coming from a phpbb forum

mepossem

the man who used to do the programming and with whom have had a nice discussion, used phpbb - and want to transfer all I have to vanilla - any suggestions?

also the hosting program I have included vanilla forum: should I go for that one or for a paid one. We are a non-profit and money is as usual very tight.

Many thanks for any replies,
Mark

R_J

You should be able to port your forum to Vanilla: https://github.com/lincolnwebs/VanillaPorter
As far as I know, most if not all issues that my rise during transfer process are solved if you ask here for help.

Please look here at the plugins of the hosted Vanilla plans: http://vanillaforums.com/info/plugins I think most of that functionalities could be achieved with OS plugins, too, but you may have to invest some time to make it play nicely together. So you have to decide what you need or at least explain what you need if you want to get an advice whether to go with Vanillas hosted plan or the self-hosted version

Adrian

@mepossem‌. Some notes on the hosted option for you. (if you need more info please PM me)

• We can do the migration for you for a fee, or can try the open-source, and convert using the Vanilla Porter @R_J mentioned.
• If you choose to switch to hosted later, it can be done for free in most cases. We can move over the forum post, users, avatars. ect
• Make sure you create a theme in smarty (file names end with .tpl). This makes moving your theme to hosted much easier.
• We cannot upload your custom theme, and you need to avoid any hacking of core code.
• We will not be able to support custom plugins, but our hosted product has almost all the functionality you will need.
• We offer a 30-day free trial so you can try it out to see if it's the right fit. The hosted and the open source version share a similar lineage, but the hosted version has many differences that might be worth examining especially if you are not technical and don't want to worry about those aspects.

Either way, Vanilla will give your community an improved experience

phreak

@mepossem: Hi Mark, i'm considering the same with one of my boards. Did you consider a URL rewriting scheme to not lose the weighted pages of your forum?

This is something i didn't have time yet to dive into, but is a critical issue for me as i'll try to migrate a board with about 13.000 comments and 1.400 discussions. Not to much, but still a thing.