After many months of planning and procrastination, I finally used Spring Break to move my site from plain php for content and SMF for the forum to WordPress with bbPress. As much effort as it took, I have to say that either it was much easier than other conversions and integrations I’ve experimented with or the experience from those previous experiments has really paid off.

For the most part, I followed affacat’s instructions on his successful convert from SMF to bbPress, trying it out first on my own machine of course before ready to go live:

1. Install bbPress 0.9.0.4 and WordPress 2.7.1. I chose to put bbPress in a subdirectory of WordPress. Set up the database integration as part of the bbPress installation and delete any posts created on install.
2. Install the latest phpBB with the necessary converter to move my existing members and posts to bbPress.
3. Install Jaim’s phpBB to bbPress converter. I had to change bb_users to wp_users, and delete the first user and forum from the SQL because there are already a first user and forum in bbPress. I’m not sure what the topic_resolved key was from, so I removed that option. Then I copied and pasted the code from bbPress into this tool to generate my topic and username slugs. (There may have been other changes also that I didn’t keep track of.)
4. Finally, I imported the SQL into my database.
5. Install and activate SuperAnn’s WordPress plugin for WordPress / bbPress cookie integration.
6. Activate other plugins.
7. Post the first blog entry and new forum thread to announce the updates.

Man, it feels good to finally have the base I need to build up my site.

3 Responses to “Moving to WordPress / bbPress”

1. Milan says:

   May 15, 2009 at 8:09 am

   I have similar situation so I’ll ask you several questions since some parts of your guide are not clear to me.

   I had already established installations of both WordPress and SMF, and I want to convert SMF to bbPress and then merge users with WP. My WP 2.7.1 is placed in root of domain (like example.com) and have three users who publish posts, while SMF 1.1.6 is placed in subdirectory forum (like example.com/forum) with 433 users.

   My questions are:

   1) What version of SMF you used?

   2) What version of phpBB you used?

   3) What version of converter you used (there are three in this list)?

   Set up the database integration as part of the bbPress installation and delete any posts created on install.

   4) Where did you delete posts, on WordPress, bbPress or both? And does this means that you merged users (integrated databases) on begining, before converting from SMF/phpBB?

   I had to change bb_users to wp_users, and delete the first user and forum from the SQL because there are already a first user and forum in bbPress. I’m not sure what the topic_resolved key was from, so I removed that option. Then I copied and pasted the code from bbPress into this tool to generate my topic and username slugs.

   5) Where did you do this? What code from bbPress you copied and from where?

   6)Did you do everything from affacat’s instruction, eg. notes 1 and 2 in step 2, step 3, step 5, his fix from second post?

   If you don’t have time to answer this or you have no interest to it, I’m ready to pay you small fee for your instructions or give you some compensation. Anyway, if I succeed in this, I’ll make even more detailed post describing whole process so others could benefit too.

   Thanks in advance

   (btw, you should install here plugin Subscribe to Comments for easier following of comment’s replies)
2. Milan says:

   May 25, 2009 at 2:15 am

   Any reply?
3. Deborah Hawkins says:

   July 16, 2009 at 11:21 pm

   Sorry I’ve been gone for so long, but bbPress 1.0 is finally out now and works amazingly smoothly with WordPress 2.8. If anyone’s still looking, check it out.

   As for the converters, you use the one for whichever version of SMF you currently have, but you’ll have to do a bit of tweaking still probably.