s a good discussion on how to go about it here:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/integration-of-established-wp-and-bbpress-installations

[@gardenfl Member 15 years, 4 months ago]

I’ve already considered the issues raised in that discussion. I looked at both user tables and it was clear that they would not line up without adding fields to the BBPress user table. There is also the problem of duplicate ids. Since almost all my users are forum members I could almost get away with dumping the WP user table and importing from BBPress. But then I would have the same problems discussed in that other thread. And I have members who have authored blog posts and forum entries.

[@gardenfl Member 15 years, 4 months ago]

What I thought about doing was importing the current members into a temp data base and then adding the fields to duplicate WP. But then I would still have the problem of IDs.

[@johnhiler Member 15 years, 4 months ago]

You could write some Updates to make sure there was no ID overlap? That’s what I had to do when we were doing a similar user integration…

Actually – the user who wrote that last thread followed up with a fantastic list of exactly what steps s/he did, including specific update quries:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/successful-reverse-integration-steps

[@gardenfl Member 15 years, 4 months ago]

Thank you. This looks like exactly what I need. And you better believe I will try it first on a test site and go slowly.