You should see Starting conversion in seconds.
Next Converting users in another second if your converting your users.
Next ‘Converting forums` in seconds if not converting users.
By default everything is done in chunks of 100 records and this should never really take much longer than 5 seconds per chunk at which point you will see the converter message progress to Converting topics 300 - 399 then Converting topics 400 - 499 etc, you should never be far away from a new message informing you of the status of the import.
I’ll try to get some more docs into the ‘import screen’ for bbPress 2.5 to give people a heads up on what they should expect to see.
As you are on a dedicated server this topic might be worth checking out on ‘speeding it up’
phpBB Import speed
Firstly though lets get it started…
Via FTP grab a copy of your SMF Settings.php file and open it up in a text editor.
/public_html/mywebsite/smf/Settings.php
In that file something that looks like this:
########## Database Info ##########
$db_type = 'mysql';
$db_server = 'localhost';
$db_name = 'mydb_name';
$db_user = 'mydb_usernam';
$db_passwd = '123456789';
$ssi_db_user = '';
$ssi_db_passwd = '';
$db_prefix = 'smf_';
These are the settings you need to use on the bbPress importer.
ps. Thanks @manuxel for helping others out here with the SMF importer 🙂
Nothing to thank me for, after a couple years wanting this import script, I’m more than glad to help, I just want to see it work for as much people as possible. I tried everything this past 4 or 5 years I think to combine my forum with my wordpress, I didn’t want a blog nor I wanted just a forum, and thanks to you and bbPress I’m so close to finally have what I wanted.
And thank you for that link, I was testing with 100 rows per second, I’m not on a dedi, but in my little VPS I think I could at least try 500 every 0.2 or something close.
Cheers and good night 🙂
@manuxel Exactly 100% what you wrote there except my case was phpBB now look where we are at 🙂
So nice to know I wasn’t alone 🙂
Hi, have a nice day all.
I might got the same problem as @infostrides , mine also a very large forum database as I do mentioned earlier. I do host on my own dedicated rack server with xeon & 8gb ram (supposed to be no memory limit like shared hosted)
At first I thought it was conflicted with existing wp database, so I do test on the new fresh wp installation > import the smf database , then planned to import post / pages (from existing wp) later. Somehow it gave me the same problem.
1 – The import process seems stuck at 5K++ post or topic something. No moving and no error reported.
2 – I’ve checked, in many of forums topic, seem to have reply count, but when browsing the topics page, none post listed except the first post – I think it occur due to fail import process.
3 – The hidden/private forum appear as normal forum – not hidden (it’s ok since I can set it later I think).
I still trying working on it until now. 🙂
Regards
I’m guessing that your making tests with a copy of your forum, right?
1- Check in your DB for the last topic imported and then check in your SMF DB for the following topic and delete it from the SMF admin, then restart the import. I kinda had the same problem with my first attempts and it seemed that one or two topics were causing the interruption of the import. Why? I do not know 🙂 I didn’t take the time to sort it out, I was just testing.
2- That’s normal, after you import you have to go to TOOLS -> FORUMS and then repair forums. For a large forum like yours do 1 checkbox at a time. Here your replies will be attached to their corresponding topics and it also fixes another couple things, I think when you see the page it explains itself.
3- That’s right, it will not import the hidden state but you can set that later on each forum you need to.
Cheers.
I just have to suspend it. It was not working for my forum.
1 – The import process seems stuck at 5K++ post or topic something. No moving and no error reported.
one or two topics were causing the interruption of the import. Why? I do not know
This does happen and I have no idea why, I have had it happen a few times and have tried debugging what is happening and editing the database directly changing the text and it still happens. This is a truly mysterious and at this stage can only wish it didn’t happen 🙁
In your wp_options table, there should be an entry with the key ‘_bbp_converter_query’. It will indicate what the last attempted converter query is, which will narrow down the scope of your search to figure out what may have gone wrong.
SELECT * FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = "_bbp_converter_query"
@glossyone wrote
3 – The hidden/private forum appear as normal forum – not hidden (it’s ok since I can set it later I think)
@manuxel wrote
3- That’s right, it will not import the hidden state but you can set that later on each forum you need to
Where do set the hidden state for a forum in SMF?
If I could find that setting I should be able to add support for that 🙂
Are there any other forum settings besides hidden & private?
I can map to ‘public’, ‘hidden’ & ‘private’ which are the three standard bbPress forum types.
@infostrides
I just have to suspend it. It was not working for my forum.
Is there anything I can do to help?
@netweb now that you mention it I don’t remember SMF having a hidden forum option, just with user permissions.
@infostrides don’t give up, I’m pretty sure if you find the conflicting topics and delete them the import WILL work just fine, I know it’s not perfect, but I think it is worth it.
Thanks. The query output nothing.
Is there anything I can do to help?
@Stephen Thanks. I have moved to the forum to sub-folder for the time being.
don’t give up, I’m pretty sure if you find the conflicting topics and delete them the import WILL work just fine, I know it’s not perfect, but I think it is worth it.
@manuxel Thanks. I will look into it again once I finish setting up the main WordPress site.
Sigh.. I’m still trying hard.
Tried everything above. none works. stuck at 5K. Then suddenly it passed once, but stuck back at $post id 250K something..
Inspected all related $post table in phpMyadmin still cannot found what’s wrong with it. Even inspect the before-and-after-data in table , not found any possible clue.
Somehow, I just notice or suspecting that.. it might be related to either :
1 – post with custom BBtag.
2 – post/topic that has Poll option.
Still not give up , but little bit frustration about it.
Somehow, I just notice or suspecting that.. it might be related to either :
1 – post with custom BBtag.
2 – post/topic that has Poll option.
What is the custom ‘BBtAg’ is it ‘BBtag’, I can try to replicate this as we do use a 3rd party library to convert some BBCode and it could be a conflict there (shouldn’t be but could be)
I will also setup a ‘poll’ to try the import with.
Another thing I haven’t tried yet though this just came to me as an idea, when the conversion stops change the value of Rows Limit from 100 to 1 and click start again, causing it to go one row at a time.
This way when it stops and won’t go any further you should be able to look at _bbp_converter_startin thewp_optionsdatabase and add a1 to that number. This in affect will make the converter start again on the next row rather than the row it is failing on.
Once it gets past the problematic topic, you could click stop again, change it back to 100 and start again so the remainging 200k posts are not imported one by one.
Erm.. it should be custom BB Code. 😀
Yeah.. sometime, in custom BB code, we do use a ; ‘ : | } ] [ * , or any other character . As myself had little bit PHP knowledge, (always do wp theme code myself and for clients), those character might broke some code if there’s no escape clause like \ (backslash) before some character ie: :\’\ etc …. As your note = shouldn’t but could be.
I’ve tried Rows Limit to 50 and 20 .. but not yet to 1. I’ll try that later.
I want to try it on localhost / my own pc. But when I think about my 500mb forum database file .. yeah.. you know.. I feeling down.. lol.
I want to try it on localhost / my own pc. But when I think about my 500mb forum database file .. yeah.. you know.. I feeling down.. lol.
I know that feeling, as @manuxel added above, we have been trying to migrate for a long time 😉
I’m glad you are sticking with it and just let me know if I can help or any extra questions 🙂
As @netweb said we know that feeling.
To save some time one of the things I did was delete almost all users from my localhost copy of SMF so the import would take less time, I did this in order to find the conflicting topics faster to be able to delete them or fix them for the real import.
Maybe you should try it, I don’t know how much time would it save for you but it’s something.
Good luck 😀
I just wanted you guys to know that this plugin/extension is fantastic. I was spending ages scouring the internet for a solution for the conversion of an old SMF forum to BBPress, and this was absolutely perfect.
🙂
Cheers
Hello everyone, I gotta say you’ve done an awesome job with the SMF converter. I already test it and it seems to work perfectly. The only problem I have is that it is not converting the categories, is this just happening to me or is it that that feature is not included in the SMF.php converter file yet?
Thanks you all,
Abraham
@maecana I just updated the original post on what works and what doesn’t.
Categories adds another layer to the importer in general and it just doesn’t support this just yet, I hope to in the future though.
‘Typically’ most forums don’t have to many categories so recreating these categories in bbPress manually and then moving the forums under these categories works quite well.
Thanks for answering so quickly Stephen, I’ll do it manually as you said.
Thanks again for the incredible job you’re doing with these converters, it’s really helpful.
My Best Regards.
I’m having some issues converting an SMF forum to BBPress. The SMF forum has about 7,500 members, 7000+ topics and 45,000+ replies.
It seems the links to images are not being imported, my guess it is a problem with the [img] bbcode? But not sure.
I understand that I won’t be able to get attached images imported but i would think that linked images would not be a problem.
Also some of the posts are being truncated. I might get the first sentence but the rest is dropped. But not on all of them.
I tired slowing the import down to 50 items at a time with a 2 second pause but still same results.
I’m on a dedicated server. Latest bbpress version, and SMF version is 2.0.4
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Are the passwords being imported already? I have the SMF converter version bbPress (r5189), but before the importing finishes it erases all passwords so users are forced to reset their password.
I noticed the _bbp_class was created in the db but it creates an error when an previously imported user tries to login.
I hope any of you is able to help me with this.
Thanks,
I’m still looking for some help on this. I’m stuck and my site is in limbo until I can get the conversion complete.
Is there anyone that might have a clue as to why my images are not showing up and some posts are only being partially imported?
