How to Convert a bbPress Forum into vBulletin Forum

I had a bbPress Forum at the Help Desk where all our blog readers can interact and ask questions and get answered. bbPress is truly a free forum script and is really useful especially to WordPress Bloggers because if offers all the similar features to wordpress users and is really easy to install and use. But when the blog needs some advanced features like Private Messaging, Managed Admin Panel i opted for vBulletin Script because its the best Forum Script ever.

Now the forum had around 700 posts and 500 members and even though these numbers were small the problems was that both of these were having really different backend and if you Google for this stuff there is no quick solution for this because vBulletin itself has a feature to Import the old Forum into new Forum script vBulletin called as ‘Impex’ which can be downloaded at members.vbulletin.com along with the Licensed copy of your script.

Steps to Perform the Conversion :

1. LEAVE THE ORIGINAL BOARD RUNNING UNTIL YOU HAVE READ THIS AND DONE SOME TEST IMPORTS.
2. Back up your target database.
3. Read the rest of this manual for importing.
4. Testing an import before shutting down the source forum is the best way to go.
5. There will probably be some residual HTML from the content that will need cleaning up afterwards, which is part of the import task and process, not a function of the support team.
6. The links within the forum to other threads/posts/users will be imported, and link to the old board. A 301/404 solution will need to be put in place if that is a concern.

I took a complete backup of the old bbPress Forum and then deleted all the files and upgraded the new vBulletin Forum files along with the Impex Folder. Next renamed the (upload/impex/ImpExConfig.php) file along with the details of the Old Database and the New One which is created for the vBulletin based Forum under the Target Database Details section. Next you need to install the vBulletin script normally and complete the setup following which login to the Admin CP where if the Impex folder was correctly uploaded you will find a small option called ‘Import’ on the Left Panel.

If you check out the above screenshot, you will find that a small list of options were shown in the Admin Section under 6 different Modules which took a maximum of 1 minute to complete one by one following which i had to move to the Maintenance > Update Counters section to update all the stuff ranging from Post Titles, Member Profiles, Search Index, Threads & Forums and everything is done. The whole Forum is moved to a new advanced paid script with everything back up.

If you have any queries which are not related to this article, do check out our vBulletin Based Forum at Free Tech Support