Looking for a Xenforo alternative
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Hello NodeBB community!
I am currently on a team that manages a web forum for a gaming community that's currently running Xenforo. We have been looking for alternatives to our forum and I was wondering if any of you have experiences you would like to share when it comes to migrating an existing Xenforo to NodeBB? Strongly considering trying out NodeBB!
Thank you in advance!
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@bentael wrote an import strategy for NodeBB in the form of a plugin:
http://community.nodebb.org/topic/331/nodebb-plugin-import-import-your-forum-to-nbbYou essentially need to export your data into a format that this importer will understand. I feel like @bentael is getting swamped with requests for help to import data from other forum software, so I'll offer some assistance as well to get your feet off the ground.
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@Dielan after Feb 13th, (be back from vacation), if you can provide me a decent DATABASE dump of a recent version of Xenforo, I will create an exporter 10 days after.
Also, read this readme on similar Exporter that I wrote before, and take notes if there is any new feature, format, "fields" in Xenforo that I should look for as well.
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Oh that shouldn't be necessary. I'm not too concerned with the data migration as I am skeptical of adopting NodeBB as a xenforo replacement in the first place and I was hoping for stories of first-hand experience of the subject.
I've browsed through some of the websites on the list in the sticky for examples of different implementation of themes and the sort and they do look interesting. While I like the cork-board feel to some parts of the interface some of my users may not and I do not know how far theming has come along or how it's done yet.
I'm scouting!
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@Dielan keep scouting! Let us know what you think. NodeBB has been around for only 7-8 months, and in that time, we only have a handful of themes, as the theming engine is only now coming to maturity. You're looking at the latest theme: Lavender.
We hope to have more themes to showcase by next month at least
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@Dielan said:
Hello NodeBB community!
I am currently on a team that manages a web forum for a gaming community that's currently running Xenforo. We have been looking for alternatives to our forum and I was wondering if any of you have experiences you would like to share when it comes to migrating an existing Xenforo to NodeBB? Strongly considering trying out NodeBB!
Thank you in advance!
I am curious as to why you want to stop using xenforo for a gaming forum?
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@StuartH said:
@Dielan said:
Hello NodeBB community!
I am currently on a team that manages a web forum for a gaming community that's currently running Xenforo. We have been looking for alternatives to our forum and I was wondering if any of you have experiences you would like to share when it comes to migrating an existing Xenforo to NodeBB? Strongly considering trying out NodeBB!
Thank you in advance!
I am curious as to why you want to stop using xenforo for a gaming forum?
Well xenforo is still a good choice for a gaming community but we are still pretty new. One of our larger concerns is xenforos cost, and the costs of removing unwanted features such as branding. Its really just a ratio of what we need vs how much xf expects us to pay for it that we are currently unhappy with.
I'm also a huge fan of open source software
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@bentael said:
@Dielan after Feb 13th, (be back from vacation), if you can provide me a decent DATABASE dump of a recent version of Xenforo, I will create an exporter 10 days after.
I could provide you with one or two reasonably large dumps. Reasonably meaning one kind-of large and one ludicrously large. However, both of these forums have plenty of plugins installed, some of which add their own fields and/or tables, though all tables present in vanilla XF should have xenforo_ as a prefix.
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fair enough, the first dump sounds a proper one to start with, I can write a starting point for exporter with all the "native" XF fields, as for the plugins fields, these will need to be added per-installation-export
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@Dielan just send it (or a download link) to my email [email protected]
but i have to tell you that there is a line now:~0. Make the -import plugin 4.0 compatible
- exporter for PhpBB
- exporter for Questions2Answers
- exporter for XenForo
I should just open up issues on the importer's repo so you can track those down, will do that soon
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Get in touch when Simple Machines appears on your roadmap, I've got a 24k posts db if you'd like to play with it. Unless someone has already managed this and would like to help me get mine done too, it's the only thing stopping me transferring over yesterday...
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@bentael I'm working on a phpBB exporter right now, hopefully you haven't started yet
@ninja-scott on its way...
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@psychobunny was planning on doing so this weekend, since you started, I 'll work on getting the -importer up to the 0.4.x signatures. The "exported" structure should not change at all, and if it needs to be, i will backward support.
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sounds good
