Hi all,

Thanks in advance for any help/advice you can provide! I am trying to migrate forum data from another platform (I believe it’s a homegrown ASP.net-based forum). I have all the data in spreadsheets/csv files and am trying to put together the SQL statements I need to move it into bbPress.

I put together a small test import (a single post to a single forum) for ‘wp_posts’ that looks like it mostly worked: the imported data is visible under Topics in the WordPress admin but it doesn’t show up when you browse to the Forum it’s assigned to on the front-end.

I noticed that when I create a topic in the traditional way (through the front-end) that it creates several entries in ‘wp_postmeta’ also (like _bbp_topic_id, _bbp_forum_id, _bbp_author_ip, _bbp_last_active_time, etc).

Does anyone know if it’s the absence of post meta for my imported data that’s causing it not to display on the front-end? If so, how much of this info is required?

I have 4300+ posts across 1400+ topics that need to be imported. Some of the post_meta data (like forum and topic id) will be easier for me to cross reference but other data (like reply_count, last_active_time, etc) would be a very manual process to try to include in my import.

Any suggestions or advice on the best way to get this data into my database?

[@casiepa Moderator 9 years ago]

Hi,
Some questions to you:
– You have 2900 replies, how do you know to what topic they relate to ?
– If you have 1400 topics and e.g. 5 forums, how do you know to what forum a topic belongs ?
– To show some stats, how do you know when a topic or forum was last changed ?
=> All answers are the same: It’s coming from the meta data of the posts. So this data really needs to be filled.

Please refer to the bbpress codex for custom imports (https://codex.bbpress.org/getting-started/importing-data/import-forums/custom-import/).
I think you will find what you need overthere, if not, give us a shout here again !

Pascal.

[@michaelrichardmurphy Participant 9 years ago]

Thanks for the quick reply Pascal. I appreciate it! I’ll check out your link.

In the meantime, to answer your questions, I thought (probably a big assumption on my part) that the posts were “connected” to their topics and forums by the post_parent field in wp_posts. I do see that this info is also repeated in wp_postmeta. As far as change dates most of the info in the forums is pretty old (the migration is mostly just for posterity sake) so that’s not as important…