Forum update 5/15/2011 - 5/21/2011

Bwahaha! I decided to look at the old site and noticed AmandaKaT came back to reminisce in 2010. Her post made me nostalgic and inspired me to upgrade the forums...

I looked up some of the current systems and decided I liked MyBB's look and features. I also liked that it uses MySQL to store data (I'm a fan), had a decent plug-in system and that it's all open source. Yay!

Getting messages from this old hacked up board into MyBB was going to be a challenge and at first I thought about writing some PHP scripts to read the files and insert records into the database. Luckily, I found an upgrade path already designed for me.

What I did was install an old version of phpbb that was happily sitting on the sourceforge phpbb site, waiting for me to download. Then I found a step-by-step guide with scripts that could read and parse all the ikonboard files and insert thread, posts, user records into the phpbb database. The scripts weren't perfect, but after I made some modifications and several database purges and re-runs later, they finally ran cleanly. So far so good.

Now I was even more fortunate that MyBB had a merge system that could read the phpbb database and insert all the records into the MyBB database. This part ran very cleanly; just a few clicks and everything was imported. All of this was accomplished in a couple days after my consistently long days at work.

Now I tasked myself to use the template and theme system of MyBB to re-create a "classic" Holy Buffalo theme. This was the most tedious and difficult part because I needed to review all the different templates and modify the HTML and CSS by hand. I didn't copy everything exactly as I hoped to make some improvements to the look, but I think I've come pretty close to capturing the old feel. Most of the lingering problems lie with the images as JuggleFoe always came to my rescue in creating the artwork for the old forums.

The last thing I did was some cleanup on the threads and posts since there were some artifacts left in the records during the conversion. I've fixed most of what I could find with some update statements against the database. I've been building databases for the last 10 years, so this part was easy!

I'm pretty happy with the result thus far and will continue to work on the forum settings. I'm also glad that there's a database behind all this because now I can update some of the older scripts to read from it and build some new data-driven pages for the site.

Oh yea, happy 10 year anniversary Holy Buffalo!