For those of you who have been faithful readers of this blog for some time will also know that an integral part of WinExtra is our Community Forums which actually pre-date this blog. The forums themselves are only the more modern incarnation of the original WinExtra Newsgroups that I hosted on my own NNTP server for years before financial problems forced me to find a more cost effective (cheap) way of giving our community a home on the web.
Currently the forums are being powered by a forums package developed by Simple Machine Forums (SMF) and have for the most part served the purpose. However I have lately become very dissatisfied with SMF and started looking for alternatives.
This is one of the things that has been keeping me exceedingly busy and not posting as much here. That will be changing as soon as I finish up with this conversion project.
After being so immersed in Wordpress for the blogging software I use I have come to really appreciate the ease of use, extensibility and many other benefits that come with it. In contrast SMF, and to a large percentage, has become old feeling and incredibly hard to work with. Not to mention the fact that SMF itself has been in v2.0 development for going on 2 years with no final release in sight.
With all this I figured it was time to look around to see what I could replace it with and possibly bring a more Web 2.0 look and feel to the forums; but without alienating our current members (who honestly aren’t the biggest fans of all this Web 2.0 crap for which I love ‘em – it helps keep me real).
However there is a really big problem when it comes to switching forum software – your data. People talk about things like Facebook and other social media networks being a walled garden of user data – well forums have exactly the same problem, you will grow gray hair trying to convert data between forum packages.
It is further compounded by two additional problems. The first being that the v2.0 of SMF I am running is still in beta (or release candidate as they call the most recent release) which makes finding any converters almost impossible. The second problem is that the forum package I settled on, bbPress 1.0, has no direct conversion path from SMF.
There is good news though. I have managed – in testing – to make that conversion and so far everything is testing out great. I plan on pulling all the pieces together in a series of posts about the experience along with a full in depth how-to for those people looking to go down the same road.
All said and done though the gray hairs gained through all this will be worth it and I’m really excited on what the future will bring to the WinExtra Community Forums once the change is completed – here’s hoping you will be as well.
Conversion is not only an issue for personal endeavors; it is also an issue on the enterprise level. When my division was sold, we switched from an internal package to Sharepoint. Both the internal package and Sharepoint had blogging functionality, but unfortunately I could not figure out any way to import blog posts into Sharepoint, which impacted several years’ worth of blog posts that I had written behind the firewall.
Granted that if this were crucially important business data, we could have hired someone or spent bucks to figure out how to get the stuff into Sharepoint. However, this was not a major issue that was worthy of escalating to the new company’s IT staff, but it was an issue nevertheless.
This was an ironic case in which I could get my data out of the old package, but couldn’t get it into the new one. Normally it’s the other way around; the providers of software have no incentive to make it easy for you to move to another package, so data export is not important.
John E. Bredehoft´s last blog ..Remove probe? It’s hard to find a kitchen aid at KitchenAid.com
Like or Dislike:
0 
0
Hi Guys,
Legitimate regsitered here. I be required to endure despite the fact that this forum is negligible it ooks existent cool. I wait I resolution derive pleasure this.
Myself Craig from Houston. I care the internet and public networking sites and ofcourse the aged gold forums.
I own a infrequent sites too. Some of which are below. Its casual in fact to win sites and pull down some money. If you are interested you can PM me or post here and I resolve try to help.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0
You would not believe how long ive been googling for something like this. Went through 9 pages of Yahoo results without finding anything. First page of bing. There this is…. Gotta start using that more often
Like or Dislike:
0 
0