I forgot to mention yet another popular forum software known as Discuz back in this forum software compared post but just in case you’re curious, its like VBulletin with lots of those standard features that you can find in VBulletin, with the difference in that it’s only available in Chinese by default, heavily used in the Chinese world, and best of all it’s free!
Anyway, with reference to the post title above, I’m actually seeking to migrate a discuz forum to a new WordPress blog. I have this discuz forum which I took over from a friend and trying to manage it but find that I just don’t have the time to moderate it properly. If it can be somehow converted/migrated into a WordPress blog / bbPress forum, that would really make life easier for me.
Anyone knows whether such plugins/mods exists? Any talented MySQL/PHP developers willing to pick up the task and build a plugin so I can pay you? This should be a good challenge for those who are looking to practice with MySQL database character sets.
Michael Rosata says
Hello, I’m not sure if you are still looking to do this project. I recently did a similar project using some generic forum that was used on a clients website. They gave me the sql along with the sql for all the content in whichever CMS they were using and I ported it over to WP. I brought their content over to WP and used WP BulletinBoard to handle their forums. I had to add a few features in that the WP BulletinBoard didn’t have, another obstacle was that my clients forum was in Hebrew. It came out nice though, I even wrote in a check to query the db for an Author name before simply adding it as ‘Guest’ and wrote rewrites for the urls so that links to the old forums would still goto the correct posts. I’m not a WordPress Guru… yet. I edited the plugin files directly, this was about a month or so ago. Next time I would like to use a plugin that extends nicely and try to do everything without having to edit other developers code. So this was a good learning experience for me. If I had to do it all over, I might use a different Forum plugin also because this one didn’t handle having so many posts in one forum at about 20k it slowed down, maybe there would be a good way to index the tables. One thing I liked about WP BulletinBoard was that it created it’s own tables in the database. I am all for doing things the WordPress way, but on a site with large quantities of content plus equal or greater quantities of forum posts I think keeping WP post and forum posts in separate tables is for the better. If you are still interested in doing this project, shoot me an email or reply below.
David says
Hi Michael, thanks for sharing your experience.
It’s been a long time and unfortunately migrating discuz to wordpress isn’t something i would need done anymore.
* Just saying it out loud, i think bbpress is way more popular as a forum/bulletin board compared to WP BulletinBoard so you might want to take a look at bbpress?
Will keep your reply published, so that whoever needs your help can get in touch with you 🙂
Ning Zhang says
Hi Michael, I have a discuz forum and want to migrate it to WordPress. Would you please contact me to discuss it? Thank you!