Convert from PunBB to Phorum

Hi,

Just wondering if anyone has done a conversion of a PunBB forum to Phorum.

I run a few PunBB forums myself and I know of some other PunBB users looking to make the switch.

Thanks.

--
Bert Garcia - When all you have is a keyboard

I haven't seen such conversion, but Thomas and I have been discussing the subject of forum conversions yesterday and decided that an XML import system for Phorum would probably help in getting more conversion scripts going.

The idea is to have a predefined XML format for the data that you can feed to Phorum. The big advantage here would be that the programmer that writes the XML export for the old forum won't have to learn Phorum structure and code, but can focus on translating the old system's relevant data to the XML format. A lot of programmers are comfortable with that nowadays. We hope that this will bring us more conversions that we have now (which is close to none, so that should not be too hard to break ;-).

Writing an XML spec and import system is something that we will try to build together during the upcoming MySQL conference. Thomas already started looking at the required XML format and a phpBB XML export script.

And since there's nothing like a good ASCII pic:

        +--------+
        | Forum  |      export
        | System |----> script -------+
        |  X DB  |                    |
        +--------+                    |
                                      v
                                     XML
                                    export
                                     file
        +--------+                    |
        | Phorum |      import        |
        | System |<---- script <------+
        |   DB   |
        +--------+

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Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce

Quote
mmakaay
Writing an XML spec and import system is something that we will try to build together during the upcoming MySQL conference.

That's good news indeed.

--
Bert Garcia - When all you have is a keyboard

This kind of system would be a big help to Phorum's growth. Most sites have been running a forum for years so the main target is no longer new builds.

Recently I converted a large site to WordPress using their XML importer and it worked perfectly. Tools like this are exactly why WordPress has been so successful - they make it easy to switch as there are converts for every other blog software out there and the XML importer is a great fallback. If it's not easy to convert most people won't. Even for a developer it's quite off-putting.

Please keep us up to date. I would be happy to lend a hand in testing the phpBB tool.

Thank you for the support and for confirming that this is indeed the Right Way as far as conversion is involved. We will keep you up-to-date for sure and we really set our minds to delivering this as a conversion tool during the conference (let's see how far I can get during the flight from NL to US ;-).

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Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce

I think this is an excellent idea - I especially like the predefined XML format. Many forum scripts have a noticeable lack of conversion scripts, and maurice's idea is great because its so inherently flexible.

I hope everyone enjoyed the conference.

A few weeks ago I printed off the database schema from both Phorum and the software we currently use (IPB) to begin putting together a conversion plan. This XML import tool would be incredible.

Am I correct in assuming that it would make use of the pre-existing database API? We'll probably have close to two million posts to convert over by the time we do it this summer.

I have the import_xml.php script on my machine right now. I have groups and some of forums working. Once we have this test with phpBB data working, we will publish the XML schema and people can start making scripts to dump other systems into our xml format.

Yes, the import script will use the existing API systems or database functions where there is no api yet (e.g. groups).

Brian - Cowboy Ninja Coder - Personal Blog - Twitter

That sounds great, Brian. The reason I asked about the database API was that I plan to add some rudimentary support for Amazon's SimpleDB so that some of the more frequent SELECTs can pull from SimpleDB and take a lot of load off our MySQL server. Posts, PMs and the like can't be stored in SimpleDB so I'm content in keeping those in the "real" database.

Sounds like you need to make a cache layer for simple db rather than rewriting db functions. We have the infastructure to cache what can be cached sanely already. See the dir include/cache for the current modules. Better yet, use one of those. memcached (if you have several web servers) or xcache (if you have just one web server) will out perform connecting to Amazon no doubt.

Brian - Cowboy Ninja Coder - Personal Blog - Twitter