SpaceSimCentral

Hey Everyone

I did a test migration of the SSC forums from BBpress (currently what is used here) to wpForo. wpForo looks a lot more professional and it is updated often, BBpress technically hasn't been updated in years. So things start to break as WP updates or plugins get outdated.

wpforo base is free, there is some addons I will need to purchase to provide or replace current functionality here (ie: embedded videos, ads, private message)

The migration process isn't perfect (none of them usually are) but passwords were preserved from what I can see. I will need to do some manual work on the forum structure (ie: Category, Forum, Sub-Forum) before official migration because the tool has a hard time with nested forums.

One thing I am a little bummed about was that thread/topic view counter were reset to zero. I am trying to see if this can be preserved, but I wouldn't reject this for just that.

Generally it has a lot of features (more than BBpress) and looks really clean. I can slowly tweak the look and feel and the options, groups, permissions, badges, etc... the WYSIWYG editor is great and very usable and can also can use social media options as well which I will look into.

Please give me some thoughts on what you see, if I get some positive feedback I might try to do the switchover this weekend.

Below is a few screenshots:

It looks very clean D1, I like it, but won't this give you a heck of a lot of work switching everything over?

That looks very nice indeed. But Geraldine is right, and IMHO it's no big deal if some counters are reset maybe.

The only immediate thing I will need to do is flatten the structure where all of the forums are at the root level then the exporter should pick them all up and then I should be able to nest them after they are converted (ie: sub-forums)

Everything else besides the view counts seem to have been brought over. I believe favorites, subscriptions and tags are not captured either which isn't that big of a deal.

I will do more digging this evening and see what I come up with I might start to flatten the forums to all be at root, so the forums will will be a bit messy for a few days