Convert from PunBB to Phorum

Re: Convert from PunBB to Phorum

Bert Garcia — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 19:33:18 -0500

Quote
Brian Moon
It's in trunk (aka 5.3). No idea if it would work with 5.2. It can import the XML dump that Thomas had created from a phpBB install he had access to. I am not sure the XML specification is documented. That would need to happen next.

Hi Brian,

It's been a while since I visited this thread, but I'm still interested in moving forward on a conversion.

This is the forum I'm interested in converting over. The over 34,000 users registered on the forum are mostly spammers, gladly Akismet is keeping them from posting anything.

Let me know what I can do to help.

Re: Convert from PunBB to Phorum

Brian Moon — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 02:13:33 -0500

Quote
Bert Garcia
Hi,

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

Thanks.

It's in trunk (aka 5.3). No idea if it would work with 5.2. It can import the XML dump that Thomas had created from a phpBB install he had access to. I am not sure the XML specification is documented. That would need to happen next.

Re: Convert from PunBB to Phorum

sunspark — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:15:44 -0500

Bumpety-bump

Ditto on Bert's question.

Re: Convert from PunBB to Phorum

Bert Garcia — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 14:58:27 -0600

Hi,

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

Thanks.

Re: Convert from PunBB to Phorum

Bert Garcia — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 16:01:47 -0500

Quote
Maurice Makaay
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.

Yes, I think this is what is needed so we can start working on conversions.

Once I get one of my PunBB forums over to Phorum, I'll be glad to document the process, provide steps, scripts or whatever I needed for a successful conversion.

Re: Convert from PunBB to Phorum

Maurice Makaay — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 14:39:49 -0500

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 =)

Re: Convert from PunBB to Phorum

Bert Garcia — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 14:09:06 -0500

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

Anything I could do to help?

Re: Convert from PunBB to Phorum

Bert Garcia — Fri, 16 May 2008 11:13:03 -0500

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.

Re: Convert from PunBB to Phorum

akphorum — Thu, 01 May 2008 04:02:50 -0500

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

Re: Convert from PunBB to Phorum

blambert — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 22:00:23 -0500

Quote
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.

Re: Convert from PunBB to Phorum

Brian Moon — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:38:06 -0500

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

Re: Convert from PunBB to Phorum

blambert — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 21:51:28 -0500

Quote
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!

Re: Convert from PunBB to Phorum

Brian Moon — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 21:14:52 -0500

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.

Re: Convert from PunBB to Phorum

blambert — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 19:02:57 -0500

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. :)

Re: Convert from PunBB to Phorum

Thomas Seifert — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 05:29:00 -0500

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

Re: Convert from PunBB to Phorum

Brian Moon — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 20:51:03 -0500

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.

Re: Convert from PunBB to Phorum

blambert — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 19:10:06 -0500

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.

Re: Convert from PunBB to Phorum

Brian Moon — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 10:21:15 -0500

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).

Re: Convert from PunBB to Phorum

blambert — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:59:33 -0500

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.

Re: Convert from PunBB to Phorum

TallyHo — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 22:08:26 -0500

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.

Re: Convert from PunBB to Phorum

Maurice Makaay — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 11:14:50 -0500

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 ;-).

Re: Convert from PunBB to Phorum

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 10:48:45 -0500

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.

Re: Convert from PunBB to Phorum

Bert Garcia — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 11:31:33 -0500

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.

Re: Convert from PunBB to Phorum

Maurice Makaay — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 10:49:08 -0500

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   |
        +--------+

Convert from PunBB to Phorum

Bert Garcia — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 10:25:15 -0500

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.