vanilla/porter

Vanilla Porter is a tool for exporting other forums to Vanilla.

Vanilla Porter

Vanilla Porter is a nifty tool for exporting your old & busted forum into a fresh Vanilla Forum. It will create a zipped text file that can be imported directly to Vanilla via the Dashboard., _(*1)

Do NOT use Vanilla Porter for UPGRADING. It is for migrating from other forums, including the incompatible Vanilla 1.x series., _(*2)

Requirements

Porter requires PHP 5.3+ and a connection to your existing database. That's it!, _(*3)

Getting started

Please use the official release, which is a single file. View the official documentation for important usage notes., _(*4)

If you have a PHP-based forum (vBulletin, phpBB, etc) you can likely drop this right on your server and run it from there. For more complicated arrangements (like jForum, i.e. a Java environment), we suggest exporting your database to a PHP/MySQL server and running it there., _(*5)

Roll your own!

To support a new forum source, copy "sample_package.php", rename it to your platform, put it in the packages folder, and follow its inline documentation., _(*6)

You can run Vanilla Porter via index.php which will use the source files rather than the single-file official release. This makes it easier to keep it up-to-date and debug problems., _(*7)

Send us a pull request when it's ready, and sign our contributor's agreement (requires a vanillaforums.org forum account)., _(*8)

Command line support

Porter can run via the command line. Execute the index.php file with the --help flag for a full list of options., _(*9)

For developers with very large databases or ones still in production, we recommend running your export from the command line on your localhost environment with a copy of the database. It just makes life easier., _(*10)

Building a release

Run make.php, which will build a single file named vanilla2export.php. Easy peasy., _(*11)