vB3 & Drupal import strategy

[steven s]

I have a vB3.8 forum along with a Drupal forum I need to import into XenForo.

My vB3.8 forum has close to 200 forums with 48,854 posts and 5,189 Members and is closed.
My Drupal forum has say 40,000 registered users. Not very many posts.

We are using a separate membership database for usernames and passwords so we can have a single sign on. That is why we have so many registered users. That part seems to be working.

Many of the usernames are the same in both forums.
Both forums have a similar forum hierarchy. But not exact.

So here are my plans.
A. Use impex to import Drupal into my vB3.8 forum then import to XF.

B. Use impex to import Drupal into a clean install of vB3.8.
Then merge the two vB forums before importing to XenForo as a whole.

C. Import Drupal to vB3. Import to XenForo.
Import 2nd vB3 forum into XenForo.

 

[Jake Bunce]

I recommend plan A. The other plans are more work and offer no benefit.

There will be some cleanup after the import to vB. Here is one thing you need to be aware of regarding user prefs:

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/private-messages-and-email.8463/#post-117050

You may also wish to deal with duplicate user emails in vB before importing to XenForo. Both importers can automatically merge users by email address during the import. But when you import to XenForo it is no longer optional... you will be forced to either merge duplicate emails or change the conflicting emails.

You mentioned that your two forums have similar forum hierarchies. That doesn't matter to either importer. The import will create an entirely new hierarchy of imported forums such that you will have duplicate forums after the import. You can mass move threads between forums to combine them where appropriate. You may wish to combine duplicate forums in vB before importing the XenForo.

Also note that the XenForo importer doesn't know anything about your custom user database. It only knows how to import from vB's own user system.

 

[steven s]

Thanks. I tend to complicate things and that is why I had 3 plans.
There are no user prefs in my drupal forum.
I've done several conversions from x program to vB3, but never merged two forums.

I thought XF would clean up the imports better, but I trust your judgement.
I'll make my share of backups and test those backups every step of the way.

 

[Jake Bunce]

I thought XF would clean up the imports better, but I trust your judgement.

XenForo's importer is actually very thorough. But ImpEx is more basic. ImpEx does not, for example, import user prefs. That means that when you import from Drupal to vB those users will have private messages turned off. Then when you import to XenForo it will preserve that user preference and disable personal conversations for those same users. You may wish to set appropriate user prefs in vB before you import to XenForo. XenForo will preserve those preferences.

I've done several conversions from x program to vB3, but never merged two forums.

Merging two vB forums is simply importing from vB to vB using ImpEx. So you will have to do an extra import if you go that route. There is no point in doing that when you can import directly from Drupal to your existing vB database.

 

[steven s]

Well, it looks like there are no importers for Drupal 6. I even tried to import it into vB4 Suite.
The good news is I don't have many posts that I may loose. There are 507 of which 188 are posts expressing their hatred for drupal which leaves only 319.

I might need to close the drupal forum and manually add posts to vB3 before I import into XF.