Importing Wordpress posts into Vanilla

raisinlove · July 2006

Hi, while I am quite satisfied with Wordpress to post news on most of my websites, I figured that a blog would be redundant on one site where I'm considering intergrating a forum. I decided to look beyond PHPBB and try out Vanilla as I heard good things about this system. So instead of having both a forum and a news update blog, I'd like to create a forum category for my news updates, but it would be nice if I could retrieve my current news post archive from my Wordpress database and populate the forum with these. If they could conserve their dates, that would be perfect but not absultely necessairy. Perhaps someone would have a non messy way of doing this? If not, I will probably copy-paste everything manually (over 50 posts...) Thank you!

Toivo · July 2006

Nice one. Why do we need swell? ;) Let's just create wordpress > lussumo converter.

Jefftheman45 · July 2006

Wordpress can export, but if you want them to always be in sync, you could write your own MySQL thing and add it to Wordpress's posting mechanism.

<?php
//Wordpress's add stuff. Do not remove. Or it will break Wordpress.

//Now, also post it to Vanilla.
//If it's a different db, mysql_select_db("new_db");

mysql_query("INSERT INTO vanilla_posts (Field, Field, Field) VALUES ({$_POST['Title']}, etc, etc);");
?>

Bergamot · July 2006

I don't know; this whole "vanilla as a blog" thing just seems like using a screwdriver to bang in nails.

lech · July 2006

Berg, tell that to the folks who use WordPress as a forum :P

jimw · July 2006

Wouldn't this be better accomplished by setting up an RSS feed between your blog and your forum?

Toivo · July 2006

nope, they dont have to be in sync. just a migrator script is enough.

russlipton · July 2006

I don't see the idea so much in terms of Vanilla-as-a-blog but simply increasing the visibility of the first post to a discussion thread (optionally) much as a blog often has a leading post accompanied by comments.

The first post should set the tone/title/theme of the thread anyway; 'blogifying it' a bit could be a help for readers and possible contributors to the thread when choosing what to browse.

pbear · July 2006

Straying a little more off-topic...

Possibilities:

Identify the first post and style it differently via CSS. For example...

Edit the vanilla.css (or go CSS > Edit CSS if you have the Web Developer Extension in Firefox) with the following. You can place it after the "#Comments code {}" rule.
div#ContentBody ol#Comments a + div + div { font-size: 11px; } div#ContentBody a[name="Item_1"] + div + div { font-size: 16px; font-family: "Georgia"; background: #333; color: #ccc; padding: 8px 14px; } div#ContentBody ol#Comments li:first-child { border: 2px solid #999; background: #000; } #ContentBody ol#Comments div.CommentHeader ul > li { border: none; background: #fff; } #ContentBody ol#Comments a[name="Item_1"] + div.CommentHeader ul > li { background: #000; } #ContentBody ol#Comments a[name="Item_1"] + div.CommentHeader ul > li a { font-family: Georgia; font-size: 18px; margin-right: 4px; margin-left: 14px; }
I wouldn't be surprised if IE barfs on it (I've not tested there).
Give the posts you want to be "blog-like" their own category: "Blog". Set up a tab (Page Management extension?) that presents just the category "Blog" by calling its own custom "blog.php" page (You'd have to make it). That way you have "Blog" posts and regular forum posts. All your blog posts get to take advantage of the forum commenting capabilities.

@lech:

tell that to the folks who use WordPress as a forum

lol! – so true! But crummy forum options are leading people to Vanilla. If you don't need it all, you pick the one that gets you the most and adapt what's missing.

Importing Wordpress posts into Vanilla

Comments