Upcoming Website Changes

[Rasyr]

When I originally created this site, I used Word Press and SMF forums, and then something happened and the forums would no longer load, but I was able to save the posts by pulling them into these bbpress forums (which, honestly, I am not a fan of).

I recently started working on rebuilding my Wizard's Lair site after it crashed last year... I am rebuilding them using SMF forums AND something called TinyPortal, which allows me to create something almost wordpress-like on the front end (and a LOT LESS involved/fiddly on the back end). You can go visit Wizard's Lair and see for yourself.

During my explorations in getting that up and running, I discovered a way to import the bbpress forums back into SMF, so that we should not lose any posts.

So, to help facilitate the upcoming conversion that I want to do, I am prepping in a couple of ways.

• I am replicating all of the static pages on my Wizard's Lair site (about maybe half way done by now) because once that is done, I can export those specific tables as SQL files and then import them back over here once I redo the site, saving me a lot of time (I still have to move them to the other site and in soing so, I am using relative links to make it easier to move them back).
• My front page News items -- for these, I am adding them to the forums as posts in a hidden forum (which some of you playtesters might be able to see). Once I have them all imported, I can use that forum for the front page on the revampted site (which is like what I am doing over on my Wizard's Lair site).

[Rasyr]

Ok, so last week, I made a test forum and then spent the next several days working on trying to import these forums into SMF, running into all sorts of errors (Hey! I wanted to test it before I tried it for real!!!)

Well, a few hours ago, I was successful!!! I got the conversion script up and running!!

Good news -- I will breing all the forums and posts on over to the new forums......

Bad news -- not too sure about attachments coming across (I can alwyas reupload what I need to)

More Bad News -- all your posts counts will be zeroed back out. The posts are there, they just do not seem to be attributed to anybody.

 

Ok, so I am planning on working on the live transition starting tomorrow (this means the site will be down for a while as I delete the current site, install SMF and import the bbpress forums into SMF.

It will likely look ugly for a few days as I rebuild things once I have the forums up and running properly (and TinyPortal installed).

 

but we are a GO!!!!