Migration Issues And Decisions

Let me start by saying this. It is possible to migrate all the data to XenFORO, the question comes down to how much time, money, and effort you wish to spend?

This weekend I am going to attempt to migrate XLNation Forums to the XenFORO forums. The wife is away and I have lots of time. I will use the Drupal >> phpBB3 >> XenFORO migration path using FREE software. This would not be the final migration but will demonstate if it can be done. If it works we can exam the results and see how many problems we have to deal with. We can decide if it's "good enough" or consider other options.

Now notice I did not mention the City Journals or XLEX, that is a whole other can of worms I will talk about shortly.

The City Journals and XLEX. That part of XLNation is not a user Forum but an addon module of Drupal (at least I think it is) with its own database. The resource manager of XenFORO is an add-on as well. There is no migration path available via free software that I can find.

1. The XLEX could easily be manually recreated on the new site, heck I did a few myself to test. Get a few people together and knock it out. Granted all the discussions would be gone but the important stuff would be there. Moderators could easily "re-assign" the resources to the original owner if they still exist once they get on the new website

2. There are tons of City Journals and those are way more complicated since the discussion threads are a big part of the CJ experience. I dont see anyway to manually migrate them without third party help.

I know of a webmaster that converted from Drupal to XenFORO successfully using a company called gConverter. I have contacted them and now I am waiting for a formal price quote. Their price quote is based in part on the number of users, topics, posts etc to be migrated. Right now we are looking at around $200 - $250. If we purged the users database the costs would drop a lot. I am willing to cover this cost myself.

The issue is migration of CJ and XLEX data, that will cost even more since its a specialized migration. The community will need to decide on the value of the CJs, and the XLEX discussion data vs the cost to migrate. This cost I cannot cover myself.

Some thoughts:
1. Is it really necessary to migrate 78,000 + users? I would suggest purging out anyone that has not logged into their account in the last two years?

2. Stick with Drupal and just upgrade the Software. That would be easy.

 

(Kicking and Screaming) XLNation on Drupal version 6.22, released May 5, 2011.

 

Status of what happened today:

This evening I installed phpBB to XLNation. My goal was to try the "FREE" migration method. I needed a working copy of phpBB in order to migrate the Drupal Database to phpBB. (XenFORO has a native importer to convert from phpBB3 to XenFORO.) Well guess what? None of these Drupal to phpBB migration programs work with v6.xx. I also found out that XLNation will have to upgrade to Drupal v6.28 in order to then upgrade to the v7.xx series first released in May 2011.

I don't think Hyperwolf has the time or desire to migrate XLNation down the Drupal pathway. That leaves us with the gConverter folks. I am in contact with them to nail down a cost. They tried to examine the server this morning but as we know it was having issues. There is still hope since they have migrated a v6.xx Drupal site to XenFORO in the past.

Spoiler: Rant ON

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Just got the following email from gConverter.

Hi Andrew,

Thank you for your email. We can migrate Drupal Forum section to the XenForo installation.

This is the one of our most popular conversion service and we have a very large experience in migrating discussion boards especially to XenForo. We don’t use any converter tools made by Drupal or XenForo developers, because all those have many issues and unresolved problems. All Drupal boards are unique and should be converted to XenForo using a script developed and adapted especially for current case and current versions, so you’ll get a semi-handmade XenForo forum with all basic components listed here: http://gconverters.com/convert-drupal-forum-to-xenforo/


Regarding to the very popular issue related to the user passwords. Because of all discussion boards use different encryption logic that’s impossible to keep the same user passwords on the target forum board. We have developed a solution to solve this issue, it doesn’t keep the same passwords but it generates those randomly for each user. After the conversion we will provide you with gConverter tool to send these new passwords to owners with their email addresses, so you will just click on "send new passwords" button and all users will get "New Password Notification" email, thus they will be able to login with their username and new passwords without any problem.


Regarding to the conversion duration. It’ll not take 1-2 hours, because we don’t just run some unintuitive script and wait for conversion end. Our conversion process based on four parts (review, coding, conversion, testing). First we review all data in source forum, finding all issues, damaged data, tables and optimizing those. Then we adapt our converter scripts to your source forum database, this is a simple script coding part. And then we do the conversion. The conversion first result always has small bugs so we have a special stuff for testing the target forum and checking all issues. They find all issues and provide with this list to our converter stuff. This is the last part and we work together to get the best result on XenForo. The duration of all those parts is about3-4 days.


Cost of our “Drupal to XenForo” conversion service is $220 (up to 100K posts).You only pay after conversion is done and the result is approved by you.

If the downtime of the source forum is very important for you we can work with “Two Parts” option:


You don’t close your forum during the conversion, we do the work within about 3-4 days, and then you check the target XenForo forum. If anything is good for you, you close your forum for 4-6 hours to allow us migrate new topics/posts added during the conversion to target forum. Then you’ll be able to make it live (move to live directory) and open. However the data update will cost you 20% of the main conversion cost: $45. The total cost will be $220+$45 = $265

Please let us know if you’d like us to work with this option.


Our support is available seven days a week. We will help you until your issue is resolved (if there is) - whether it is a pre-service issue, a problem during the conversion or concerns after the conversion is complete and payment has been received.


As for the access data. The Drupal admin account is not required, in order to do this conversion we’ll need following data:

• Drupal database backup file
• Drupal FTP access (for file attachments migration)
• XenForo phpMyAdmin login details
• XenForo FTP access
• XenForo administrator login details

As for the City Journals migration. In order to estimate this work, we need to know a bit more about it. Particularly, we need to know how exactly must be converted each Journal component to the XenForo add-on. Therefore, you’ll need to install that plugin, configure it and create a couple of example so that we understand conversion login and create an appropriate script.







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Thank you

Developer at gConverter

Eric White

 

They are the same thing actually, Resource is just the top level name.

Resource

--> XL Exchange

--> Sub Categories​

--> City Journals
--> Tutorials​

 

There is something to be said about a Fresh Start