Add-on Xenforo to Xenforo Importer

The Dark Wizard

Well-known member
I am curious to see if any one is willing to make this or has found one that exists.

Currently Naatan who made the awesome SSO addon is willing to make this for $2200 if some one wanted to help with that cause I guess we could go with him.

Looking forward to people's responses.
 
That is a stupid price. $2k basically means he will work 9 hours a day, for a full month ..

It's quite easy to make an import script, and shouldn't take too long.

I've converted a few xf boards using a third party program SQL designer for Mac that lets you map fields and then you click import. It took me 45 minutes to map things, because I was new to the program, and another 45 to convert the million posts over.

Go with someone else like AlexD, I bet you he does it half that price. Easily. And it would be a xf2xf.php import script to dump into xf directly.
 
I sent AlexD a message and I welcome any one else who is interested in taking on my request to give me a quote via private message or just post here incase any one else wants it :D
 
I agree i have used SQL examiner in windows and was able to merge 2 XF sites. Only draw back was user imported in had to change password and then i had to run query to fix urls.
 
That is a stupid price. $2k basically means he will work 9 hours a day, for a full month ..

It's quite easy to make an import script, and shouldn't take too long.

I've converted a few xf boards using a third party program SQL designer for Mac that lets you map fields and then you click import. It took me 45 minutes to map things, because I was new to the program, and another 45 to convert the million posts over.

Go with someone else like AlexD, I bet you he does it half that price. Easily. And it would be a xf2xf.php import script to dump into xf directly.

45 minutes seems overly optimistic. I did one of these using SQL Server Integration Services; a product I am quite familiar with (albeit from a different platform), and that took several hours to code. In total, I think I spent about 12 hours, excluding the actual import.

Maybe yourt product works better though. In my case with SSIS, I kept running into issues with the mySQL Connector. I played with the idea of creating an SSIS thing for XF2XF, but people did not seem to be overly keen on the SSIS solution and prefered a regular import script for it, as no third party software is required, and they could run it themselves.

I would think something like that would also easily consume 20 hours, though, even if you are very familiar in XenForo as it is. More so if you need to retain the userids somehow and match everything properly.
 
i made 2 forums on localhost first, so i had very little data to try stuff out with and see the output and know which post what user, and which data should be there. It's mainly drag/drop and linking things up and editing it to have joined tablets also linked (which is a bit of a challenge with xenforo, the user one already has like 7+ tables).

I had both live forums on my localhost so i had no connection issue, and put the read in customer/ drive and output in memory which writes to disk in batches. This certainly speeds things up.

The only problem was afterwards having to figure out the cli mysql queries to link attachments to the right users, and one for randomizing passwords for the new users that weren't merged. (and keep a record of which users so we can mail them later)
 
That is a stupid price. $2k basically means he will work 9 hours a day, for a full month ..

It's quite easy to make an import script, and shouldn't take too long.

I've converted a few xf boards using a third party program SQL designer for Mac that lets you map fields and then you click import. It took me 45 minutes to map things, because I was new to the program, and another 45 to convert the million posts over.

Go with someone else like AlexD, I bet you he does it half that price. Easily. And it would be a xf2xf.php import script to dump into xf directly.

I quite honestly find it a bit insulting that you expect professional developers to work for 10 dollars an hour. There is a HUGE difference between throwing together a couple of lines of code and crossing your fingers and delivering a quality product.

Mapping a couple of fields from one database to another works fine if all you're doing is migrating some very basic data, in the case of a FULL XF to XF importer this is not the case however and you need to handle many different scenario's. Users have to be merged, permissions have to be re-inherited while their id's will have changed in the new database, posts will need to maintain their relations to many different data entry's in other tables, etc. You simply cannot do this by mapping one field to another.

TDW I would appreciate you not mention quotes I give you in public as they are contextual to the work involved. Simply stating the quote I gave you without any further information puts me in a bad spotlight as people will simply jump to conclusions and not consider how that price was calculated.

All this said, I think you can see for yourself that given the lack of developer response to this thread developing an XF to XF importer is not as easy as Floris would have you believe.
 
And yet again, I only asked $49 or more for a complete evening of converting someone's board to XenForo. Gee, how horrible of me .. You're right. I will start charging $2200 per convert and tell everybody to f* off.

Asking someone to copy paste an importer script and rewrite it to support XenForo as a source, .. isn't going to take 9 hours a day, for a full month .. A lot of people are happy they would earn $2200 in an office job.

If someone has to take THAT long and spend that many hours on writing it, perhaps they're not the right people to hire in the first place.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but I am a horrible PHP coder, and yet for XenFans since NO import script was available for XenForo during version 1, I had to write my own engine for the sources that didn't ImpEx by vBulletin didn't support (which was my first choice to convert sites over).

If it's an insult; so be it. I stand by my words. Feel free to pay $2200 to someone!
 
And yet again, I only asked $49 or more for a complete evening of converting someone's board to XenForo. Gee, how horrible of me .. You're right. I will start charging $2200 per convert and tell everybody to f* off.

Asking someone to copy paste an importer script and rewrite it to support XenForo as a source, .. isn't going to take 9 hours a day, for a full month .. A lot of people are happy they would earn $2200 in an office job.

If someone has to take THAT long and spend that many hours on writing it, perhaps they're not the right people to hire in the first place.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but I am a horrible PHP coder, and yet for XenFans since NO import script was available for XenForo during version 1, I had to write my own engine for the sources that didn't ImpEx by vBulletin didn't support (which was my first choice to convert sites over).

If it's an insult; so be it. I stand by my words. Feel free to pay $2200 to someone!

This goes back to what I first said about the difference between throwing together some lines and delivering a quality product. I'm not in the business of selling hacky code, if people wish to buy that fine, I have no problem with that, but I won't be selling it.

I'm done explaining myself any further as quite frankly I find your tone incredibly inflammatory. I'm perfectly willing to have a meaningful discussion as to the pricing of custom work, currently that does not seem to be the case.
 
I appreciate your explanation, and I am glad you're able to at least help people out. I wish I was at that level, I am clearly not. I just can't justify the price, and that's simply my opinion. And I've explained why when you asked.
 
Naatan has been doing some excellent for Xenforo.
I'm glad he's quoting prices.
Is $2200 too much ? I don't know.
I don't think people should second guess his prices unless they submit a bid for less.

There are many reasons to avoid making this.
(1) this is a niche request, most people dont want this.
(2) xenforo.com really should made this.
(3) xenforo.com probably will make one "in the future", which makes this a temporarily-needed, niche request.
 
No disrespect to Nataan, despite that it comes across like it's personally against him; which it is not -- It's just about the price, general comment. Anyway. I can't wait to see XenForo being able to dedicate their time on positive things again and update their import system to include not only a single sign on solution for admins with multiple communities but also an import script to allow them to handle their data better. If they are wiling to pay this much money on having someone write a script, they have the money to pay for this as an official add-on, such as big-boy search and resource manager.
 
I appreciate your explanation, and I am glad you're able to at least help people out. I wish I was at that level, I am clearly not. I just can't justify the price, and that's simply my opinion. And I've explained why when you asked.

That's fair, like I said I understand not everyone wants to pay more for the quality I strive to deliver, there are plenty of developers out there that will work for less.

My pricing is based on an hourly rate which in turn is based on who gets the copyright of the resulting code and how much community interest there is in the addon being developed (in case I keep the copyright). After that I split up the project into small tasks and estimate the hours needed for each task and include a small buffer for customer support and testing.

Worth noting I did in fact offer a reduced price to TDW based on the community's interest in the addon.

If they are wiling to pay this much money on having someone write a script, they have the money to pay for this as an official add-on, such as big-boy search and resource manager.
Although PHP is technically a scripting language I don't think it's fair to think of XenForo and most of it's addons as "a script", which to me implies a small file with some basic logic. Anyway I doubt you intended it that way, just sharing my view.
 
TheVisitors said he's making a xenforo to xenforo importer for free.
I'm pretty sure TheVisistors said he has no plans to release it anytime soon, I could be wrong though, I talk to lots of people at once.

It would be awesome if some one showed up for this and was not asking for my soul.
 
Well, one guy wanted triple what you were charging.

I did not mean any offense to you.

Ok, sorry it sounded as if it were directed at me what with the OP's content. To be clear I make it a point to be honest in everything I do, I'd never charge anyone more than it takes to complete the project.
 
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