A while ago I was running an Invision powerboard forum and I was unhappy with it.
I stumbled upon this forum engine, loved it (it's fairly similar to the IPB engine but more light-weight and easier to use) and decided to migrate the forums.
Being the paranoid perfectionist that I am I decided that losing the forum and starting from scratch was NOT an option. My site runs on the content of the forum. The posts in my forum are the only reason for the site to exist and I was not going to accept losing those posts.
So I worked for about 2 months on a procedure to migrate from Invision to YAF.
The procedure involved dumping the IPB database in SQL server, running custom made (by me) SQL statement to export the IPB dump into the YAF tables, running .NET applications to massage the data (the BB format is a pain in the ass and SQL doesn't support it), and doing some little tricksie stuff with primary keys and such.
The end result was ... my forum ... which was an astounding success.
The whole procedure took me about 2 hours to complete and after 2 hours the new forum was up and running. It's still a bit iffy and buggy and i need to tweak it a bit ... but it worked like a charm (for example I am planning to develop a "blogging" feature to be integrated with the forum, where select users will have their own blogs, or an image gallery where select users can upload their own pics and maintain their own galleries).
Bye bye Invision.
My question is: is there here anyone interested in this procedure? I have already been approached by one person insterested in it.
If so, should I go through the pains of offering this procedure publicly? How many people would be interested?
I love this forum engine and I wouldn't mind going through the pains of documenting and the procedure and offering it to anyone interested in getting rid of Invision.
For obvious reason I will not advertise this in the IPB board :lol: but I thought I'd make the offer here.
Thanks!