[DEV] phpBB2 to phpBB3 upgrade script

[Highway of Life]

Hey everyone,

I thought it would be wise to start a new topic regarding the phpBB2 to phpBB3 (beta1) upgrade script that I am creating, that we discussed in the other thread.

I'm running out of town, so I don't have time to do some of the MOD stuff...
I'll let you guys know how the script goes when I get back, and I'll post it here when I'm done.

See everyone in a few weeks!

- Highway

phpBB2 to phpBB3 Upgrade Script
Bug Tracker
SVN
SVN Access

[Guttsy]

I would be very interested in testing out this script whenever you complete it, or using it, or whatever. I know some MySQL and PHP, but not a bunch. I can't imagine how much work and changes it would take to get it to successfully upgrade, however.

[Highway of Life]

For my board, a good number, since it has a ton of MOD's, there is a lot of *junk* to go through.

Also, contrary to what some believe, it's not as simple as face value.

For instance, BBCode is handled very differant in Olympus than phpBB2, so sigs won't work. There are many others too, but when I'm done with it, I'll post a tutorial and two or three ways to upgrade based on phpBB3 Beta1

[tannie]

"HoL" is right. I had bunked the idea of the upgrade script after comparing the tables of BB2 and BB3. There are a lot of differences and sometimes you may have to put hours to understand what exactly they (phpBB developers) have handled a particular feature in BB3 as against BB2.

[Highway of Life]

An update on the script.

These are the sections that have to be trasfered over:

• attachments
  
• banlist*?
  
• categories
  
• forums
  
• groups
  
• posts
  
• private messages
  
• ranks*?
  
• poll_options and votes
  
• ?search_results and wordlist?
  
• topics
  
• users
  

*? = Low priority, do we need these?
? = Do we need to transfer these?

[Highway of Life]

Status of what has been finished, and in-progress

• users = 97% done
  
• groups = 50% done
  
• posts = 50% done
  

[Guttsy]

When I was doing my "script" that pretty much only worked on my board.... all I copied over was the users, then I completely ignored any groups that the old board had and simply set everyone into the registered members group and set the person with the smallest ID to be a founder. Completely ignored categories and whatnot because I didn't have the time - and this was only for my fun testing anyways.

Frankly: users, forums, topics, posts - why would you need anything else?

It's not like you would even want to keep the phpBB2 permissions... you start completely from scratch. Ranks can easily be remade... probably takes less time to remake the ranks than it would to code it to transfer them over. That's my theory - if it takes less time to do it by hand, then don't code it.

I broke all the signatures and got lazy when it came to copying the actual post text over. Avatars broke too.

I'd be quite happy if just a "minimal" version of this conversion script was made and then released, with additional features to be released later (like ban list, attachments and etc.

But for groups, I think just setting everyone to registered members would be good since I (not sure about others) will completely redo the groups anyways.

[Highway of Life]

Okay, thanks for the feedback, that does help, but I would also like some feedback from other users as well...

We are trying to convert a 19,000 post database, so we *NEED* the forums, categories and topics. Otherwise it could be one big nasty mess to clean up.

Also, banlist and ranks are really really low on the priority list, but I put them there so If I get any feedback that those are needed, I can make a script for them.
Each part that you see that I posted is a script of it's own, this decreases the amount of load it will take on the server.

For us, attachments is a last priority, but I would like more user feedback on this one.
# categories is important so that each forum knows where to go, and we have over 40, so it would be a bad cleanup if we did not have cats.
# groups is somewhat part of the users, so this is needed.
# private messages, don't you think it would be important to your users???
# poll_options and votes, again, I don't know about you, but we have entire forums dedicated to polls and votes, so this is very important for us at least.
# ?search_results and wordlist? I really have no idea if we need to transfer this or not.

[Guttsy]

Okay, yes, polls are needed. Banlist... pft.

As far as private messages... I increased the amount of PMs anyone could store in their folder to 1000 because I was really too lazy to delete my own PMs... so really, for us, not transferring Private Messages wouldn't harm, it would help the database size. But I cannot say the same for others....

I like how you are doing them as seperate scripts however, very nice.

[Handyman]

Doing them as seperate scripts makes it easier to code and keeps the pages shorter