Vanilla Porter for Discuss ( Modx )

Hi everyone.

I am thinking switching Discuss ( modx forum system ) to Vanilla Forum because it is not maintained anymore

They already have a tool to import your datas into the CMS (https://open.vanillaforums.com/addon/porter-core), but it is not available for Discuss.

Has anyone any recommendation or suggestion how to do that ?

Thanks

What happens when you try to import? Why doesn't the tool work? Does it see the Modx database?

I looked into it a bit, the V Porter is expecting a MySQL database, but the Discuss is using xPDO which can handle multiple database types. so maybe the type of db here is the problem?

I don't know if Discuss uses MySQL databases, unfortunately

Oh, here is something, the Discuss db schema:

https://github.com/modxcms/Discuss/blob/develop/_build/schema/discuss.mysql.schema.xml

and, this tool will help possibly also if you have a SQL Server database

https://github.com/tburry/dbdump [ed. note: nuan88 last edited this post 8 years, 11 months ago.]

Oh I also realize this page that I am reading now is useful:

https://modx.com/blog/2015/09/21/migrating-your-modx-site/

The great thing about Modx for me is that I can very easily just grab all the contents on one site and put it on other server or domain, then customize it quickly from there.

However Discuss is its own beast. What data do you want to save?

Ideally all threads, users and categories.

Ok user data is handled primarily by Revo, not by Discuss, it was easier to just let Revo make the user than Discuss I think.

You can therefore grab the user data normally from the Revo install. If you look you will see all those users just in the normal Revo user list, they will have the forum member flag.

That user data may not include Discuss-only data like number of posts, but let's focus on the big things first. If you can successfully grab the threads this user data may come with it, possibly.

The categories are pretty simple, I am assuming you don't have too many of them. Those can be seen where you set them up in the Discuss manager. This part might be ok to do manually, or grab the list from the manager and figure out where to import the category info into Vanilla.

Now, the threads, this is the hardest one I think. Each thread is numbered, and I assume that each message is also numbered, but not sure. Those will be in the Discuss database, and also you can see them in the manager, but you can't do much over there.

That's going to be in the Discuss db for sure. How far along can the tool get you?

Hi, I bring good news

I've contacted Vanilla Team, I provided them a modx/discuss install and they managed to get Porter Working:

See more here: https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/34220/vanilla-porter-for-discuss-modx


First version of it is working (expect some bugs with users role)

Wow cool!

For users, its re-writing the entire user table so you are losing all previous data (admin etc). Don't you have an admin user in Discuss installation?

>Permissions. Assigning moderators with different access rights requires different moderator roles in Vanilla. You will have to do that manually. It's not worth the effort to do that automatically (if it is possible at all)

As for mod role of some users that's I believe just a flag in the db and if it were the same value as in Vanilla it might port over. That's the point somebody made in the thread about re-naming some of the tables or columns, so that the data goes sort of into the right place and is understood by Vanilla.

But, I don't know what he means about different moderator roles, or whether Vanilla stores that data as a flag, suppose so but not sure. They might do something funky with roles, as I mentioned before its an interesting software system to put it mildly.

Custom roles would be lost for sure because they are not transferable.

Moving from discuss to Vanilla .... awesome!
Now when they fix the SSO, you can blend it nicely with MODX

It would help them to know that there are use fields in both the users table and the user_profile table.

It might actually work better, though, to create a custom user table with their fields and an 'internalKey' field the holds the users original ID. I'm guessing that's a shorter step from what they're doing now and it would preserve all current user data.

Another thought: IIRC, someone at MODX LLC did some work on porting stuff from Discuss to Vanilla. I don't know who it is or what they've done.

I wish I had time to work on this, it sounds like fun.

@sottwell did a writeup on porting Vanilla.

I did some porting myself, but the Vanilla jsConnect plugin is broken at this time.

Vanilla is an awesome piece of work.