Lots of questions - Potential move from heavily hacked phpBB2

[mccollin]

Hi folks,

I'm here because I have an interest in possibly moving to VBulletin from my current phpBB2 base. I have a heavily hacked portal site using phpBB2 as the content management for the site. I'm looking at the need to move it up to the most current phpBB, and that's going to be some work, so I'm considering moving. I'd likely be also using VBPortal along with it, so consider that. Here are my questions that will help me determine if a move to VB is going to be even possible. Financially, the license is not an issue in this discussion.. the site can easily pay for the license, I'm more worried about these other things.

1. Template Modification - Take a look at my current site at http://pdaphonehome.com to get a perspective on the degree of modification I'm talking about. I have become pretty proficient at creating new portal pages and developing a template to display the content of the forums in the format that I want it. I know that it's very easy to "configure" templates in VB, but how easy is it to modify them to do something different? Is there a logical pairing between the php code and the template files, and can you easily figure out how to grab the dynamic content on a page and move it around if you want? Some of the phpBB scripts are very complex and beyond my abilities.

2. phpBB to VB Migration - I know that there is a script that imports phpBB into VB, but I have some hacks that might cause a problem with this. First, it's not a hack, but I've added a number of smilies and avatars. Do these get picked up in the import for the database, and if so, would I be able to easily just move the image files to the correct location? The next question applies to migration too.

3. File Attachments - I have the very popular file attachment hack installed, and it is heavily used throughout the forums. Since this is not part of the core phpBB, does the import script cover this? My forum is large enough that it would be impossible to manually recreate all the image linkages, and the files are indexed in the database, so the filenames aren't meaningful.

4. PDA Friendly Version - As my site is oriented to PDAs, I have a complete version of the whole site... the forums and the portal pages... recreated in a PDA friendly version. Is there a PDA friendly template readily available for VB? I haven't seen it used on PDA oriented VB sites, if so.

5. Google - I have worked very hard to get many of my pages placed will in Google and unfortunately, I didn't have the forethought to setup my directory structure well when I built the site. All of my phpBB code is in the /phpbb/ directory, which means all of the inbound links to pages point at the viewtopic.php script that is part of phpBB, or one of my portal pages. If I move to VB, my directory tree will be different, and my inbound page will be different. Will VB maintain the topic numbers during the port, so that I could possible write a new viewtopic.php script that would redirect inbound pages to the appropriate VB pages and not lose my Google inbound traffic and links. I realize that they would go to a 404 page by default, but my content is very specific on thousands of pages and people will likely leave if they get redirected to a banner page. Any ideas on how to do a phpBB to VB move when your content is spidered would be helpful.

Thats about it for now... I realize that these questions aren't core VB questions. I'm cool with what VB and VBportal can offer... but I can't make the move if these issues are unsolved. Thanks for all your help.

[Xenon]

1. hmm, i don't know exactly what you mean here.
but templates and php scripts are tightened together in a good and easy way mostly

2. yes possible, and yes very easy

3. Hmm, theoretically possible, but not with the normal importscript.
you may need a extra script for it, maybe you ahve to hire a coder for that.

4. there is a pda hack AFAIK

5. with .htaccess redirects this should be possible, also with the viewtopic.php to write yourself it should work.
the id numbers aren't touched within the portingscript afaik

[mccollin]

Thanks for the quick response,

1. So is there any documentation on how to modify the templates and hack the scripts that I could access prior to buying a license?

3. This one will be a big challenge... I don't want to lose all the attachments that people have added. Its such a common hack, that I've got to believe someone has solved it alread.

4. Where should I look to find this hack? I'd like to determine if it will get me to where I want to go.

5. I think you answered my question but let me clarify. phpBB has posts and topics (or threads). Most urls that are inbound to my site are going to be following a link to viewtopic.php with a variable in the url for the topic id. Will the import script maintain that id. If so, then it should be possible to write a simple script that reads in the url with topic id, and redirect to the VB page for the same topic, correct?

[filburt1]

1. Sorry, no. For template modifications, you can try the admin demo at http://www.vbulletin.com/ .

[mccollin]

Right... I've seen the demo. I'm more interested in the APIs. Can you give me some idea what kinds of APIs are there, and how they could be used... for example are their APIs that let you write a portal page and pull your content easily out of the VB database.

Example.

I want to create a forum for "Reviews". I would like to create a portal page to display the reviews that is asthetically pleasing and doesn't look like a forum. I just did one of these here... http://pdaphonehome.com/phpBB2/articleview.php?t=2940

This is a work in progress, so no comments on the creative side... still need to put buttons in and such..

Anyway, to do this page, I took the phpBB viewtopic.php and viewtopic_body.tpl and modified them. The php file only needed a minor change to alter the template file name and add a few variables and such... mostily it's the normal viewtopic script. The template files in phpBB are mostly html with dynamic data tags that take a while to figure out, but are easy to manipulate once you know how. I completely ripped apart the template and stripped it down to just the author, date, subject, and body... plus a few links, then I added left and right margins that are standard in the portal, and changed the create look... all done from scratch, but still using the CSS for the style.

But here's my problem with this approach... I've got probably a hundred or more pages done like this. I need to upgrade phpBB, so guess what. I've got to essentially redo all these pages.

The idea of an API appeals to me. Would the API let me create a custom page that pulls the data I've talked about here... and keep myself clean on upgrades? Does it give you a standard shell php file that handles all the session stuff to get you into, and out of a page, identify you have access, etc.?

I'm just trying to understand the process required to do custom pages, without having access to the code. I'm essentially wanting to us VB as a big content management engine.

[filburt1]

There are crude APIs in vB2 for generating postbits and other common functions. I believe it's been drastically improved in vB3.

Yes, you can override a forum's style set to the point where it doesn't even look like a forum.

You can easily create a custom page that uses vB's template system as well as query information from the database.

[Talisman]

I think you'll be real happy how easy it is to customize everything at vB...... and it's very simple to correlate everything you need to -- no matter what all the pieces are that you're working with ....... php scripts -> templates -> java -> flash -> xml -> standalone html pages....

You can see how I'm using a combination of vB, vbPortal, and Photopost....... mind you, this is all done with a basic setup using programs I haven't bothered to update during the last year..... so what you can do now (with lots more expertise than I have) includes all sorts of fancy features (like video), better security/flexibility, and tighter integration........ that I'm not using yet.

[Erwin]

Hey, I have a Treo 270, and use your site once in a while for info. Welcome!

[mccollin]

So what would you do if you were contemplating going to VB, have a ton of modifications to do, and V3 isn't quite available yet. If V3 has stronger APIs, then that would be better long term. Is it possible to get V3 now and start developing my stuff, as it will likely take me several months to get it done. Then by the time V3 is generally available, I'd be done and ready to launch the site.

Erwin,

Glad to hear you've benefitted from the site... another "converged soul" ...

[mccollin]

Yesterday at 08:33 PM Talisman said this in Post #7
You can see how I'm using a combination of vB, vbPortal, and Photopost....... mind you, this is all done with a basic setup using programs I haven't bothered to update during the last year..... so what you can do now (with lots more expertise than I have) includes all sorts of fancy features (like video), better security/flexibility, and tighter integration........ that I'm not using yet.

So the Turtle Tips site... that would be the one you are talking about? So are you saying that http://www.turtletips.com/vbtips/ is served from VB content, or is that a static page? If that is coming from VB content, then I'd love to know generally how you did it, because that's essentially what I do on my site, but yours has a nicer creative treatment. If that isn't the page you were referring to with regard to vB, vbP, and P... which one was? If you had to upgrade those three products to a new release, how much rehacking do you have to do? I'd like to get to the point where my hacks are easily implemented to a new release of code if possible... otherwise you are exposed to security threats.