API documentation for adding posts (post data manager?)

[EddyM]

Hi,

I am the web developer for a site that currently has a forum-like section as part of it, which was built from scratch by me a few years ago. We would now like to change over to a proper forum, which will hopefully be integrated with the site in several other ways too.

At the moment I am trying to decide between phpBB3 and vBulletin. I've played around with a demo of vBulletin, and a copy of phpBB3 on our server, and haven't found much to favour one over the other in terms of how we will want the admin options etc set up (things like allowing guest posts but with a CAPTCHA on the posting page). But it's obviously a lot harder to tell which one will be easier to integrate with the rest of the site in the ways that we want to.

The very first step will be to somehow import all the posts from the existing forum-like system into the new one, so as phpBB is free, I decided to go ahead and have a go at writing some code to add all the posts from the old system to it. But I immediately ran into problems with that, as I can't find any documentation or other help on adding posts which is detailed enough.

So I decided to give up on that for now and have a look at the documentation for vBulletin. There seems to be a lot of it, and there is a section that talks about using Data Managers to do several things, including what I want to do here (adding posts), but then it only gives an example for how to register a new user, and no other information on how to add posts at all... only the fact that there is a data manager for posts.

So what I would like to know is... is there some more extensive documentation on this available somewhere that I will have access to if I buy a vBulletin licence? The documentation page on the main vBulletin site seems to imply that what I have already looked at is the full documentation for vBulletin.

In the absence of full documentation for this, I have some specific questions that it would be very helpful if someone could answer

1. Is it possible to add a post (using the API) as a guest, but with a username? (i.e. the same as someone posting without logging in first, but typing a name in the box when they post, which then gets displayed with it).

2. Is it possible to set the date on this post to a specific timestamp (the time of the original post on the old system), rather than the time when it is actually added to the new forum?

3. This isn't absolutely necessary, but can a script using the API, if so desired, work completely independently of the user that is currently logged in on the computer that is calling the page? I'm just wondering because I had a lot of hassle with this when attempting this with phpBB, if I was logged in it would post the posts as the user currently logged in on my pc (which was the main admin account), rather than as a guest as I wanted... and if I logged out first, it would then be posted correctly as a guest, but therefore have to be approved (there was also no way to override this in the API call, only by changing the permissions for unregistered users on the forum, or rewriting the actual phpBB code), so then I would have to log back in to see what it had actually posted, and log back out after modifying the code before running it again, etc... which was the point where I gave up.

5. Is it possible to add an extra field to the post database to store the email address of the poster (from the old forum system), or would this break anything? The reason I would like to keep these stored with the posts (as well as not wanting to lose any of the existing information anyway) is because I am hoping I might also be able to write some code to run when someone registers, to associate any existing posts matching their email address with their account (the old forum system didn't allow people to register, but it did ask for their email address when posting).

6. Should I use the ImpEx system for all this anyway, as it will only be a one time import once it is all sorted out? I can't answer this myself as I can't find any detailed enough documentation for the ImpEx system either, it only talks about how to use existing importers for other forums, nothing about creating a new importer at all. So I don't know if it is capable at all of doing what I need it to.

If I can get answers to these questions, and therefore know that it is going to be possible to do what we need to with vBulletin, then we can go ahead and buy it.

Thanks very much in advance for any assistance anyone is able to offer

Edit: OK, I now have another question... when I tried to submit this post, it went to the login screen, saying I wasn't logged in and therefore didn't have permission to post. So I logged in there again, and then it went to a page saying "This forum requires that you wait 30 seconds between posts. Please try again in 30 seconds". And it seems it has already been posted anyway.
Does anyone know why that happened, is it something specific to how this forum is set up (perhaps a particularly short login timeout or something?), or is it just a random bug that could occur on my forum too if I go ahead with purchasing and setting up vBulletin?