My pet project has undergone many changes in the past several years. What started as a 20 pages of HTML on a free webhost in early 2005 has developed into over 150 pages of content with a news blog, forum, and gallery. Back in 2005, though, I had a lot of free time on my hands. For a while, there was even a wiki for my content. That had been my original idea behind using Chavez360 as the site name: if you followed links around the site, eventually you’d link back to where you started from. But that seemed to be kind of overdoing it, and at the time I couldn’t figure out how to integrate the wiki membership with the rest of my site.

What I had just wasn’t working as planned. As I learned more about webdevelopment and coding, I more and more wanted to create a new CMS and forum from scratch so I could have exactly what I wanted. Unfortunately, it was a needlessly complex task, and it took well over a year before I realized that I wasn’t going to create anything that I’d be satisfied with anytime soon. So I started looking around. There were big CMS’s, blog software, forum software, all in several languages and with a huge variety of features available. How to decide which was the best for me? I wanted something:

1. simple–something that wasn’t already bloated with features that probably would never get used and something where I would at least understand most of the source code. This was probably the strongest factor in my choosing bbPress. By default, it has only the most basic functionality, and anything else can be easily added to taste with plugins.
2. clean–not just the code, but the actually look and feel of the forum pages. It’s easier to find what you’re looking for quickly when it’s neatly organized and not cluttered with lots of unnecessaries.
3. with a community–okay, so maybe the bbPress community isn’t that large, but the WordPress community definitely is. Between the bbPress forums and the WordPress codex, I can find anything I’m looking for.
4. fresh–not so old that everything you could possibly do with it has already been done. I’m looking forward to making a couple of plugins available for others to use… eventually.

It may be weird to choose bbPress first and then WordPress also for consistency, but so far, so good.

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.