sides of march » CommunityServer http://www.sidesofmarch.com Thoughts on life, liberty, and information technology Mon, 16 Jan 2012 02:43:26 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 More success converting from CommunityServer to vBulletin http://www.sidesofmarch.com/index.php/archive/2008/08/26/more-success-converting-from-communityserver-to-vbulletin/ http://www.sidesofmarch.com/index.php/archive/2008/08/26/more-success-converting-from-communityserver-to-vbulletin/#comments Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:48:30 +0000 brian http://www.sidesofmarch.com/?p=279 Back in July, I wrote about my initial experiences converting from CommunityServer to vBulletin. At the time of that post, I was importing users, forums, and threads, but had issues importing posts. Well, I’m happy to say I’ve had more success since then.

Together with the help of Jerry (a member of the vBulletin team), we’ve improved the import scripts a number of ways. Prior to this effort, you were only able to import users, forums, threads, and posts. Now…

Performance has been improved by rewriting some SQL queries, and in some cases optimizing them for SQL 2005. (SQL 2000 compliant queries are available, but commented out in the code.) Private messages are imported, however they are not threaded (by design; vBulletin doesn’t thread private messages). Forum groups are imported as top-level forums, so your CommunityServer group/forum structure is preserved. SQL scripts are available to clean up post formatting differences between CS and vB. Not a fix, but an important note: If you have . . .

→ Read More: More success converting from CommunityServer to vBulletin]]> Back in July, I wrote about my initial experiences converting from CommunityServer to vBulletin. At the time of that post, I was importing users, forums, and threads, but had issues importing posts. Well, I’m happy to say I’ve had more success since then.

Together with the help of Jerry (a member of the vBulletin team), we’ve improved the import scripts a number of ways. Prior to this effort, you were only able to import users, forums, threads, and posts. Now…

  • Performance has been improved by rewriting some SQL queries, and in some cases optimizing them for SQL 2005. (SQL 2000 compliant queries are available, but commented out in the code.)
  • Private messages are imported, however they are not threaded (by design; vBulletin doesn’t thread private messages).
  • Forum groups are imported as top-level forums, so your CommunityServer group/forum structure is preserved.
  • SQL scripts are available to clean up post formatting differences between CS and vB.
  • Not a fix, but an important note: If you have lots of posts, you definitely need to increase your timeout periods in your php.ini. I set mine to 600 seconds before things started working reliably importing posts.

There’s still a little more I want to do before I consider this “good enough” — notably, add support for migrating attachments, polls, and avatars — but the process now is certainly working, since I’ve used it to migrate the 700,000 post CSFBL forums from CommunityServer to vBulletin in a non-production environment.

Since vBulletin is a commercial product, to get access to the latest conversion files, you’ll need to contact vBulletin — don’t ask me for them, as I can’t give them out.

If you’re looking for an alternative to CommunityServer, now may be the time to seriously consider vBulletin.

]]> http://www.sidesofmarch.com/index.php/archive/2008/08/26/more-success-converting-from-communityserver-to-vbulletin/feed/ 16 Converting from CommunityServer to vBulletin http://www.sidesofmarch.com/index.php/archive/2008/07/30/converting-from-communityserver-to-vbulletin/ http://www.sidesofmarch.com/index.php/archive/2008/07/30/converting-from-communityserver-to-vbulletin/#comments Wed, 30 Jul 2008 22:15:27 +0000 brian http://www.sidesofmarch.com/?p=266 I’ve been using CommunityServer to power the forums at CSFBL for a few years now, with mixed results. The version I am running (2.1) is a bit buggy and a poor performer in some respects, but it is serviceable. Still, with hundreds of thousands of posts, I really need something more reliable.

The obvious choice was to upgrade to CommunityServer 2008, but problems with the upgrade script and stickershock at the new price tag pretty much put this right out of contention. I went out and bought a license for vBulletin — one of the most widely-used bulletin board products available — for $160, about 1/50th the price I’d pay to upgrade CommunityServer.

vBulletin offers some support for converting from CommuntyServer via their Impex utility. Unfortunately, the current implementation they had was quirky and unreliable… but vBulletin gives you the source code (everything, including the import/export scripts for dozens of other forums), so I began to . . .

→ Read More: Converting from CommunityServer to vBulletin]]> I’ve been using CommunityServer to power the forums at CSFBL for a few years now, with mixed results. The version I am running (2.1) is a bit buggy and a poor performer in some respects, but it is serviceable. Still, with hundreds of thousands of posts, I really need something more reliable.

The obvious choice was to upgrade to CommunityServer 2008, but problems with the upgrade script and stickershock at the new price tag pretty much put this right out of contention. I went out and bought a license for vBulletin — one of the most widely-used bulletin board products available — for $160, about 1/50th the price I’d pay to upgrade CommunityServer.

vBulletin offers some support for converting from CommuntyServer via their Impex utility. Unfortunately, the current implementation they had was quirky and unreliable… but vBulletin gives you the source code (everything, including the import/export scripts for dozens of other forums), so I began to tinker.

Looking at how the import/export worked, I was able to fix and patch to the point where it was working. There was quite a bit of trial and error (I’m no PHP expert) but in general the code was easy to follow and easy to modify.

I recently posted on the vBulletin forums and offered up some of my insight, and the guys at vBulletin seem to have identified the sales potential for having a solid CommunityServer to vBulletin converter. Hopefully, I’ll hear from Jerry soon and will be able to help get this conversion process working perfectly.

Until then, I’ve so far been able to import users, forums, and threads without issue. There’s some lingering issues related to importing posts (dates are getting lost in the import, and the overall process seems to die after a while, which could be a PHP memory issue), and I have to further tweak my private message import scripts. Hopefully with the help of the vBulletin team we can offer a viable solution to spending thousands of dollars to upgrade to the latest version of CommunityServer — not just to me, but to others, too.

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