XF 1.1 Importing a part of xenForo to a whole new forum (xenForo)

faeronsayn

Well-known member
How hard is it to import let's say a section of your current xenForo forum to a whole new xenForo forum? And only import users that have posts from that forum? Also would it be easy to redirect the URLs?
 
There is currently no direct XenForo to XenForo importer.

You will need to go via other software such as phpBB, IPB or vB, assuming they have a XenForo importer.
 
I am currently doing something similar...splitting up parts of a forum into their own stand-alone forums.

Right now I have a test forum that I am cleaning up. It contains all content and members. I plan on copying the database over to each new forum and deleting whatever I won't need for each particular forum. A lot of work, but it seems like the easiest route in my case.

Good luck!
 
I am currently doing something similar...splitting up parts of a forum into their own stand-alone forums.

Right now I have a test forum that I am cleaning up. It contains all content and members. I plan on copying the database over to each new forum and deleting whatever I won't need for each particular forum. A lot of work, but it seems like the easiest route in my case.

Good luck!

How are you planning on forwarding the URLs?
 
Sorry, I don't have a solution for forwarding urls from just specific categories. It's pretty easy to forward "all" urls from one setup to another. But, I don't believe there is a way to forward only urls belonging to specific categories to another setup unless you had the category names in the thread urls. I could be wrong. Maybe a developer can help answer that question.

For myself, I'm not worried about urls since I will be linking to the new forums anyways from the old one and I'm not concerned with backlinks and SE's and all that. I know it will all work itself out eventually.

Hope you find the solutions you want.
 
Then you can use similar queries to update the id maps for imported forums. The process is the same though.

I don't really have access to an IPB license at the moment.

I was able to use the same database and delete all the forums I didn't need. Now i'd just need to redirect the threads that I didn't delete. Since the IDs of these threads remained the same, the URL redirection might be pretty simple?
 
It's unclear to me exactly what process you are using. But for the purpose of redirects I need specific examples of before and after links.

This is what I am doing.

Forum A has lets say 5 sections.

I create Forum B on a new domain, and I want one of those 5 sections imported to forum B.

So I use Forum A's database with Forum B. This new Forum B's database hold all of Forum A's content, but I delete the 4 other sections and leave one. At the end, I have 1 section in Forum B and 5 sections in Forum A.

Now the section that I moved from Forum A to Forum B, needs to have all of it's threads inside it redirect to Forum B.

The before and after URLs would be like

example.com/threads/thread-name.id/

example2.com/threads/thread-name.id/

The url structure and IDs won't actually change, it's just the domain name will change.

What I am having difficulty with is to redirect only the threads within the section that I imported to forum b, not all threads.

I was thinking maybe if it was possible to get all the thread IDs of the threads that were imported then use something like this link

example.com/threads/thread-id/ <--- and redirect that.

In any case, you'd probably have the answer to that.
 
That will be difficult to do "nicely". You will need to check the node_id for every thread before redirecting, and the node_id is not in the URL. You would have to get into the PHP code to do the check.

I was thinking maybe if it was possible to get all the thread IDs of the threads that were imported

An exhaustive list of thread_ids would be an alternative to checking the node_id. How many threads total?
 
That will be difficult to do "nicely". You will need to check the node_id for every thread before redirecting, and the node_id is not in the URL. You would have to get into the PHP code to do the check.



An exhaustive list of thread_ids would be an alternative to checking the node_id. How many threads total?

Looking at a couple thousand.

I could probably query the database to get the thread_ids i'd assume? But throwing those in there with simple 301 redirects in the .htaccess file, I don't know if that'll work.

With the php code, we'd probably have to run that code on each thread url, I am really not sure which way to go about it.
 
Example of redirect with explicit list of threadids:

Rich (BB code):
RewriteRule ^threads/[^\.]+\.(1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9)/(.*)$ http://www.example2.com/threads/$1/$2 [R=301,L]
 
Example of redirect with explicit list of threadids:

Rich (BB code):
RewriteRule ^threads/[^\.]+\.(1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9)/(.*)$ http://www.example2.com/threads/$1/$2 [R=301,L]

Is there a way to output all thread id's in that manner? I mean in this format : 1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9

If there are about a few thousand listed like this, would this cause any problems?
 
Is there a way to output all thread id's in that manner?

You can export a list of thread_ids using phpmyadmin. Run this query using phpmyadmin:

Code:
SELECT thread_id
FROM xf_thread
WHERE node_id IN (1,2,3);

If you want to save the results then click Export at the bottom of the page in phpmyadmin after you run the query. It will give you lots of format options. I would probably export it as an Excel or CSV and then import into Excel. Then use some Excel functions to concatenate a list together. This requires some dexterity.
 
Example of redirect with explicit list of threadids:

Rich (BB code):
RewriteRule ^threads/[^\.]+\.(1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9)/(.*)$ http://www.example2.com/threads/$1/$2 [R=301,L]


I tried the above code, and it didn't work for some reason.

Code:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
 
#If you are having problems with the rewrite rules, remove the "#" from the
#line that begins "RewriteBase" below. You will also have to change the path
#of the rewrite to reflect the path to your XenForo installation.
#RewriteBase /xenforo
 
#This line may be needed to enable WebDAV editing with PHP as a CGI.
#RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}]
 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -l [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^(data/|js/|styles/|install/|favicon\.ico) - [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^.*$ index.php [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^threads/[^\.]+\.(37976|24569)/(.*)$ http://www.mynewdomain.com/threads/$1/$2 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>
 
Top Bottom