yoghurtfarmer
Well-known member
I thought I'd give an overview of some issues I ran into importing from SMF -> vB -> xF. While some of these solutions are SMF specific, they can be easily modified to work for other forum software.
1. Getting passwords to work - DO THIS BEFORE XF IMPORT
A crude fix until someone puts together something better. Remember to expand the password field in the vBulletin database, I wasted a lot of time when I forgot to do this.
http://xenforo.com/community/thread...ing-vbulletin-as-an-import-intermediate.5172/
2. URL redirection
This if for smaller forums and for people without a lot of PHP knowledge but want to do it semi-automatically. No doubt there will be much better solutions down the line.
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/crude-way-of-doing-301-redirects-semi-manually.5842/
3. xenForo will not import threads without postusername set.
So after running Impex but prior to importing into xF. Run the query below in phpmyadmin.
5. With SMF, the title of REPLIES will show up bolded at the top of every post in Xenforo
Since most people usually don't edit the title when they reply, this creates clutter.
To remove them, use the following query BEFORE importing into XF.
4. Broken quotes can be fixed with some additions to impex's cleaner.php
Fortunately someone has taken care of SMF 2 to vB quote formatting already and shared it on vB.com.
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?309519-SMF-2-Quote-Cleaner-Code
After converting your quotes to vB style and importing them to xenForo, use brendanc's tool to convert the vB style quotes to xF while also fixing the post references.
6. Things to be fixed after importing into xF
Birthday, category descriptions and timezones need to be fixed after import into xF (at least with SMF).
These are the queries that I used to clean them up:
"Find all thread started does not" also doesn't seem to work even after rebuilding the search index (see this bug report).
1. Getting passwords to work - DO THIS BEFORE XF IMPORT
A crude fix until someone puts together something better. Remember to expand the password field in the vBulletin database, I wasted a lot of time when I forgot to do this.
http://xenforo.com/community/thread...ing-vbulletin-as-an-import-intermediate.5172/
2. URL redirection
This if for smaller forums and for people without a lot of PHP knowledge but want to do it semi-automatically. No doubt there will be much better solutions down the line.
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/crude-way-of-doing-301-redirects-semi-manually.5842/
3. xenForo will not import threads without postusername set.
So after running Impex but prior to importing into xF. Run the query below in phpmyadmin.
Code:
UPDATE `set this to your vB database`.`thread` SET `postusername` = 'Guest' WHERE `thread`.`postusername` =''
5. With SMF, the title of REPLIES will show up bolded at the top of every post in Xenforo
Since most people usually don't edit the title when they reply, this creates clutter.
To remove them, use the following query BEFORE importing into XF.
Code:
UPDATE `set this to your vB database`.`post` SET 'title' = ''
4. Broken quotes can be fixed with some additions to impex's cleaner.php
Fortunately someone has taken care of SMF 2 to vB quote formatting already and shared it on vB.com.
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?309519-SMF-2-Quote-Cleaner-Code
After converting your quotes to vB style and importing them to xenForo, use brendanc's tool to convert the vB style quotes to xF while also fixing the post references.
6. Things to be fixed after importing into xF
Birthday, category descriptions and timezones need to be fixed after import into xF (at least with SMF).
These are the queries that I used to clean them up:
Code:
UPDATE `your xenforo database`.`xf_user` SET `timezone` = 'America/Los_Angeles' WHERE `xf_user`.`timezone` ='Europe/London'
UPDATE `your xenforo database`.`xf_node` SET `description` = '' WHERE `xf_node`.`description` ='!Forum description'
UPDATE `your xenforo database`.`xf_user_profile` SET `dob_day` = '0' WHERE `xf_user_profile`.`dob_year` ='1'
UPDATE `your xenforo database`.`xf_user_profile` SET `dob_month` = '0' WHERE `xf_user_profile`.`dob_year` ='1'
UPDATE `your xenforo database`.`xf_user_profile` SET `dob_year` = '0' WHERE `xf_user_profile`.`dob_year` ='1'
"Find all thread started does not" also doesn't seem to work even after rebuilding the search index (see this bug report).