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How's progress on the MyBB importer?
Saw this thread that mentioned a MyBB importer for Vanilla was in progress or something like that.
I'm curious to see if it exists yet, because I really want to ditch MyBB and go straight to Vanilla, without having to go through phpBB3 or pay a buttload for gConverter's services.
Any updates?
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I'm not affiliated with gConverter, but they don't seem too expensive to me. Importing a fairly large forum, with everything included, tested and guaranteed to work, is not a walk in the park and their service seems quite reasonably priced.
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Would rather do it myself because I'm paranoid.
The converter is an open source project. If you can't do it yourself I would pay the team or someone to do it. I think waiting around for someone to come up with it for is a bit silly, the team have plenty on their plate already. They were able to create basic converter, however spending time on in right now for nothing is not something they have time to do.
grep is your friend.
Halfway of the work is 'mapping' the fields of MyBB into Vanilla. It's as easy as dumping the structure of MyBB and Vanilla and comparing. What goes where.
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Basically, new porters get added when someone pays for a migration from that platform to vanillaforums.com hosted service. We do so many bloody migrations that I don't have the wherewithal to then proceed to build new ones pro bono. It's like digging ditches all day and then you come home and your spouse asks you to dig a pool. Nope!
Happy to give pointers if you take it on and get stuck.
Alright then. Where do I start?
Start by reading the source code for the current porter. You need to familiarize yourself with the current code.
Right at the top of the file is the supported array. Add MyBB to it. This will make the option available in the form dropdown.
Now you need to create your MyBB specific class. The SimplePress class seems like a good fit to start from.
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@hgtonight fyi, really that supported array just lets you choose the order. Otherwise it just grabs a list of all the classes in whatever order it wants, i.e. the new class will get added whether it's in the array or not.
@lukelarris Note you don't need to build a new vanilla2export.php file every time you want to test it. Just drop the whole mess into a web folder and use index.php. We just use make.php to build a new vanilla2export.php for easier distribution. It works as-is (in multiple files) just fine.
Well thanks guys. Time to figure out how PHP works and the whole SQL mess :P
Always insightful, you are! Coming from my background of embedded software, all of this autoloading is almost like black magic to me.
Almost. XD
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Check out the Documentation! We are always looking for new content and pull requests.
Click on insightful, awesome, and funny reactions to thank community volunteers for their valuable posts.
@Lincoln, be thankful that your wife didn't ask you to do a migration pro cher
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I may not provide the completed solution you might desire, but I do try to provide honest suggestions to help you solve your issue.
Which confirms what I wrote in my first reply. Paranoid or not, don't fall into the psychological trap of thinking that web development is easy and anyone can do it. It will surely give you a feeling of accomplishment if you succeed, but the risk of programming by coincidence is high.
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I don't assume it's easy, I'm just willing to try my hand at it, that's the difference.
@lukelarris Out of curiousity, why are you leaving MyBB?
I don't like its ancient and obsolete "classic" forum layout. I believe it's unfriendly and doesn't invite users to join in discussions as easily as Vanilla does. It's also a lot more complicated to register as a new member on a forum using MyBB, especially so with their lack of officially-supported social authentication (Twitter, Facebook).
That is really appreciated, Luke.
It's actually one of the strong points of the Vanilla community. Although we sometimes joke around a little bit, we always try to help as much as we can and then request the user to add his new-found information to the Vanilla Wiki...
The joking around comes from sometimes frustratingly seeing the same questions over and over again (not about MyBB porter, but other stuff :-) )
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