Importing from Ruby on Rails

[Wandering_Boots]

Hello! I'm a representative for a forum that was built in the mid 2000's in Ruby on Rails. Our forum code is getting on in years, and we are currently looking at options for replacing it. It is crucial to us that we can migrate posts, accounts, and passwords over to any new forum architecture, and we would love it if there was a pathway to migrating over to XenForo 2. Whatever pathway we end up taking, we would need to able to coordinate with or at least migrate from our old Ruby code.

I have taken a look at other posts on this forum related to RoR, but have not found any evidence of anyone having imported from Ruby before. From what I saw in the manual, it also appears that XenForo 2 does not have built-in support for importing data from RoR, and there are no unofficial/third-party importers I could find.


My questions are:

• Have any other XF customers migrated from Ruby on Rails in the past?
• Is there a particularly convenient forum software that is supported by XenForo 2 for import, and that is easy to convert to from Ruby (i.e. RoR -> Something else -> XF)?
• How much development work should we expect if this is possible?

If you have any technical questions, or other considerations on how best to migrate this data, I'd be happy to relay them back to my team and get back to you.

Thank you!

 

[Jeremy P]

XenForo has an importer framework which can migrate posts, accounts, passwords, and other data. We have a Discourse importer (which is a Rails application), but the importers themselves are written in PHP and interface directly with the source database. The importer framework supports MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.

If there isn't an existing intermediate platform you can import from (doubtful if the schema is bespoke) then you would need a custom importer. The importer framework comes with the license, but there are no comprehensive guides for writing a custom importer so you may wish to seek out a third-party developer to write one for you if you are unfamiliar with PHP.