* Please explain what you mean by "Imports forum data and users correctly" - in what way does it currently not import them correctly?
I did a little playing around with importing some earlier versions of 4.x, and it didn't play nice with them, but then imported a 4.0.5 perfectly. It kept failing at importing the users for some reason. I switched over and tried the 3.x, and it worked perfectly, elbeit attachments. I found that a little weird and not sure if there are differences in table structure during the 4.x release that hindered this from working. May off simply been me, but I found it odd that the 3.x worked fine on earlier 4.x releases, but the 4.x you did didn't.
Blogs into new threads - I dont think this should present too much of an issue - Ive seen it suggested before and already considered it.
Nice. The one I read that brandon had done at xenfans, I actually wasn't impressed with the way it then took categories and created forums out of them. Blogs are typically a "per user" node as far as I'm concerned, and categories should not be used to create forums from, as each user can have their own category structure, and that to me would just be a chaotic mess when imported considering the amount of users that use the blogging on my site, let alone others.
I think it should be kept simple, so that each blog post just creates a new thread by that user, in a specific one forum that the importer creates, ie. Blogs or such, so it can be either hidden from public view or then have the content redistributed across the site into forums so it all just becomes forum content.
CMS data - By this I assume you mean articles ? - I would guess that could be done in a similar manner - I havent actually delved into the CMS data set-up that mutch as i dont use vb4 other than for testing.
Yep... same deal. Importer creates maybe one forum "Articles" then uses sections to create sub-forums, but leaves categories out of the equation, as they are search indicators, not true content categorisation like sections.
Each article is then bought over and placed under its appropriate forum heading (ex-section), with any comments becoming replies. This way an admin can either redistribute the content across forums or leave it as one big article repository in the board.
Re-direct VB4 urls ? - You mean like the vb3 redirector thats available - Thats a bit more tricky, and not something an importer itself would handle anyway.
Yer... it would be nice if it redirected standard URL options available in vb4 to the new URL. I guess we can all suck the lose of traffic up really knowing that a massive traffic lose will be incurred by moving forum software to begin with... I accept those risks, but would love to have a redirect if available.
As I said, im quite willing to look into this as long as people have patience - I do have a busy life !
Completely respect that... no immediate hurry, more something I would love to see here, supported, that really does an excellent job without data loss. If a true importer can store existing vb4 data, groups, albums, etc, for later recovery in the DB, that would be a pretty awesome tool to have so that it can be bought out later when XF release products such as gallery or such.
Again... also happy to donate a couple hundred towards this, and if others would want it, also encourage them to donate to the person who can achieve a true importer to make it happen.
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- I think most of the club type forums will use them, thanks for reading anyway.
