Pixel-Lated
I helped a buddy out over the weekend by building him a phpBB forum and migrating all his data out of the overpriced crap he was using before (ZeroForum). It took up most of my weekend, but I’m pretty happy with how well it went, and I know he’s happy. He went with 1&1 for his hosting and is paying $5 / mo instead of $20. I have some more interesting news about my own 1&1 account, but I’ll bring it up later.
The ZeroForum software is proprietary, so getting data out of it was like pulling teeth. I wasn’t able to migrate users passwords, since I didn’t know what type of encryption was used, but that turned out to not be as big of a deal as I thought, I had the system generate 128 bit random passwords (dont want anybody complaining about my reducing the security of their account!) and just had all the users go though the “I forgot my password” process to have it reset to their liking. Any information I was able to get out of ZeroForum was only in XML files. So my migration process went something like this:
- Export data from ZeroForum into a series of XML files.
- Import the XML into an access database to get it usable
- Dump those tables to an SQL transaction using Bullzip’s Access to MySQL utility (highly recommended)
- Run the transactions against the MySQL database
- Write query’s to insert the new data into the phpBB tables doing any data transformation necessary along the way.
- And finally, touch up the data, do things like encode IP addresses, rebuild the search tables and recount user posts.
The plan is to eventually add photoblogging (using b2evolution or perferable WordPress) and a more professional gallery (Gallery2) that would be for premium members. Right now there is a simple photo album that allows users to post up pictures, but no bigger than 800 pixels on a side and the image gets watermarked with the site logo.
I would encourage you to go take a look at the new site, if you like photography and design you’ll probably find it a great distraction.
