elorg.net

I’ve gone through so many forum solutions over the years. I moved to bbPress at some point a while ago because I was tired of trying to integrate Vanilla with WordPress. Unfortunately, bbPress doesn’t seem to be updated often, and is seriously lacking… almost everything.

I think it’s time to move back to Vanilla (again). It integrates so much better, and even though I absolutely loved it the last time I used it, it looks so much slicker now.

I’ve been doing some tinkering, and it’s NOT going to be an easy process. There’s a script that’s supposed to help with the migration – but it fails horribly for me no matter what I do to try to coerce into behaving. I’ve mapped out a lot of the fields (maybe I should actually write all of that down and share it) and that portion isn’t so bad. It’s the differences in the way that bbPress and Vanilla each store the content of the first post of each topic that’s going to be the biggest pain. Thankfully my little forum is pretty low traffic, so I can take my time.

So far I’ve tried a LOT of different approaches, and ruled them all out. I think I have a game plan now, and just need to sit down for a day and get it done. I’m hoping it actually works and I’m not wasting my time. It’s not entirely a waste though – I consider myself a database n00b, and hacking through all of this is teaching me quite a bit.

Awesome! The forum isn’t allowing logins? Sorry about that…

I didn’t make any changes to the forum, though I have been attempting to integrate WordPress with a new install of Vanilla. I didn’t think I had made any changes that would impact bbPress, but apparently… I did?

Check back later this weekend. Might need to continue moving forward with the Vanilla install and manual data migration.

All fixed! Well, for now. If you had an account on the forum, you can login and start posting again. I still need to finish up a few things like add plugins and themes, but otherwise, it’s functional again.

Enjoy!

As of today, the forum is back online.

Unfortunately, I gave up on migrating the old data over. There were too many discrepancies between Vanilla and bbPress database table structure and requirements. Renaming/rearranging the tables are easy enough, but I don’t have the experience or time to try to make work-arounds for the more complicated discrepancies that I found, and then hope that it doesn’t break anything. I did give it a try though.

We didn’t have any critical data on the forum, so I figured that it wouldn’t hurt too much to start from scratch. It has a very similar layout to previous incarnations, and the access has been restricted similarly as well.

I installed bbPress since it integrates with WordPress a lot easier and more dependably than Vanilla does.

Your old account will still work unless it was removed due to complete inactivity. You can login through WordPress here on my website’s front page, or directly via the forum – both access the same user information.

WordPress has been updated. Not surprisingly, this did not seem to affect the (non)functionality of the forum at all. I’m looking into finding another solution for the forum now.