Ever since having to move the WinExtra Community Forums from their original home on my own NNTP server to a web forum format I have been using a software from Simple Machines Forums. When I first went looking the SMF package seemed to be the best that was out there, getting plenty of plus reviews, and it helped that it was free.

In the last year though I have become dissatisfied and wanted to look elsewhere for something newer and that would at some point blend in easily with this blog. I don’t know if you have ever looked at the code behind SMF or the way themes are handled but after working with Wordpress it is a painful experience.

The additional thing that had to be dealt with was the migration of data that had accumulated over the years on the existing SMF forums. This was issue was further hampered by the fact that I was running a beta; followed by the Release Candidate, of their version 2.0.

While there might have been importers that could handle importing the 1.x version tree at the time I first started looking around it was a different story when it came to 2.0. Granted this was to be expected and it resulted in me postponing any further thought of changing software.

Then a couple of months ago I decided that there was no more postponing – the time had come to find an alternative. The prime concern was that it had to be compatible with Wordpress and that there be some kind of roadmap going forward that would allow for building a real community oriented destination point.

After looking at the alternatives I decided to go forward with bbPress even though at the time I began working with it there was some question as to its future. After spending some time in both the bbPress forums and the IRC channel I felt confident that there was a future for the software and it was heading in a direction that suited my own future plans.

The big question now was what I was going to do about the existing forum data. There was no easy path for converting from SMF to bbPress but after much testing and dry runs I did find a method that works. It is that method that I will start documenting in a series of future posts.

It isn’t an easy process and it definitely isn’t for n00bs (sorry but it isn’t). However I will provide all the working files that I used to convert from an SMF 2.0 RC1 set of forums to a bbPress 1.0.2 forums.

I will be opening up a dedicated forum for those looking at going through this painful process so I can offer assistance and we can help each other.

It ain’t a pretty process but it works – as you can see.