Any chance to use settings of an existing test forum?

[Arno Nühm]

Hello from Germany,

I already bought a XF licence (and a XFMG licence some minutes ago, too), but only for testing purposes at the moment.

I have a big VBulletin forum with nearly 4 million posts and want to test the whole XF system before upgrading/changing to XF.

Now after some weeks of testing and styling my XF test forum looks good, I customized a lot of templates, added some addons, added another style, ...

I guess I need some more weeks to make everything look perfect, but then I want to upgrade the VB forum.

Is there any easy way to import the settings of the XF test forum to the "real" XF forum after importing all data from the VB database?

I will have three forums on three different locations (same server) and different databases:

- existing VBulletin forum I want to upgrade to XF later
- existing XF test forum I am working on at the moment
- fresh new XF forum as a replace for the existing VBulletin forum

Sorry for my bad english. I hope you were able to understand my question anyway

Thanks,
Arno

 

[Paul B]

This thread outlines the best practice for doing test and final imports.

https://xenforo.com/community/threads/importing-guidelines.25325/

 

[Arno Nühm]

Thanks, Brogan.

But I couldn't do this step:

The next step is the most important; using phpMyAdmin or similar, take a backup of the database.
This backup will then be the clean master database, which can be used over and over again until you're ready to do the import for the final time.
The backup should be taken before you create any categories, forums, or test users, make any posts or add any content at all.

I already imported data from my VB forum to the XF test forum. I think otherwise I would not have been able to style and modify everything to my needs.

I guess now I have to make a second XF test forum, manually do all the changes and addons again, just to get a clean master database for the final import later?

 

[Paul B]

You could export the style but not the option settings, add-ons, etc.

So yes, you will have to do some work again.