Member Avatar for kaoru

Hi all, I have recently created a website (hosted through godaddy.com) for an online gaming guild and after using phpBB (v. 2.0.15) to make the forums, I stumbled upon php-nuke (v. 7.6 is what I would be using). Now the forums have already been running for a few weeks, and thus have a good-size MySQL database building. Obviously the most simple thing you could do is create a new database, create the php-nuke site, and start a database from scratch. However I would rather not have all my users re-register. Basically what I would like to do is use php-nuke for my main site and integrate the database from my forums into it. Now I from what I can gather there is a few ways to go about this.

1) You can use php-nuke for the main site, and when you go to the forums link/module it still uses phpbb for the forums, but will allow you to share the database between the site, and the forums.
http://www.legendsofstarwars.com/index.php - is a good example of this

2) You can use php-nuke for the main site and allow php-nuke to control the forums too, but itegrate your former phpbb database into it, so that you don't lose everything.

I'm not really sure on the pro's/con's of these choices, nor do I know how to go about doing either one. There may even be other (better) options that I don't even know about. Hopefully someone here can offer me some insight on this issue, giving some reasons on which method of integration would be the best way to go, and how I should go about it. Thanks in advance.

P.S. Also since this forum is filled with expert PHP users, if you have any "beef" with using php-nuke or reasons why I shouldn't use that for my site please let me know.

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Member Avatar for Troy

I noticed nobody has replied. Have you made any progress? I don't have exact information for you, but I'm fairly familiar with phpBB, and am very familiar with data conversion/migration/integration techniques.

As for php-nuke, I have no experience with it. It's obviously used by a lot of sites, so it must work!

If you use phpBB instead of the php-nuke forum module, the problem will be how to integrate authentication. When you users log into your php-nuke system, you don't want them to have to re-login to use the forum. You want that to be seamless. Google for "phpBB authentication integration" or ""phpBB login integration". (Don't know what you'll find.)

To migrate from phpBB to php-nuke, but keep all your info, you'll have to analyze the database tables and structure then build a roadmap that ties fields in your phpBB tables to the php-nuke tables. Once you think you've got it figured out, write scripts to select the data from the phpBB tables and insert into the php-nuke tables. (I guess you should Google to see if somebody happens to have code already to do this.)

You don't risk messing up your phpBB system doing this, but you do risk destroying your php-nuke data. So don't do this migration on a php-nuke system you are using. Be prepared to wipe it and start over as needed until you get it right.

In the end, it may just be OK to make them all create new accounts and start over. Depends on how much work you want to do! Either way, most likely in 6 months, your users wont care one way or the other.

If you do code a solution, be sure to share it here! Help the community!

Member Avatar for kaoru

Well I have yet to actually implement this yet, but after much searching around the internet I came across this forum posting:

http://www.karakas-online.de/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2609

This seems to be exactly what I need to do, and they even list a site that you can download the conversion kit. However I'm still hesitant to go ahead with it b/c of my PHP in-experience. I'm not worried about messing up the php-nuke, because I havn't really implemented it fully yet anyways. I am worried about somehow losing my user data from my phpBB database in the conversion process though.

Member Avatar for Troy

Cool! That script appears to be designed for your purposes. I have not looked at the conversion script, and I don't plan to, but I'd think there should not be risk to your current phpBB database. It is supposed to be reading the phpBB database and doing whatever data manipulation is necessary then inserting into the php-nuke database. It should not be changing the phpBB database. I do see they of course recommend you backup your phpBB database first, but that is mostly for CYA purposes. (CYA = Cover Your Ass)

Since you are not an experienced PHP programmer, you can do your best to follow the instructions and run the conversion. If it does not work, you'll most likely need to get help from a PHP/mysql programmer. If it does work, woohoo!

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