1 Topic by JMelhuish (edited by JMelhuish 2004-09-20 21:39)

  • From: Boston, USA
  • Registered: 2004-09-20
  • Posts: 27

Topic: Importing from other BBs or CMSs

I have been checking out punBB for the last couple of hours, and have it running on my website.  It seems really nice! 

I am inquiring about importing old forums into the database.  I see that some convertors have been written for phpBB (and others).  I have two possible desired conversions:

1) tiki (tikiwiki) to punBB
2) separate HTML files into MySQL/punBB

tiki (http://tikiwiki.org) already uses MySQL and PHP, but it is rather over-featured for my needs. (I thought I needed the features, but think I am better off using more forums for things like article writing, technical content sharing, etc.).

So, I presume there is no convertor for tiki (or for separate HTML files); is it possible or easy to do some kind of direct database dump from tiki into punBB?  Currently I have only about 350 topics and 1000 total messages.

Also, how about some kind of convertor for HTML files into MySQL?  Here I have about 68,000 separate HTML messages...  :-(

I'm also hoping that the mods for file attachments (especially images/pictures) get ironed out, maybe even included in the PunBB codebase!  [Rickard??]  Allowing registered users to add files or images would massively help my use of PunBB as a CMS.

Any ideas or feedback appreciated!  Thanks.

James

See my current tiki CMS & forum at http://fullrangedriver.com/
Personal site http://melhuish.org/

James Melhuish

JMelhuish's Website

  • From: Gothenburg, Sweden
  • Registered: 2002-07-03
  • Posts: 946

Re: Importing from other BBs or CMSs

JMelhuish wrote:

1) tiki (tikiwiki) to punBB

Shouldn't be too much work to fix. Though, I've not looked closer at the TikiWiki-forums, but they probably work as every other forum :)

JMelhuish wrote:

2) separate HTML files into MySQL/punBB

HTML-files? How do you mean? How are these html-files created? Feels like it's problematic to do this...

(I'm the one who have written all current converters)

3 Reply by JMelhuish (edited by JMelhuish 2004-09-20 22:19)

  • From: Boston, USA
  • Registered: 2004-09-20
  • Posts: 27

Re: Importing from other BBs or CMSs

Tiki is pretty much similar I think...

The HTML files were created by a cgi bulletin board at the German Parsimony forums (http://parsimony.net)  Each file (message) contains URLs that reference other files (messages - mostly in the same directory).  I may just put them up as HTML files, but I would like them to be searchable through MySQL.  I don't mind losing the URL references to other messages, but keeping any URLs internal to the message would be helpful.

I might have to get someone to write a program to extract just the relevant text, as there is a lot of cr*p before and after the real information.

See for example some similar forum at http://f24.parsimony.net/forum54930/index.htm  Note the "threaded messages" with each message potentially containing it's own child thread(s).

Thnx
James

James Melhuish

JMelhuish's Website

  • Registered: 2004-10-05
  • Posts: 49

Re: Importing from other BBs or CMSs

My site used to be based off of Web-App, which was a perl CMS and Forum that used flat file databases. It recently crashed, and I decided to rebuild from the bottom, since web-app was a little big and the forum was getting too big for flat text file databases.

I had about 600 members and over 2,000 posts. It be nice if I could somehow convert this to punBB.

The user database is a folder that has a textfile for each user such as:

admin.dat
someguy.dat
someoneelse.dat
etc.

In each text file is the username, encrypted password, email address and other info. All I care about is the username and email address since punBB uses a different type of encryption for the password. (Old users can just request a new pw, anyway.)

The forum database is similar, with a folder that has all of the posts in textfiles such as:

1.txt
2.txt
3.txt
4.txt
.....
2000.txt
etc.

The info in each textfile is the user who posted, the content, and the category it belongs to.

Is there any way that all of this junk can be piled into MySQL so punBB can make sense of it?

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jchristophm's Website

  • From: Boston, USA
  • Registered: 2004-09-20
  • Posts: 27

Re: Importing from other BBs or CMSs

jchristophm wrote:

The forum database is similar, with a folder that has all of the posts in textfiles such as:

1.txt
2.txt
3.txt
4.txt
.....
2000.txt . . .

Is there any way that all of this junk can be piled into MySQL so punBB can make sense of it?

That is what I am going to do.  I might require my users to re-register, as it is the 68,000 posts that I want to focus on getting into PunBB.  A friend will probably write a script in Python and run it on my web server.  It will just strip content defined within various HTML tags or keywords and dump into the MySQL tables.  If we get any code that is reusable, I'll post it somewhere in Mods.

James

James Melhuish

JMelhuish's Website