For the past six or seven months I have been wanting to find something to replace my install of SMF (Simple Machine Forums) – the software used to power our community forums – with something a little more modern. As well I needed something that would help pull both the blog and the forums together and allow for new things in the future.

It took some time but I finally settled on using bbPress as the replacement for SMF but there was one big problem that I had to beat before that could happen.

How to keep the existing years worth of data from the SMF powered forums and convert it to a format bbPress could use. At first I was really disheartened as there is not one-to-one conversion available. It was only after doing a lot of searching on Bing that a solution presented itself – it wasn’t pretty nor was it easy but there was a solution.

It involved converting SMF 2.0 RC 1 to phpBB 3 and then converting that over to bbPress. There was still a lot of fancy footwork to do as nothing is ever simple or easy but I managed to do it.

I will be pulling all my notes and screen shots together over the next few days and posting about the whole process. In the meantime here are some before and after shots.

Before: SMF version of the WinExtra Community Forums

After: The new bbPress powered WinExtra Community Forums