bbPress has a fledgling xml exporter. We had a discussion on IRC#bbpress recently about creating an importer of the same format.
This would be great for migrations and backups, and if we wrote some code for other forum software to export to this same format, we would have greater ability to cross-grade.
Bump this topic. Are there any tools for migrating from, say, MSN Groups into BBpress, and preserving the old content?
not sure if this is the right place for this question.
My client needs to have his bbpress forums moved from one server to mine. I am unfamiliar with bbpress (for now). Can I simply download all the files from the current host and upload to the new? Providing that the new has adequate server requirements?
Not just files: that’s 1/2 the picture. The other half is the database. You need to dump the database, then reimport it on the new server.
http://bbxf.org/ was started a while back as well.
okay. Thank you for this info. Where does the database live? How can I get this export? Okay, I am not that savvy in these things.
If you’re doing this for a client, I think you should get some assistance to make sure it goes well.
The database lives on a host that the client is (probably) paying for right now, maybe his web host. They probably have a control panel and in there some sort of tool for managing a database. Depending on the tool, there should be a way to export or dump the database. Once you have that file saved locally on your computer, you can go about using a similar tool on your host, in reverse though, for import instead of export. That takes care of the database.
Then you need to grab all the bbPress files off their web host, and transfer those to your web host.
If you’re not changing domain names, just hosting, then you need only worry about DNS, not modifying any of the settings for the site (other than database connection details: those will certainly be different on your server.)
Also, in general, don’t forget about any email addresses they might have created at the old web host. You’ll need to recreate those on your server. That’s got nothing to do with bbPress, but I almost always forget to do that, and then remember it later.
Good luck.
Also, in general, bbPress, WordPress, most modern forums and modern blogging platforms use a database to store the data for the site. There are files on the filesystem as well, but in addition to those, there is almost always data stored in a database. In anything other than a simple static site (and with systems that use flat files rather than a database for data storage) you’ll find that there is almost always a database involved.
You’ll see on this page that there are some flat file systems, no database required, but most forums and content management systems and blogging platforms use a database back-end for storage:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_content_management_systems
I was thinking about looking at the techsailor plugin for RSS import/export for wordpress and see if it would be possible to get bbPress into that format so you could even export bbPress and import as blog posts and comments (or vice versa). Obviously I would have trouble doing this with my minimal coding, but hopefully someone else has something to add!
