[nickandrea19]

Hi there,

I will be redeveloping a site that was written in the Dinosaur age of web development. It is written in Perl, and my task is to port the existing forum into bbPress. I’m looking for thoughts on how to do this.

Thank you!

[Stephen Edgar]

bbPress includes a conversion tool to import forums/topics/replies/users from some of the popular forum packages eg. bbPress or phpBB

There is an ‘example’ file also included as a ‘reference template’ that if your forum software is using a SQL database then you could easily modify this to be a custom importer by matching the correct database tables/fields etc

The file is called ‘example.php’ and is located in /wp-content/plugins/bbpress/bbp-admin/converter

[nickandrea19]

Nice. Thanks for the heads up. I don’t know if the previous database was an SQL database but I think it was. So, the conversion is installed when bbPress is? Is it accessed and configured through the WP dashboard?

Thanks.

[Stephen Edgar]

Yes, the converter is part of bbPress and can be found in your WordPRess admin dashboard under ‘Tools’ -> ‘Forums’ -> ‘Import Forums’ but you do need to customize the ‘example’ file I mentioned above for any custom forum imports.

[nickandrea19]

So, as I understand it, I would need to customize the example file, which will be the template for the forums. Then, I will need to actually import the data?

[Stephen Edgar]

Customizing the example.php file is what will map your existing SQL database tables and fields to the required bbPress tables and fields to import your data.

I am slowly getting some docs up on the codex, though these need updating.

https://codex.bbpress.org/import-forums/custom-import/