XF 2.2 New Installation and Merge

[Graham Smith]

In a moment of madness, the committee of my motorcycle club have signed up to a ridiculously expensive online service that includes a built in forum, and they've instructed me to close down our existing xenforo forum.

Sadly, all the content belongs to them, but many of the users are really unhappy with this decision and have asked me to set up a new forum site running xenforo that they all know so well.

Clearly, I'll have to buy new licenses of xenforo, media gallery and resources, and the old ones can just die when they expire.

My plan is to set up a new board and import the old one data, keeping all the categories, styles etc as they were, but just have no content to start off with.

The users can then just sign up for new accounts when we go live.

Hopefully at some point in the future, my club will realise the error of their ways, and I'm hoping there'll be a way of 'merging' our old XenForo installation with the new one that I'm going to create. The new 'bundled' forum software, I'm not worried about.

Has anyone got any hints or tips that might see me right?

I was going to ask people to use their existing usernames when they sign up to the new board. Am I right in doing this, or should I ask them to choose a new username?

I'm just after any advice or tips really? Not sure if anyone else has had a similar circumstance.

 

[Paul B]

If you're not going to import the members, threads, and posts, I would just do a new install and set up the nodes, settings, etc. again.

 

[Graham Smith]

If you're not going to import the members, threads, and posts, I would just do a new install and set up the nodes, settings, etc. again.

Thx Brogan. I get that. It'll take a bit of work, but a clean install might be best.

What about the 'merging' of the old and new in the future if that becomes necessary?

 

[Paul B]

You can import at a later date.

If the members use the same user name / email address then the accounts can be merged and the content from the old forum will be associated with their new account.

 

[Graham Smith]

Top stuff. Thanks Brogan.

What about merging forum categories?

ie. if I have 'My Forum Category' on the old site and 'My Forum Category' on the new site, to merge them in the future, will they have to be named identically?

If that's the case maybe I should start the 'new forum' by importing the 'old' one and just remove the existing content?

 

[Paul B]

The importer will import them as separate categories and forums.

You can then use the batch tools to mass move threads from the imported forums to the existing ones.