[brightcoconut]

Here’s the situation: I’m moving a membership site from an old static HTML site w/ a phpBB forum over to a WordPress install and a bbPress forum. The WordPress site is set up, users added, membership issues handled w/ the WishList Member plugin, and my phpBB › bbPress conversion questions have been answered; my questions are about integrating that newly converted bbPress w/ the WordPress.

• Is it possible to use WP 2.8.4 and bbPress 1.0.2, or should I stick with bbPress 0.9?
• Is there any way to integrate the two that would allow for a continuous login?
• And perhaps the biggest question is: how do I upload/merge the converted bbPress database with the existing WP database?
• And once that’s done, how to deal with the disparity of users in WP with the old bbPress?

One idea I have is to create a new bbPress install that’s integrated with WP, and then once the conversion of the old forum is complete, to try to import that data into the existing install. Would that make sense?

Or, is it possible to just have the two databases separate, but use plugins (assuming I’m sticking with 0.9) to create the continuous login? Is that even possible? How would that share user data?

So, what would you do if you were in my shoes? Thanks for all your help.

[batrachoid]

The latest versions of wordpress and bbpress are the most secure and bbpress is designed to integrate with wp. The only possible advantage to keeping an older version of bbpress is the amount of plugins that have not been updated to ensure compatability (in other words, if you want a lot of plugins, stick with 0.9 until the ones you can’t live without are brought up to speed. My recommendation – upgrade now that you don’t have too many plugins to worry about).

If you’re going to upgrade bbpress, do it first.

Install wordpress and integrate with bbpress. Basic (shallow) integration eliminates the need for users to log in to each seperately.

[johnhiler]

The latest WordPress is definitely the most secure, b/c Automattic has not released security patches for earlier versions. But bbPress 1.0 is not clearly more secure than 0.9 – in fact, because bbPress 1.0 uses BackPress, it’s possibly less secure. Plus 0.9 has been stable for a long time, while 1.0 is new and still has a fair number of bugs.

Integration is easiest when you share a user table. It’s possible to integrate bbPress with other software (WordPress, or even something else) without sharing a user table but it’s not easy and there are no publicly released plugins which allow it.

How many users do you have on your WordPress install?

[brightcoconut]

There are ~115 in WordPress, and even though there are ~400 in the old phpBB forum we’re about to bring over, we really only care about the current 115 (the ones in WP).

[johnhiler]

How much overlap between your userbase is there… how many of the 115 WordPress users also have phpBB accounts?

Also – if “Mister X” has two accounts (one on each system)… is it critical that the comments in WordPress and in bbPress be merged into the same account? Or would you be ok with having them be separate accounts…

[brightcoconut]

How much overlap between your userbase is there… how many of the 115 WordPress users also have phpBB accounts?

All of them (except maybe one admin account). There won’t be anyone in WordPress who isn’t in bbPress.

The only ones with separate accounts might be the three admins, and they’d need to be the same across WP & bbP.

[gerikg]

I would leave both databases and then import both information to new DB. I’m not sure if anyone has tried doing this.

OR

Import the BBpress info into a New Database. Then intergrate it with a fresh WP. WP’s info is exportable through the admin section you can try to export all the information (posts) and then inport it to the fresh install.

[johnhiler]

Is it critical that a user have their old phpbb posts tied to their new WordPress/bbPress identity? Is it ok if their old posts are tied to their old username?

[brightcoconut]

@gerikg – how do we import bbPress database info into an existing database? (I’m no database pro; I can find my way around phpmyadmin, though.) I’m totally familiar with the WordPress side of things, but not so much w/ bbPress.

@johnhiler – yeah, that might be okay… at this point, I think the client would be thrilled if I can pull off the phpBB › bbPress conversion and have a single login between WordPress and bbPress. If the existing forum info ends up being “archived”, so to speak – not associated with their current usernames – I think they’d be okay with that.

[johnhiler]

That would greatly simplify the work involved!

[brightcoconut]

Great – so how do I do it?

[Mark]

@adamkayce – you might want to look into an application called phpMyAdmin, it provides a visual interface for database interaction. From there you could easily export your original bb_ tables to an .sql dump file, and then simply reupload the file to the new database via import.

[brightcoconut]

Cool; phpMyAdmin I can do.

So, I could probably upload that file into the same database as the WordPress install, right, since the prefixes are different? That would help integration immensely, if I’m not mistaken… and then configure bbPress to use WordPress’ user tables (which has been described before in many places)?

What happens then w/ the old bbPress users? Not that I actually care, much, if we’re using WordPress’ user tables… I guess I just don’t know what happens for the posts made by defunct users. Any advice there?

(and thanks again, everybody… this is supremely helpful.)

[Adam Harley (Kawauso)]

If bbPress can’t find user data for someone who’s made a post, it marks them as Anonymous

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/unexpected-anonymous-posts

[gerikg]

Adam, what I was saying is get a NEW database. Export the database from existing BBpressDB into the NEW database. With the new database install a fresh version of WP. This will give you BBpress with all your old forums and WP with nothing in it. After everything works well, then go to your old WP admin section export all the “authors and post” and then imported into the new WP.