[Matoca]

I want to export a bbPress 2.5.1 forum from one WP installation to another WP installation on the same server into a currently installed bbPress 2.5.1 empty forum.

When I look at the import tools, I see that there is no selection for bbPress 2.5.1!

I am at a loss how to accomplish this, can anyone provide some help?
Thank you, Matoca

[John James Jacoby]

Use WordPress’s Importer. bbPress works just fine with it.

[Matoca]

John
Thank you. I did finally figure this out, sort of, though there are very few instructions about this anywhere. I had some problems with it, so I am only about a 1/3 done. I started with importing the forums and the users which went ok.

But when I imported the topics, every topic came in with the wrong field entered for the associated Forum Name, they were random words from the content. I had to go through and re-associate all the topics with the proper forum by hand which took hours.

I want to use a new name for the forum, so I associated each topic with the new forum name. The topics are now all in the new forum, without replies which I haven’t imported yet, I can see them when I view the forum. But inside the dashboard the topics all appear to be still under the old forum name, not the new one. I think perhaps this must be what the forum repair tool will fix?

But I am not sure whether I should import the replies first and then use the repair tools or just make sure the topics are fixed now before I move on to importing the replies, I don’t know how bbPress associates the topics and replies together, are the replies going to look for the old forum name? At some point I want to delete the forum with the old name, but I want to make sure that I am not mistakenly corrupting anything. I really really don’t want to spend several days fixing the replies by hand.

I found the “empty the forum and get rid of everything” choice. So that will be a good backup plan if I mess this up.
my best
Matoca

[Matoca]

I decided not to try to change the name of the forum midstream so I started from scratch, removing any forum from the new site. Again, the 2 forums imported ok. The topics imported ok, up to a point. This has been a real disaster.

The replies imported but none of them are assigned to the proper forum, that box says “no parent”. I am having to go through over 500 replies in the dashboard and assign each one by hand to the forum it belongs to. That involves referring to the old forum continually to make sure that I am getting it correct.

But it gets worse. Other values for some of the replies are also messed up, such that I have to search the original forum to find these replies and fix the forum assignment, the topic number value, and if there is a reply to a reply, I have to find the reply number value that the reply is responding to. But I have a process and it is getting done.

My question, and what I need help with, is how to fix how the “replies to replies” are displayed. In the old forum that I exported these from, these replies to replies were offset to the right and colored a med gray so they stood out as different. The CSS is correctly set for the new forum to color them gray. But the color is not there and these replies to replies are not offset to the right.

So the end result is that these replies to replies are placed in between the wrong replies and are not near the correct reply. The content flow makes no sense. I do have the correct “reply to” number values set in the dashboard so it should know which reply it is associated with.

What controls how these replies to replies are colored and moved to the right under their parent replies? How did that get lost in the export/import? What can I do now to fix this?
Thank you,
Matoca

[Stephen Edgar]

Did you export and import each ‘forum’, ‘topic’ and ‘reply’ separately or did you use the ‘All content’ option?

I haven’t tried them separately for a while and typically find that doing it all in one hit and removing any duplicated blog posts or pages after the import works quite well.

[Matoca]

Stephen,
There is very little written in the way of instructions how to do this. The only caution I saw was that doing it in one chunk may overload shared servers and cause errors. So I exported each item separately, starting with forums, then topics and finally replies. I also imported in that order. The forums and topics went fine. The replies lost their associated forums and many also lost their topics. I had the old forum to use for reference and so I have been editing each reply in the dashboard, adding back the correct forum and topic number.

I am about 2/3 done, weeks later, but now I am getting a 500 Server error when I try to view page 10 of the replies. What is interesting is that I can see those replies in the forum and I can edit them there. I just can’t get into that one page of replies in the dashboard. I tried the forum repair tools with no luck. I am not sure if this is a big issue that I need to worry about? Any idea what this is? Do you think it is worthwhile to use the “kill all forums” and start again with the “all” export/import?

I am about to open the forum up to the users from the old forum and once done, I am committed. I had hoped this would go easier but I would not recommend this to anyone who is considering moving a forum to another WP installation.
my best
Matoca

[Stephen Edgar]

I am getting a 500 Server error when I try to view page 10 of the replies. What is interesting is that I can see those replies in the forum and I can edit them there. I just can’t get into that one page of replies in the dashboard. I tried the forum repair tools with no luck. I am not sure if this is a big issue that I need to worry about? Any idea what this is?

That’s an odd one that I haven’t seen before, most likely it is an issue with a posts title somehow causing the rendering of the list to throw an error. Does going to page 11 work?

Do you think it is worthwhile to use the “kill all forums” and start again with the “all” export/import?

I’s probably suggest pausing your current work so you don’t lose what you have done thus far.

I would suggest you install another copy of WordPress either locally or on your web host using a backup copy of your current database, nuke those forums and try the exporting/importing everything scenario using the ‘All content’. If that works repeat the same for your primary site, if that doesn’t continue from where you left off.

I had hoped this would go easier but I would not recommend this to anyone who is considering moving a forum to another WP installation.

I agree it would be nicer when things ‘just work’ and I think the vast majority of the time it does, but when it doesn’t it is not the best experience going around. 🙁

[Matoca]

Once I get the server error, other pages after 10 also have problems. But if I bypass 10 at the start, I can seem to get to other higher numbered pages.

That is a great idea. I certainly can simply export it into another blog that is already installed without any trouble! Thanks for the suggestion!

I did a follow up post about the 500 Server Error, see the post “PHP 5.3 Error.” This is something I found out this morning. My webhost support went into the dashboard this morning to figure out the 500 server error. He told me bbPress is throwing this error because 5.3 was deprecated and removed from the server. He tried 5.2 and 5.4 but that bbPress is throwing the error under both versions.
my best
Matoca

[Darren Odden]

The wordpress importer only works for simple forums. If there is any quantity of data that needs to migrate, the importer will timeout. Does anyone know how to export the data and then import it and the replies to another site?

Example, forum with over 8,000 replies, 141 topics that associates across some segment of 17,000 users