Good morning,
I am hoping to get some help here. I am working to get a client set up with UBB that currently has a phpBB. We are set to install on Tuesday, providing I can get all my ducks in a row by then.

This morning I received the following in an enail:
[QUOTE] Hi, before you change over to UBB, you should let Cyd know that there are conversion scripts out there that will allow you to convert from one board software to another while keeping all discussions and users registered. Just a suggestion![/QUOTE]This came from a woman that operates a phpBB. {Would have been really nice if she inserted a link there!}

Does anyone here know of a conversion program that will do this? I searched your engine but found nothing current on this.

I currently have another site that runs UBB Classic, and was going to pattern the upload and server paths as per the existing one. Am I on the right track?

The UBB board was originally installed 5 years ago, by a mentor of mine, so I did not do the full install. Then when we moved hosts, Jacob Toves helped us get the new one running, so again, I was not fully involved. I hope to have enough experience by now to be able to do this myself.

Cross your fingers!

With the release of 6.7, an Import/Export Utililty was introducted.

As of right now, I haven't seen a phpBB YAML file yet, but some information on the importer/exporter can be found at http://www.ubbdev.com/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi/topic/8/3682.html?

Thanks! I'm on the hunt! I am going to install the trial version first. I know it will work, but I want to hit any snag now before I am expected to jump through hoops on Tuesday.

thanks again!

Do note that at this time we do not have a YAML importer spec for phpBB, but we'll make one once there's an official request for it by a license holder.

Also note that the trial version is based on 6.6 and does not have the import bits.

Thanks Charles. I sent your reply to my client. I believe she is going to buy a license Monday or Tuesday, and hopefully allow enough time for the converter to be written.

If you have info on how this is done, I would appreciate it. Some of this stuff is beyond my experience level. It's great to know there are people out there to turn to when I am stuck.


Cyd~

Much of the importer is best refered to as "magic"...

In short, the code is designed to take "any" tabular data that contains categories, forums, topics, and members, and import it. This is possible because the code can bend over backwards to try and understand what is being imported.

The actual mechanism that allows the importer to work its magic is the import specification file. The file tells the importer what components are available to be imported, and what to do with the data.

Right now, we have import specification files for our own products, the Invision boards (1.2, I believe), and vBulletin 2.3. Writing a spec file for most database types takes very little time in comparison to actually writing new code just to import one particular product.

The same exact import specification file format is shared by all the new importers in all of our products. Right now, there are importers in the Eve platform, and in UBB.classic. The importer for UBB.threads is a work in progress. (There is an existing standalone importer to go from UBB.classic to UBB.threads.)

There are some limitations you need to be aware of. The UBB.classic importer uses an outdated CSV parser that may not be able to handle all of your data very well. When the database tables are dumped, they must be done in a particular way, with a certain minimum version of phpMyAdmin. (There are ways around this limitation, but they are not really part of the import spec, and thus can not be supported on these forums... )

Importer performance is also less than spectacular - some servers may kill the import process if it tries to pull in too much data at once.

However, for almost everyone, the importer should work. And if not ... well, that's what support tickets are for.