Alright, here's how I converted from SMF 2 to XenForo 1.1, using
phpBB3 as a middle man, without spending any money other than on the XF license.
I'll give you an outline, but it's worth pointing out that this is relatively straightforward and easy. There are two ways to do this: convert everything live on your server, or convert everything on your local computer (localhost) after downloading your SMF installation, then uploading the converted XenForo site to your live server. I prefer the latter way of doing things, but this makes converting your site a bit more involved.
[STEP 1] First I backup my online SMF 2 database using phpMyAdmin. When exporting (downloading) your database, make sure you turn off the "extende inserts" option on the export page. Next, I download my entire SMF forum (all of the files) to my computer. I will assume that you have a local webserver such as
xampp or
mamp setup on your computer. For importing a large database to my localhost, I use
MySQLDumper. In my case, there were a few errors during the database import, which I resolved thanks to the last post in
this topic.
After you have moved your SMF board to your computer, you will want to use
repair_settings.php for SMF to point your installation to your local database, and correct all file paths to point to the files on your computer, not your live webhost.
[STEP 2] Next up is setting up phpBB3 on your localhost. After you are done with that,
download this SMF 2 to phpBB3 importer. Install the importer, use it, and sit back, because importing a large SMF database into phpBB3 may take a while.
[STEP 3] Assuming all goes well, you have succesfully converted from SMF to phpBB, but there is one thing you will need to do before importing phpBB into XenForo. Go to phpMyAdmin, open your phpBB3 database, click on SQL and then run the following query (just paste it in the box and press start):
Code:
UPDATE phpbb_posts SET post_subject=''
This deletes all reply titles, which will show up as bolded text above each XenForo post if you do not delete them with the above query.
[STEP 4] Now your phpBB3 board, formally SMF 2 board, can be imported into Xenforo. There are no additional steps, just run the importer and everything speaks for itself.
[STEP 5] Your XenForo install should be up and running by now (locally), but there are some things that you may wish to fix via SQL queries:
Change timezone for everyone in phpMyAdmin:
Code:
UPDATE xf_user SET timezone = 'Europe/Amsterdam'
After import, users are "Guest". Turn them into "Registered" with this query:
Code:
UPDATE xf_user SET display_style_group_id = 2 WHERE display_style_group_id = 1
Optional: delete all imported secondary user groups with this query:
Code:
UPDATE xf_user SET secondary_group_ids = ''
Optional: if you install another forum language (Dutch in my case), set all your users to that language (assuming your language ID is 2):
Code:
UPDATE xf_user SET language_id = 2
[STEP 6] One more thing I did was adding my imported admin account ID to "super administrators" in config.php, by adjusting this line: $config['superAdmins'] = '1,2';
These are basically the most important stept. Avatars and passwords will be imported, and stuff like quotes in posts will be converted properly ass well. This was just an outline, but I hope it will be of use. If you want to skip doing the conversion on your PC and prefer to do it on your live webserver, things may be more straightforward. Install Xenforo, install phpBB3, download the SMF converter for phpBB3 I linked to above, import SMF into phpBB, then follow [STEP 3, 4, 5, 6], which are basically the easiest steps. I hope this helps. If you need more in depth information about any of these steps, let me know.
