Is it possible to set the author of a discussion manually?

Vel

Hi, I really love the work that has been done on Vanilla Forums! Keep it up!

I recently installed VF to replace bloated comment sections on my WordPress website and have ran into a bit of a problem. I want to migrate over the questions and answers people have posted on the Wordpress site to VF, but I did not force people to register to comment on the WordPress site so all I have is what they put as their name. What I want to do on VF is to add all the comments from WordPress manually as discussions and specify the poster of the discussion manually as well (to be the same as in WordPress). Is there a way to do this without registering a fake account for each separate person?

Thanks in advance!
Vel

UnderDog

OMG, interesting question, starred. Are you using SSO to connect between WordPress and Vanilla? All I can do is give you SQL queries (semi-code) for exactly what you don't want : Import dummy-users into Vanilla.

I'll let the real developers answer this one for you :-) All I can say is that we have the porter plugin (and porter plus). It won't transfer from WordPress by Default, but maybe, with some tweaks, you will get the results you like :-)

Also take a look at the api application, maybe it will help. http://vanillaforums.org/addon/api-application

hgtonight

You want the author to be able to be set manually on any discussion. On top of that, you don't want to require it to be linked to a vanilla account?

I would approach this by first importing all the discussions/comments as the same 'dummy' user. Then I would write a plugin (MyWordPressKludge that picks the dummy user out and replaces it with "proper" name based on a UserKludgeModel.

It would be a lot easier to just create a dummy account for each unique commenter, imo.

Vel

Thanks for the comments to both of you, it looks like there isn't really an easy way to do this. I can just make dummy users and transfer everything across manually, it shouldn't take more than a few hours... Trying to make it automatic sounds like quite a hassle!

UnderDog

@Vel said:
Trying to make it automatic sounds like quite a hassle!

Nope. Maybe we explained it too complicated.
Making it automatic is similar to

Insert into `vanilla`.`discussions` SELECT * FROM `wordpress`.`discussions`

and of course a couple of other SQL queries.
If you have clear which things you want to put where (field mappings), you can create those SQL statements easily.

Vel

Currently I have a sub forum for every page on the website, but on every page the Wordpress comments will need to be manually moved into separate discussions within each sub forum. Could I automatically pipe all comments on each page into the correct sub forum then organize them by topic manually later?

UnderDog

I think so, yes. Also you can tag those discussion topics, so no problem organizing them. Don't look at it from the frontend, look at it from the backend and phpMyAdmin.

Vel

Excellent, is there a guide somewhere I could use to do this? Your SQL command above could use a bit more explaining as I haven't used SQL that much

vrijvlinder

You need to go to the mysql panel find your database , if you have others beside the one. You can find which it is by looking in your config.php and see the name of the db . Then once you know which it is for sure, click it from the list of data bases and then click phpMyAdmin which will take you to that database where you can see all the tables with stuff.

Look at it and study it and find the data you need to move and or where you will need to move it. Get familiar with it all before you move stuff.

http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/docs.php

http://www.sequelpro.com

http://www.wikihow.com/Install-phpMyAdmin-on-Your-Windows-PC

http://shallop.com/2011/04/howto-use-phpmyadmin-to-remote-admin-mysql-dbs-via-ssh-tunnel/

UnderDog

@Vel said:
Excellent, is there a guide somewhere I could use to do this? Your SQL command above could use a bit more explaining as I haven't used SQL that much

Nope, sorry. Most SQL statements are constructed using logic.
If you have all the field names of the old DB. And you have the field names of the new DB, try to figure out which information from the Old field names go into the new DB (mapping).
If Vanilla has discussion_title and WordPress has Title, those 2 match.
Let's say you only want to move over the titles from WordPress to Vanilla. The SQL statement would become:

Insert into `vanilla`.`discussions` SELECT `Title` FROM `wordpress`.`discussions`

If you want to fill all the discussions fields from Vanilla, you need to know what you want to fill them with. Find as much fields from WordPress to fill the Vanilla Discussions table.
Hope it makes sense.

Vel

Alright, I'll have a look around and try to transfer comments automatically. Thanks for all the help!