Hey Everyone
I have tried reaching out to the people that make the majority of the 'paid' plugins for wpforo forum and I haven't gotten a response. Because I generally need to get 'new' plugins or I cannot upgrade the forum software. And probably soon the version differences might make it very unstable soon to do any upgrading at all.
Plus on one hand, I cannot stand shitty support or no responses to my account inquiries so why keep investing into their platform if they treat customers like this. So I am kicking around possibly moving platforms again 🙁 Yes I know I have done this a few times over these 15yrs 😉 But I want something that is a little more simple and stable.
I just loaded up the latest version of phpbb on a test setup in xampp and I will be downloading the DB from the site to see how much effort it will be to move the users/posts/comments out of the forums into that db schema.... of course there is no tool so this will be a manual effort. So I will be doing some testing over the next few months and hopefully building some scripts that could do this.
Obviously there will be some data loss a little, but I believe all the threads and stuff like that should be okay... it will be all the extra stuff wpforo has that phpbb doesn't. But main concern is the user tables and forums, if that can be converted I really don't care about the rest to be honest.
I have been skeptical to make updates to the theme because its on old code while Wordpress is up to date 🙂 least this way with php its more simplified. But I will be just playing with this for now and hopefully soon I can put up a test site to let me know what you think so stay tuned.
I also do think moving to a more simple platform might increase performance as well, unless GoDaddy is just awful in their shared hosting because I have noticed slower performance rendering pages recently.... so these are the types of things I am looking into. Plus phpbb supports more higher and stable versions of mysql and phpbb while wpforo doesn't....
So I will keep you all posted and I might post screenshots here of my progress.
Thanks for the understanding... the station is old and sometimes we need to clean it up and do some maintenance 😉
-D1-
I am still working on this, I didn't play with this much over my vacation. But as I stated this will need to be a manual migration away from wpForo because for some reason there is no converters out there at all after scouring forum community software for wpforo converter this is a common issue plaguing others as well.
Things that will need to be worked out, so I will need to manually look over the schemas and see what data is needed to be pulled to make a successful insert into phpbb. But at a minimum I will need to pull users, posts, threads and figure out how to redo group/security permissions since wpforo uses their own homegrown stuff.
Sorry been slacking on this, ugh I just know it will be a lot of manual work to try to pull data out manually and I have to figure out what to do about 'password hashes' they are encrypted so I would have to insert a basic password for everyone and get them to reset their own passwords because I cannot preserve that stuff.... very frustrating that wpforo has literally no conversions/migration scripts to other platforms I guess its how they keep you.
I also have a https certificate I have to renew soon and GoDaddy prices are insane wanting $200 ?
I also have a https certificate I have to renew soon and GoDaddy prices are insane wanting $200 ?
Sounds outrageous. Do they actually do anything for you other than grab your dosh?
They grabbed this fee this morning from my paypal..... I will have to look into this tonight to see if I can cancel it or use another service, that is just too much $$ for a SSL certificate. I am not doing any financial transactions on this site, there should be levels for this SSL. 🙂
I know all fees go up but between hosting, domain and SSL.... a basic site gets expensive especially when your trying not to add ADs everywhere 🙂 I will figure it all out, if necessary I will just go back to HTTP and not use HTTPS. We'll see.
They grabbed this fee this morning from my paypal.
Sounds a bit naughty, does that!
Any particular reasons against Let's Encrypt? Or does the hosting simply does not allow it and forces you to pay them instead?
@aki I was able to solve this problem I used ssls.com, got a nice deal on 5yrs. I had to upload/configure the cert myself since godaddy doesn't do it automatically since its not theirs 😉
Now I just need to spend time with the wpforo sql tables to see if I can manually extract forum data into phpbb to see if I can finally move away from this setup. Because there is some things that are not supported plus wpforo has NO migration path the longer I stay with it the harder this will be. Because I feel like SSC is getting slower, I think its the bloat of WP and all the mods to make the site useful 🙂