In the near future I'll share a means of converting phpnuke/phpbb to fireboard. More specifically, I'm converting a small Phpnuke site to Joomla with Fireboard and Community Builder. My phpnuke database is a self-modified version of 7.9 (partially reverted to 7.6). I think the phpbb tables are from 2.0.6 or 2.0.7. I also have an old (call it coeval) phpbb forum that was a standalone. As far as I can tell, only the users' table is different, and not much. In other words, converting phpnuke with integrated phpbb forums is virtually the same as converting phpbb standalone (if you ignore the CMS stuff).

I looked around for some conversion scripts created by others, but I couldn't find any, so I did a little scripting myself using VBA in Microsoft Access. I studied all the tables in the databases for Phpnuke and Joomla, and I now have an idea of what needs to go where. I'm still working out some bugs, but, time permitting, I should be done in the next few days.

I did it in VBA with Microsoft Access because I don't know PHP well enough to use that. The downside for those of you who are interested in using my method is you'll need Microsoft Access. At any rate, I'm doing the work for myself, but if someone else can benefit from it, I'm happy to share.

I am definitely interested in how you turn out with your conversion.

I am planning on doing the same thing on a fairly large gaming clan website. The first time I converted this site, we went from phpbb to PostNuke with PNphpBB2. Now, after using Joomla! with Fireboard and Community Builder on a few of my other websites, our gaming clan site is the last one to do.

I have the converter from Game Nuke to convert from PostNuke to Joomla!, however it seems that convertors from PNPHPBB2 to Fireboard are few and far between.

Our forums alone have almost 500 users and 54000 individual topics, so losing information is not something I want to do.

Please post back soon to report how it went, and post a conversion script if possible!

Here's a progress report. I'm behind schedule because I've been out of town, but I have successfully converted data from portions of my nuke database and pushed the changes out to a fresh install of Joomla + Fireboard + Community Builder. It took some tweaking in Joomla to get everything working properly, but at least all the user data, forum posts, and news articles got passed over and work.

My site had a variety of forums with access restricted to members of groups, so my next step is to incorporate GroupJive, which seems to be the only equivalent available for Fireboard users to the group system of phpbb. (Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.)

Unfortunately what I created still isn't worthy of being shared yet. The code is a mess, and there is no documentation, so even if you knew what you were doing, it's really only usable to me at this point. I also have a much smaller site that I'm converting, so I may need to change a few things to handle the scale of what you're describing. For instance, some of my variable types aren't large enough to handle 32,000+ items.

Here's a preview of what it currently does and does not do and what it requires. I'll make the first rough version available soon!

Features and limitations:
General stuff:

• Takes phpnuke database and partially converts it to Joomla + Fireboard + Community Builder. This doesn't convert an entire nuke site to Joomla. It just gets the important stuff. Read below for more details on what gets converted and what doesn't.


• Converts IP addresses stored in hexidecimal to xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx format. Nuke and phpbb store IP addresses in hex, but Joomla and Fireboard capture them using the xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx format. This means you have a larger database of IP addresses to consult when trying to resolve problems with misbehaving users.


• Converts nuke users to users in Joomla, Fireboard, and Community Builder. Right now, this only includes the default Community Builder fields + the additional fields to CB that I added to better integrate with FB. See here for more information.


• Converts unix timestamps to Joomla friendly format. This preserves all the registration and last visited dates. People using the member care services mod will be especially interested in preserving these dates.


• Does not currently support avatars, ranks, private messages, or user groups, bans, banners. Time permitting, these can be added on request.


• Reads data (and optionally writes) from or to MySQL or Microsoft SQL databases (using ODBC), manipulates the data locally, and exports to MySSQL database. For people without remote access to their databases, I have created rudimentary support for importing and exporting *.sql files.


• Has limited support for access control. By default everyone is a registered user unless specified as an administrator or superadministrator.


• Optionally creates a partial or complete backup of your source database(s). All manipulated data is done in separate tables. Some changes support audit trails.


• Converts Nuke articles to Joomla articles with limited category support (single category). Nuke allows you to associate articles with multiple categories; Joomla does not.

Fireboard specific stuff:

• Removes Bbcode UIDs from posts and signatures. This is something that phpbb does (or, at least, did) with the bb tags. For example, something in bold would read [b:e8ta892k]bold text[/b:e8ta892k]. As you can see from what I just typed, this doesn't work in fireboard.


• Converts lists created using phpbb tags [list],[list=1],[*] to Fireboard format.


• Converts URLs in posts from phpbb to Fireboard. Authors of posts often provide links other posts at your forum. If these URLs aren't modified, they'll be pointing to your old forum.


• Preserves stickies but converts announcements to stickies (does not convert them to FB announcements)


• Keeps locked threads locked


• The breadcrumbs of a moved thread are deleted.


• Allows two or more phpbb installations to be combined into a single Fireboard installation. Allows selected users and/or forums to be intelligently merged.


• Adds Yahoo Groups to a single forum. Requires database from PG Offline. No fancy options. All posts are made under an anonymous account. HTML is stripped from the messages.

Pre-requisites:

• Microsoft Access 2000 or later
This is a fast requirement. I have no plans currently to make it available for Word or Excel. I would put it in .NET before I did that.

• Macro security level in Microsoft Access must be set to Medium (recommended) or Low.
The scripts I wrote are in VBA, and the conversion cannot take place without them. None of the code is hidden, so you're welcome to browse through it to verify that it behaves as advertised.

• Read access to the database containing the source tables (phpnuke, phpbb, or combined)
. Alternative is to import a *.sql file for which there is limited support.

• Write access to the database containing the Joomla tables. Alternative is to export to a *.sql that you can then import to your MySQL database.


• MySQL ODBC 3.51. This is a free download from MySQL. It allows MS Access to talk to MySQL. If you go the *.sql file route, then this won't be necessary. The disadvantage of not using ODBC is that you can't use Access's simple interface to manipulate your data by hand--something you might find a need for.

Description above updated. Noteworthy additions include the ability to convert Yahoo Groups to Fireboard and the ability to combine multiple phpbb installations to a single Fireboard installation. See above for more details.

It's taking me longer to finish because I keep adding features. I'm locking it down to what I've described above so that I stop talking about it and get it done.

PS. Reevesracing, I changed my variables to accommodate the scale of your forum.

Looks like you are making progress.

Saving private messages would definitely be nice, since I have several hundred myself dating back over 5 years.

I am trying to target the week of Christmas to perform my upgrade, since that is the time of year where we have the least amount of traffic.

Keep us posted!

For what private messaging component? I see there is one called fire messages coming out.

For Joomla!, I am just using JIM.

Okay, I'll add JIM to the mix and lock the list down to that until everything gets done.

Hey all,

A mate and myself have also a complete clan site running in phpNuke with integrated BBtoNuke forum. Now we want to convert also to Joomla with FireBoard but because we don't know much about databases and websites we are very interessed in your converter.

Will it also work with phpNuke and a BBtoNuke forum? And if yes, where can we get it?

Thanx already,

If by BBToNuke forum you mean one of the varieties of phpbb2 that's integrated into nuke, my script will convert it. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to devote much time into fixing up my code and releasing it.