Hi, our company is currently using Lithium platform. We have about 100,000 posts and 30,000 users. Is it possible to migrate this to bbPress?

Other requirements are:
• Post images, and videos easily
• Permissions for users to view Forums by topic
• Ability to support 500 simultaneous visitors and 2 million page views per year
• Ability to monitor activity and create reports on
– Page views by product
– New users

I’m aware that bbPress has 200+ plugins so I’ll have to research what is available there but is there anything here that someone can see as not doable?

thanks,
Kurt

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 5 years ago]

The number of posts or users isn’t a problem. We have 11million users and millions of posts across multiple WordPress installations sharing the same user base. Like any web based application, the software will scale up to whatever hardware it’s running on, or choke on whatever it’s missing.

Posting links to images and videos is very easy, but if you want users to be able to upload them, you’ll need some way to elegantly allow for that. WordPress can handle it, but you’ll likely want to customize this experience.

Concurrent users and other metrics will all come down to server hardware, configuration, and ongoing maintenance. bbPress doesn’t really care how many users there are or how many page views happen.

bbPress does not come with any internal reporting. It adds some statistics to the WordPress Dashboard, and that’s it. Intentionally simple.

(There is a lot of data available in the database, and I’ve no doubt that really awesome reporting and charts and conclusions could be drawn from them, but there is nothing built-in to expose it.)

bbPress does include a very robust importer and forum-conversion tool, that we’ve successfully used for years to help hundreds of thousands of sites migrate millions of posts. Some folks have contributed their converters back up into bbPress, but most of them were made by community members who did the work to match all the data points together.

We’ve used the built-in converter here ourselves to go from bbPress1 to bbPress2; the same one that’s included with bbPress itself.

Switching forum platforms is risky. It’s a lot of work. It’s likely that some community members won’t like the new software. It never goes 100% without some kind of hitch. But… we’ve done an immense amount of work over 15 years to try and make bbPress the kind of software that makes that transition as easy and painless as it can possibly be.

I hope you’ll give it a try. We’ll be here if you have more questions. 🤝

[@kurtgarrison Participant 4 years, 9 months ago]

Hi John, our company did decide to shut down our Lithium forum and again exploring the idea of importing into bbPress. The bbPress import tool allows importing by connecting to a database. We wouldn’t be able to do that with Lithium. They will provide an XML file on shutdown. Is there a way to import from a file. I reviewed the bbPress provided PHP import files for mapping including the example that can be edited for Forums not included in the dropdown list. So we could edit our data fields to match.

Any help or insights would be great appreciated!

thanks,
Kurt