After many months of planning and procrastination, I finally used Spring Break to move my site from plain php for content and SMF for the forum to WordPress with bbPress. As much effort as it took, I have to say that either it was much easier than other conversions and integrations I’ve experimented with or the experience from those previous experiments has really paid off.
For the most part, I followed affacat’s instructions on his successful convert from SMF to bbPress, trying it out first on my own machine of course before ready to go live:
- Install bbPress 0.9.0.4 and WordPress 2.7.1. I chose to put bbPress in a subdirectory of WordPress. Set up the database integration as part of the bbPress installation and delete any posts created on install.
- Install the latest phpBB with the necessary converter to move my existing members and posts to bbPress.
- Install Jaim’s phpBB to bbPress converter. I had to change bb_users to wp_users, and delete the first user and forum from the SQL because there are already a first user and forum in bbPress. I’m not sure what the topic_resolved key was from, so I removed that option. Then I copied and pasted the code from bbPress into this tool to generate my topic and username slugs. (There may have been other changes also that I didn’t keep track of.)
- Finally, I imported the SQL into my database.
- Install and activate SuperAnn’s WordPress plugin for WordPress / bbPress cookie integration.
- Activate other plugins.
- Post the first blog entry and new forum thread to announce the updates.
Man, it feels good to finally have the base I need to build up my site.
