Convert from PunBB to Phorum

so which are the queries you want to store in simpledb?

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Thomas Seifert

I will go ahead and admit that I haven't thoroughly looked at anything past the database driver documentation here on this site (all the functions and what they are supposed to return). I'll heed your advice on looking at the caching layer. I saw the folder in there but wasn't aware it would be capable of so much.

The only thing I've found so far that SimpleDB can't store is the message bodies. That is, unless you limited the bodies to 1K in length. Message bodies would have to be stored in S3 (if the goal was to have everything "in the cloud"). Everything else is fair game, but I was going to concentrate on user, forum and topic data.

I haven't studied the Phorum schema in detail yet, but the way our current system (IPB) works, updating or inserting into the (very large) post table blocks the multi-table joins used to generate the topic listing pages.

My reasoning for using SimpleDB would be to prevent blocking on those frequent, critical selects. I would still want everything to be written to MySQL, like a master in a replication scenario with SimpleDB being the slave. And a slave that you can run unlimited SELECTs against.

I'd write a complete SimpleDB database interface for Phorum in a heartbeat if it weren't for two things... one being that it can't single-handedly store everything necessary (requiring some additional hacking), and most-importantly, I'm really really green at this PHP stuff.

I hope I'm making sense. Let me know if I sound like a nutcase. :)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/20/2008 08:05PM by blambert.

Phorum will not have the problem you speak of when it comes to "blocks the multi-table joins". We don't do that kind of thing. I would ask you to give Phorum a try before you start worrying about its performance. I think you will be pleasantly surprised.

Brian - Cowboy Ninja Coder - Personal Blog - Twitter

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brianlmoon
Phorum will not have the problem you speak of when it comes to "blocks the multi-table joins". We don't do that kind of thing. I would ask you to give Phorum a try before you start worrying about its performance. I think you will be pleasantly surprised.

I installed it several months ago and have been working with the templates for a few weeks. If you need someone to help test your new import feature, I'm your man. I'd love to get these posts loaded to see how things run under load. I don't doubt what you're saying about the performance, I just don't want to have to go through the hassle of upgrading (or adding) database hardware.

One thing that concerns me: IPB stores topic data separate from posts with separate IDs. In Phorum, the "topic ID" is the ID of the first post in a topic. What ID numbers will need to be passed in the XML dataset?

I think I'm in your neck of woods this week, over here in Muscle Shoals at the RTJ courses covering a golf tournament. Great weather!

All new ids will be assigned. There is no easy way around it. Especially in these situations where the schema is much different.

Brian - Cowboy Ninja Coder - Personal Blog - Twitter

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brianlmoon
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.

I've gone as far as getting data to SimpleDB using the caching layer but the serialized arrays of both the message data and user data are beyond the limits of SBD. I'm pretty sure the cached RSS string would also be too long.

I suppose it was worth a try.

Hi.

That would be awesome. I come from phpbb3, and i don´t want to use it anymore, because i converted to phorum with another fresh board. But my old board is still using phpbb3, and a conversion to phorum... hell that would be great.

Regards

Hi,

Last week, the PunBB core developers forked the project.

This conversion now takes on a different perspective for me and many other PunBB forum users.

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Bert Garcia - When all you have is a keyboard

What's the status of the import_xml.php script?

Anything I could do to help?

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



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/10/2008 03:31PM by Bert Garcia.

It's in the trunk (but you knew that I think) and if I am right, it was about functioning (Thomas and Brian should be able to comment on that in a more trustworthy way, since I aimed my arrows at the new BBcode module while they were coding on the XML import.) I think that one important thing to take care of would be documentation about the system, which describes what the XML should look like and how to handle an import. Also important would be some sample export scripts for other forum systems, which show a full conversion from forum package X to Phorum.

Help is always welcomed of course, so if you feel like taking on these tasks or other related tasks that you can think of, then don't let us stop you =)

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Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce