Import from phpBB3 *AND* Simple:Press?

dudieboy

Hi all, first post. I haven't actually installed Vanilla hobbyist version yet, but I've downloaded it and I'm studying up. I want to "upgrade" from Simple:Press currently installed on my site, but I see that it's also possible to import from phpBB3. Over a year ago I closed our phpBB3 forum and made my members all sign up for new membership at the Simple:Press forum. So:

1) is it possible to import Simple:Press into Vanilla and THEN import phpBB3 into Vanilla, and show all posts from both forums,
2) is there a way to combine memberships? So for instance my moderator Jayne at Simple:Press can have her current account combined with her old phpBB3 account.

Please understand that I'm trying to ask all the dumb questions I can before I dive off a cliff and accidentally break my site.

UnderDog

These are good questions, but you have a problem, Unless the forum id's post id's etc from PHPBB3 and SimplePress get new numbers while importing into Vanilla

In PHPBB3 you'll have a forum discussion under ID number 13, but you could also have one under SimplePress, which discussion will then end up in vanilla?
If you have imported discussions from PHPBB3 to SimplePress, then those discussions are in both places, what would you like to do with them?

These are all interesting questions. Let's see if you can use the porter plugin to import both forums in (hopefully) separate installs of vanilla:
http://www.vanillaforums.org/addon/porter-core

It's not a final solution, but let's see if that works, for starters.

dudieboy

Thanks UnderDog. So I've installed Vanilla on my site and I'm playing around with embed and trying to get it to pop out on my mobile site. More questions on that in another discussion.

But yes, now that I've installed it I can see that there's room for me to mess around with importing before I replace the SPF forum currently in use, since Vanilla uses its own db separate from WP (good luck getting all those SPF tables out of WP, I guess). If all goes wrong with the imports I can delete Vanilla and the db and start over. I let you know what happens.

Hopefully, VERY hopefully, phpBB3 and SimplePress use different id methods for their tables, and then we'll go from there.

dudieboy

Okay I'm confused again. Where do I upload the vanilla2export.php file in order to export SimplePress? To the plugin folder? Or to the root folder for the site?

dudieboy

I gave it a shot and exported the data okay. So I imported the phpBB3 data first from the old forum, then I imported the SPF data from my current forum. The second import wiped out all the data from the first import. So the answer is, you can only import from one forum and any further imports will override previous ones.

UnderDog

And of course you made a backup right after you imported from the SimplePress Forum?
Then you have a lot of options to fix this.
All on your local PC / Server:
Make 3 installs
Vanilla_SimplePress
Vanilla_PHPbb
Vanilla_total

Vanilla_total will eventually contain all posts (discussions) from Vanilla_SimplePress and Vanilla_PHPbb
Make sure Vanilla_SimplePress AND Vanilla_PHPbb work perfectly, no date problems, discussion title problems, etc, etc.
After that, figure out a way to insert all posts from Vanilla_SimplePress AND Vanilla_PHPbb into Vanilla_total (the fun part)

dudieboy

Oh no, I'm no PHP wizard. :P Maybe that could work though.

UnderDog

I didn't say you need to be a PHP wizard for that, in fact, being a MySQL wizard would be better in this case.
After you have those 3 Vanilla instances you need a way to transfer posts from _SimplePress and PHPBB into _total (if you understand what I mean.

There's also another post that needs to transfer posts from 1 vanilla install to another and needs to know the same SQL query as you need.
In that case if someone invents the SQL query we can catch 2 flies with 1 stone, sortof :-)