Upgrading from phpBB to XF via vB

Paul B

XenForo moderator
Staff member
I understand that phpBB will be quite low down on the list when it comes to creating importers/convertors.

For obvious reasons the primary focus will be on vB and then other paid forum solutions as the owners of those are more likely to purchase a licence for XF than forum owners running free software.

I don't really want to wait as long as I expect it will take to create an importer for phpBB so that leaves me with one other option: that is to upgrade from phpBB to vB and then to XF.

So my questions are:
  1. How easy is it to upgrade phpBB to vB? Has anyone here done it?
  2. Will it be a completely clean database after doing so or will some manual editing of the tables be required to get everything to work correctly; custom BBCodes, etc?
  3. What would a rough price be to purchase a (temporary) vB licence, bearing in mind I only want it for the purpose of upgrading to XF?
  4. Would doing a double upgrade from phpBB to vB to XF have any impact on the XF install? Presumably not.
Hopefully I'm not breaking any forum rules by asking these questions here.

Thanks in advance for any advice.
 
1. I've upgraded from MyBB and it was fine.
2. Errr...? It should carry the posts, threads and members fine. If you want to add more detailed things like bbCode, you should do that in the vB admin panel afterwards.
3. I'd suggest just "selling" your database to a friend and letting them do the upgrade on /testvb, then give you back the database. Not sure if that complies with vB's ToS though.
4. I don't think so.
 
As far as I know, it is perfectly legal to have a limited number of people have access to a private /testvb forum, as long as the general public cannot have access.
 
Of course I am only interested in legitimate ways to upgrade so I'm not going to go down the route of "borrowing" a licence and I would never release the database to anyone else.

I'm interested in the test forum software though, is that something that exists?
 
The new feature of xF importers is being able to use old passwords on the new boards. If you go to vB then xF then that wouldn't happen as the passwords won't get carried across to vbulletin thus it won't get carried across to here.
 
Of course I am only interested in legitimate ways to upgrade so I'm not going to go down the route of "borrowing" a licence and I would never release the database to anyone else.

I'm interested in the test forum software though, is that something that exists?
vB license holders are allowed to have a closed (pass protected) /testvb board to test stuff on. If you asked someone nicely, they might be able to do it for you.

If you don't want to release the database to someone else, you'd require their control panel information I think, in order to export the database. Correct me if I'm wrong.
 
The new feature of xF importers is being able to use old passwords on the new boards. If you go to vB then xF then that wouldn't happen as the passwords won't get carried across to vbulletin thus it won't get carried across to here.

So are you saying that the importer for vB from phpBB doesn't carry passwords across?
So if I wanted to upgrade to vB now and have a working forum I wouldn't be able to?
 
I don't think that an importer from phpBB will be that low on the priority scale. After all, it's the most popular forum software out there as far as I know. And Kier has already said that they will be making importers for the major forum scripts. And phpBB is definitely one of those.
 
So are you saying that the importer for vB from phpBB doesn't carry password across?
So if I wanted to upgrade to vB now and have a working forum I wouldn't be able to?

You would be abel too, just your users would have to reset their passwords, all of them. xenForo fixes this by having support for multiple authentication systems.
 
vBulletin's importer program (ImpEx) can import passwords from phpBB1 and phpBB2, but not phpBB3. So it depends on what version of phpBB you are running. If you are running phpBB3 then you won't be able to preserve your user passwords in doing the phpBB -> vBulletin -> XF route.

That is not to say that you can't do something custom to preserve the passwords. But that would require extra effort, and some one who is savvy with databases.
 
So my questions are:
  1. How easy is it to upgrade phpBB to vB? Has anyone here done it?
  2. Will it be a completely clean database after doing so or will some manual editing of the tables be required to get everything to work correctly; custom BBCodes, etc?
  3. What would a rough price be to purchase a (temporary) vB licence, bearing in mind I only want it for the purpose of upgrading to XF?
  4. Would doing a double upgrade from phpBB to vB to XF have any impact on the XF install? Presumably not.


1) I have done lots of phpBB -> vB imports. It is one of the easier imports and I rarely have problems. The only sticking point tends to be importing user avatars which requires that you specify the server path to the avatar directory in phpBB.

2) For your purpose of using vBulletin as an intermediate upgrade step you wouldn't have to do any maintenance. But if you want to get everything working properly in vBulletin then there is some maintenance. Here is a list from my notes:

a) rebuild thread / forum info.​
b) manage the imported groups.​
c) enable custom avatar permissions if you want imported avatars to show up.​
d) delete imported ranks (phpBB imports often give an admin rank to all users). Rebuild the titles and ranks afterwards.​
e) rebuild user stat and smilie caches by editing and saving a user and smilie in your Admin CP.​
f) manually copy over the smilie images.​

3) As other people have said, if you have a vB license then you can do a testvb installation for the purpose of importing.

4) Imports are almost never perfect, but I don't foresee any problems in your case (other than the password thing, see previous post). ImpEx does a good job of preserving the vBulletin schema on which the XF importer no doubt relies.
 
2. Will it be a completely clean database after doing so or will some manual editing of the tables be required to get everything to work correctly; custom BBCodes, etc?

I forgot the BB Codes. That is a problem with almost every import. You can expect some formatting weirdness in your imported posts. This is difficult to fix and I usually recommend just living with it.

Sometimes you can do string replacement queries on the imported posts to fix some of the formatting, but it's not always that simple.
 
vBulletin's importer program (ImpEx) can import passwords from phpBB1 and phpBB2, but not phpBB3. So it depends on what version of phpBB you are running. If you are running phpBB3 then you won't be able to preserve your user passwords in doing the phpBB -> vBulletin -> XF route.
I'm running 3.0.5

That is not to say that you can't do something custom to preserve the passwords. But that would require extra effort, and some one who is savvy with databases.
I'm fairly sure our site coder could handle that no problem.
I'll have a word with him.

Thanks for the other responses Jake.

Faulty BBCode would be a major issue as it is heavily used on the site.
I'm sure our dev' could reparse it somehow, again I'll speak to him about it if we go down that route.
 
For your purpose of using vBulletin as an intermediate upgrade step you wouldn't have to do any maintenance. But if you want to get everything working properly in vBulletin then there is some maintenance. Here is a list from my notes:

a) rebuild thread / forum info.​
b) manage the imported groups.​
c) enable custom avatar permissions if you want imported avatars to show up.​
d) delete imported ranks (phpBB imports often give an admin rank to all users). Rebuild the titles and ranks afterwards.​
e) rebuild user stat and smilie caches by editing and saving a user and smilie in your Admin CP.​
f) manually copy over the smilie images.​

I don't think any of those steps (which are all related to rebuilding denormalized data) would be necessary for the phpBB -> vBulletin -> XenForo import. The XenForo importer would be looking at the canonical (rather than denormalized) data, and would then build its own denormalized data at the end of the import process.
 
That sounds ideal.

The vB step would be purely intermediate as the forum would never go live so any issues purely related to vB would be irrelevant.
 
I don't think any of those steps (which are all related to rebuilding denormalized data) would be necessary for the phpBB -> vBulletin -> XenForo import. The XenForo importer would be looking at the canonical (rather than denormalized) data, and would then build its own denormalized data at the end of the import process.

Yeah that's my thinking too, which is why I said no maintenance is necessary if vBulletin is simply an intermediate. Though it may be useful to do the vBulletin maintenance to see that the intermediate import worked properly. That's what I would do.
 
Of course I am only interested in legitimate ways to upgrade so I'm not going to go down the route of "borrowing" a licence and I would never release the database to anyone else.

I'm interested in the test forum software though, is that something that exists?

Just to clarify, you may borrow a unsed license... heck, the guy could gift it to you... vB (afaik) and everyone else I know allows you to use one copy on one server at one time.... in fat, vB allows a private copy as well....
 
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