Hi All,

I’m having a very frustrating time here.

I’m building a new site, and I need to transfer a BBPress powered forum from the old site.

Both sites are running BBPress 2.5.4.

The new site is running WordPress 4.0, the old site 3.9.2

My first surprise was when I realised that BBPress does not list BBPress in the list of platforms in the Tools -> Forums -> Import Forums dialog.

So I spent a couple of hours reading up and then set out to move the forums across to the new site.

I started out by using WP Migrate Pro to migrate wp_users and wp_usermeta from the old forum.

Then I used the WordPress Exporter to export Forums, Topics and Replies.

Then I used the WordPress Importer to import each of these three files.

As each file imported I manually specified which user should be given authorship of the forum, topic or reply. There are a lot of forums topics and users, this takes more than hour.

This seemed to go well, and at the end of the process I could see all of the forums, topics and replies in the BBPress admin screens of the site.

I went to the forums on the front-end, and I could see all the forums listed, together with the number of topics and replies in each one, and the last poster.

When I clicked through to view a forum, I saw the following message:

“This forum contains 1 topic and 7 replies, and was last updated by xxxx (name removed) 2 months, 2 weeks ago.”

Underneath that, another message:

“Oh bother! No topics were found here!”

So I Googled and Googled. I tried using the Tools -> Forums -> Repair Forums dialog, but this simply deleted all of my replies.

So I ran through the whole process again. Same result. I can see everything in the admin, but only the forums with no topics and no replies in the front end.

I’ve tried downgrading WordPress to 3.9.2, and also switching to the 2014 theme. Still no joy.

I’ve also tried disabling all of my other plugins. No dice.

I’ve also tried this:

bbpress wp4 fix

I would be really grateful if somebody out there might be able to help me with this.

I thought BBPress is a well supported WordPress based forum. Surely the ability to easily move forums between different WordPress installs is a core requirement?

Help!

[@treb0r23 Participant 10 years, 2 months ago]

Okay, so I read some more and I can see that there are multiple issues with both import / export and WordPress 4.0. I realise that this is open source software, and I’m sorry if I came across as unreasonable in the above post.

Given that I can see the content in the admin I’m sure a fix will emerge in due course.

Sorry for being a stress head about it, I was just a bit frustrated.

[@ravanh Participant 10 years, 2 months ago]

Hi @treb0r23 – I just ran into the same issue. Wanting to move bbPress forums from one WordPress 4.0 to another 4.0 site, I tried WordPress’ own Tools > Export feature to create three export files, one with forums, one with topics and one with replies.

After importing them in the same order, it looked like everything was fine. All forums, topics and replies where imported successfully and seemed to be correctly assigned to their ‘parents’.

However, when visiting the front end, it turned out that only a two topics where visible in one forum. All other topics where missing and all other forums where empty. Replies where nowhere to be found either.

Even though topics and replies are marked as correctly associated in the back end, it does not appear to be the case at all.

I went to Tools > Forums to try to fix that. First, I tried “Recalculate the parent topic for each post” but even though it responds with “Recalculating the topic for each post … Complete!” after that, I can’t even open the All Replies list anymore. I get a blank page…

Then I tried “Recalculate the parent forum for each post” but this simply removes all evidence of association between all topics and their forum 🙁

This is just awful.

[@ravanh Participant 10 years, 2 months ago]

Searching the internet, I found https://github.com/pippinsplugins/bbPress-Export-and-Import

This plugin is designed to create an CSV export file per forum and allows you to import it to another forum.

1. Download the zip from github and install it like a regular plugin on both sites.

2. On the donor site, open a forum for editing and find the Export link on the right under Forum Attributes. Click it and you will receive the CSV file.

3. Go to the recipient site and create a new forum. Now on the right side under Forum Attributes (again) you’ll find the Choose File and Run Import buttons.

This does import topics and replies and on the front end, all seems to work well except for the number of posts per topic is too high. On the back end, Topics appear to be disassociated from the forum — it says (No Forum) — and the All Replies page turns up blank again.

Happily, heading over to Tools > Forums and running the top two “Recalculate…” and the “Count replies in each topic” options fixed things this time instead of making it worse 🙂

I really hope bbPress can be fixed to work with the normal WordPress Export/Import at some point but until then, the above steps should get you some good results.

[@treb0r23 Participant 10 years, 2 months ago]

@RavanH Thanks a lot!

I’m going to wait a bit longer and see if BBPress gets updated to fix these issues before I need the site to go live. if not, I’m going to give this a whirl.

[@ravanh Participant 10 years, 2 months ago]

One more thing I noticed after the migration: Although all topic tags where imported, they are no longer linked to any topics. Not a big deal in my case but it’s good to know in advance.

+1 vote for an official export/import fix or dedicated tool 🙂