Hi all –

I’m new here, but have been doing a lot of research recently on moving my bridged Drupal/vBulletin site to WordPress and bbPress. There have been many changes with vBulletin management and policies lately, and many people are looking for alternatives to VB as their forum software. The only obstacle keeping me from jumping into bbPress is a direct vBulletin -> bbPress import script.

In my opinion, this is the only thing keeping bbpress from really catching on fire. If anyone has the know-how to do it and is interested, I can help fund the script. If anyone else would like to throw in to help the creation of it, please chime in. Once it’s done we can give it to the community and watch bbpress explode.

[@zaerl Participant 14 years, 7 months ago]

This can be very challenging. The vBulletin SQL schema is very complicated and it isn’t, as far as I know, well documented.

[@mikkelsen Member 14 years, 7 months ago]

Hey,

This is probably not what you want, but I just recently made the switch from vBulletin to bbPress. I converted my vBulletin database to phpBB, and then I converted the phpBB database to bbPress. The only issue with this solution is that all your users have to choose “Recover password” the first time the try to log in on the new forum, because the passwords can’t be converted due to some password protocol phpBB or vBulletin uses.

Everything else works great though, and I’m very happy with the switch.

[@coop1979 Member 14 years, 7 months ago]

mikkelsen, I actually came across your posts during my research into converting. I would like to avoid the password issue that you ran into because I don’t think I would be able to convert a large % of my 60,000 membership base if action is required on their part. Another requirement for me is to import all attachments and private messages.

That is where things get really tricky because then you’re talking about involving non-core plug-ins as part of the import process.

All in all, though, I think it would be a project well worth undertaking and we would see a quick uptick in activity on bbPress plug-in development and forum discussion.