Migration to Fluent Community

Hoang Hxn How does that work? Do they provide an export file at all?

Ross H It seems that Skool does not currently allow data export. 🤣

Curtis Bisel How large is the forum? It will be quite different going from a message board to a community like this. For an import though treating forums as spaces, threads as posts and replies as comments shouldn't be too difficult. Just a case of looking at how the FC database is structured and deciding how to map your wpForo db. https://github.com/WPManageNinja/fluent-community-docs/blob/master/database-schema.md

Ross H ~ Thanks for the reply. My wpForo forum has about 600 topics and 2500 posts in total. Not sure if that's large or not. I understand your logic about assigning one item in wpForo to another in Fluent Community (in the database), I just don't know how to take it from here. Hoping there will eventually be others like me to join together to hire someone to make a temporary migration plugin or something, as I am not a developer and don't know how I will take the next steps.

Curtis Bisel I'm using WPForo as well and would love to migrate. (cc: Ross FCA). My community is on the smaller side less than 204 posts, 1140 topics, and approx. 100 members. 

Chris Davis Hi Chris - same as above, if you can prep your import sheet but exporting your posts then mapping them to the Fluent database, I can help with importing them.

Ross FCA I'm tech savvy in a different way and I don't know how to get the export you're requesting in the format you're suggesting. Perhaps I'll get a freelancer to interpret and prepare the file for importing.

Curtis Bisel Hi, were you successful in your migration from wpForo? We are exploring this option. Thanks.

Eli Linares good timing as I figured out how to create a script that exports all my posts from the WPForo database then it rewrites them to the FC tables. I thought it would take me weeks and hundreds of dollars. With Claude I had it done within an hour. Still kinda unbelievable. It even allows me to migrate my forums one at a time for testing and verification.

I only tested it on my site in my environment so I'm not sure if it works outside of that properly.

Eli Linares ~ I never made it any further. Until Chris Davis posted today about a solution, I had never heard of anyone who successfully found or "created" one. Currently, I have been running my old wpForo community in a "read-only" mode alongside my new FluentCommunity. Which certainly isn't the best scenario with all of that code running at the same time, not to mention more confusing for my members.

Chris Davis ~ Very cool! I have had success with ChatGPT writing some PHP scripts for me to do lightweight things for Fluent Community, but I never gave it a try to solve this (major) WPForo issue. I think I assumed there would be too many issues I would have to deal with fixing. For example, can it handle all the replies in a nicely threaded style? What about file attachments? What happens if a user wrote a comment in wpForo, but they aren't a space subscriber in Fluent Community ... would their comment still carry over???

Can you share your experience with your solution? Any downsides? Compromises? Should someone like Eli Linares and I try to re-recreate what you produced in Claude? Can you import a few WPForo posts at a time to test, or did you have to batch export/import all at one time and hope for success?

Chris Davis that's excellent. As a matter of fact, I was thinking about Claude yesterday, but this seems to be a complex task. Would you mind sharing your script or the prompt you used to create it? Have you refined it? I'm also curious about the questions raised by Curtis Bisel on how exactly posts and replies would be handled. Have you already executed your migration?

Thanks so much in advance.

Curtis Bisel yeah, that sounds a little messy. I would love to migrate, but it seems hard to do. I wish a developer could come up with an official plugin to do this.

Eli Linares and Curtis Bisel it wasn't very clean actually. I thought it would be a lot messier but they key was to do it in steps. For instance...

1. I created a script to export all the various tables in WPForo.
2. I had it write code to transform it into HTML as I was initially going to just have a read only vanilla version of my forums available because I thought it would be too much to try to import into FC
3. After the HTML file was created I figured if it can create HTML it can probably map to FC database. So I gave it a try...
4. FC documentation is outdated so it took a few tries to get the right tables mapping. Once figured out everything migrated over pretty nicely. Maintained all threaded comments and attachments. Bonus was even the Loom videos members used showed as embeds.

What didn't work (nicely)...

• Mentions. Some maintained links but they didn't update the the new FC profiles
• Quoted text. If you used the feature in WPForo where you could quote text from another member it displayed as a shortcode. Not terrible but not clean
• Nothing else to list as everything was pretty clean

All members who have comments are automatically added to the new Space (my plugin creates spaces with the same name as the forums) but they aren't added to any other spaces.

I decided to create a group "Legacy Forums" that all the old forums and posts live in. I know it would be easier to see things but I have to draft screenshots with my members information blurred (which is the most time consuming part).

Hopefully that helps.

Chris Davis ~ Thank you for writing all of this out for us! It really helps me to understand and visualize what I will need to do if I want to take this on — that I have to see it as lots of separate steps, not any kind of an automated process that you start, it runs, and then it's done.

It's a type of project I'm possibly willing to take on, now that I know it's doable. I'm sure it's frustrating along the way since there isn't satisfactory documentation to help with mapping the correct tables in the correct order inside of Fluent Community.

Thanks for sharing, Chris.

Curtis Bisel I can share screenshots from my scripts database export that has the correct table naming and format for FC. Can also share the script for exporting all WPForo content into a JSON file then you can probably take it from there how you want to import it. Feel free to shoot me a DM.

Chris Davis, thanks for the detailed post.