am using SMF which I consider one of the good ones but then I find Vanilla unique and simple i'm having decisions issues and need to hear what others have to say :)
I actually used to be an SMF contributer. Used the software for a while, before realizing that I didn't need every single feature on the block. It was too slow for me, and too bulky. So I switched to punBB. Very light, crisp, and fast. However, I found that it hindered concepts and conversations by complicating this natural process.
That's when I found Vanilla. All pros, if that's what you're asking. No cons.
But you have to realize that Vanilla is different than the normal discussion board software. It's more of a framework that you can customize infinitely using addons. And it makes the little things that much simpler. I would say, install a test version, install some addons, and take it for a whirl. ;)
Sorting discussions by category would only work if you had less than 30 discussions on your forum surely? Unless you just took the top 5 from each one, which i believe someone did for some part of their site if you search around on here a bit.
wow seems like importing all SMF board topics, posts, etc to Vanilla would be an almost impossible mission are there any how to's on accomplishing this ? seeing how the db tables are wired different i'm almost dreading it lol
I've used vBulletin, punBB, SMF, and phpBB for a very long stint. I returned to the phpBB today to round out my post count to 4700. But I'll never go back.
In its simplicity Vanilla encourages discussion by removing the natural barriers that other forum software establishes. It is also infinitely upgradable, and simple enough so that anyone with imagination and a little know-how can convert it into whatever they want it to be. In the truest sense Vanilla is not forum software as much as it is the infrastructure for an interactive community.
One of the major differences between Vanilla and other forum software, is in the engine, and the ability of Vanilla to easily modify user accounts for use site-wide. Try doing that with phpBB it is a lot more difficult, and all the hacks have very limited and specific applications.
Another big difference, is in the focus of the development team. All the other makers of forum software are watching each other for direction. All the other forum software groups could combine into a mega group and no one would miss a beat. Not so for Vanilla. To me that uniqueness, and the ability to question the usefulness and application of features on their own merit, rather than on what everyone else is doing, is what makes Vanilla great.
Seems like there are only good words about Vanilla currently.
I too, have used SMF for a while and find that their extensions are hard to maintain and to be used. Each extension search for codes in only the "default template" and if you are using other templates, you will have to figure how to make things work/appear in it.
Besides, SMF uses tables for their display, whereas Vanilla uses CSS. Table designs are too restrictive to me. Just have a look at wordpress and MT and tons of other open source projects, CSS is the way to go these days.
my biggest issue is going to be importing all SMF data into vanilla not sure how one would even begin such a task, would be cool if vanilla DB tables were such that we could just import topics, posts, etc but since they are different it will probablly require some serious editing and I imagine the post count doesn't match either so major headaches
I've been working on a SMF to Vanilla script today, I'm in the process of doing the same move on my site. The script is working but give me a day or two to find some time to tidy it up and make it more usable before I post it up for public consumption.
Most stuff goes across fairly nicely, although the terminlogy is different - i.e.
Passwords are hashed differently - I've hacked together an extension which allows users to login with passwords hashed by either SMF or Vanilla. I'll post this up too for you to use or You'll need to get your users to reset their passwords.
Vanilla uses Icons (32x32) and Pictures (280x200) instead of Avatars - I've got my SMF Avatars going across to both - I figured having them cropped down really small was better than nothing! Users can update it once I make the move on our production server.
Looking forward to it, will make converting from SMF so much easier
curious what will this migrator do with SMF board names or category names ? I imagine one would get tossed but then you might lose the order of where everything was at since Vanilla does not have these items,
come on now SMF is not complexed its one of the most simple forums on the planet, it just has a ton of code and tables in it that makes it bulky, i made use of most of its features which can easily be turned off and on.
but I too am waiting for the SMF migrration tool to Vanilla, the creator may need some $motivation lol
Well the only thing i'll regret with SMF is the awesome amount of highly detailed statistics. Totally useless, but damn cool for a geeky admin who loves staring at increasing numbers (yeah, I do...)
It's slow, themes are painfully long to create, the permission system is almost worst than phpBB's, and, well, I just don't understand what the word "simple" has to do with it.
I guess it's because I'm definitely not a techie, but SMF just seems unfriendly to me, even after 6 months of use.
I took David 'Chacmool' Djurbäck's SMF to PunBB conversion script as a basis for this and its more or less a dirty bastardisation of his code, use at your own risk modify settings.php with your database details then hit forums.php, topics.php, posts.php, and users.php This just ports forums/topics/posts and users - You will need to reassign the respective permissions.
I used this to port my community of around 600 users 4000 discussions, 60000 comments - If you have alot more you may need to look at increasing timeouts etc for the run of the script
SMF Password hashes are salted using the users own username, so you cannot port them directly across from Vanilla - this extension once loaded will overwrite the normal People.Class.Authenticator with one that also accepts passwords in their SMF salted form. Things to note about this are: if a user updates their password, it will then be saved in the normal vanilla manner (which is fine) and the users should not be allowed to change usernames or they will need to reset their passwords also. Again please use at your own risk :)
Also this extension will update your vanilla config as soon as it is enabled - to disable the extension you will need to unload it and remove the AUTHENTICATION_MODULE line from conf/settings.php
Any questions just yell out - I will get around to tidying up the code its just a matter of finding the time!
Awesome! Everything worked perfect except for posts.php (it just loads a blank page, no errors). A review of the code in formatting.php has some text mixed in, like : "smf-to-v/settings.php0000700000175000001440000000115210474317356015406 0ustar steveusers00000000000000" . Also noticed some references to Pun tables.
I couldn't get the user passwords to work either.
This is a great start though, thanks Steve! This was closer than I invisioned getting.
Hi Steve, I tried your script a few minutes ago and encountered a few problems. I totally suck at PHP & MySQL stuff, so maybe I did something wrong, however I somewhat managed to make it work. Here's what I noticed:
- First I've got the following message after running "forums.php": Unable to connect to database. Error: Access denied for user 'steve'@'localhost' (using password: NO)
Dunno if it has something to do with the fact I was trying to run your script on local or not, but I managed to make it work after replacing your name on line 56: $db_link = @mysql_connect ($GLOBALS['config'][$this->type . '_host'],'steve' in "include.php"
- After that I successfuly ran "forums.php", but only categories from SMF's first section were converted to Vanilla categories. I suppose it could be fixed if I put all of my SMF subforums in a single section. I've got this error: MySql Error: Duplicate entry '9' for key 1.
- Finally all of the posts and users seem to have been converted. Everything works fine, but I'm french and use silly caracters like "é", "è", "à" and so on. The problem is all of these characters were replaced by "?" in Vanilla. Dunno if it comes from your script or not. Maybe it has something to do with Mark's international character recent problems.
I didn't try the SMF Password Hash Extension yet, but will in a few minutes. I hope you'll find my comments useful (or understandable...) thanks anyway for this script :-)
edit: I just noticed only the discussions titles work. When I click on a discussion, all of the comments are just replaced by a single "0". I suppose it has something to do with Warning: Unexpected character in input: ' in \formatting.php on line 228. I get this when I run "posts.php".
ok I got the url ok but says unable to connect to database, doing some re-checking ;-) I've noticed a lot of duplicate errors, is it using the same number system as vanilla ie if vanilla item is listed as 1 and smf is listed as 1 becomes a duplicate error, on posts.php I get a blank page so far it hasn't imported anything from smf
Hiya, It looks like i trashed the formatting.php when i tried to tar it up with the wrong syntax :) I've pulled it down for now and I'll post up the correct version once im home from work tonight. Looks like I've posted it up a tiny bit prematurely sorry
As for the other issues
mysql errors: I've put up the version that was on my dev server, turns out it wasnt the final one, I'll try to get the one I used on my production server conversion mysql duplicate rows: You will need to drop the existing default Vanilla Category of 'general'. I will address this issue in the script tonight french characters: I'm not sure how these are handled in SMF or Vanilla, I'll have to look into this
Warning: This will drop all current categories/discussions/comments from the destination <b>Vanilla</b> database before importing - Your Vanilla install should be a blank one, and if this is the case you wont lose any data. This also drops any users other than with UserID 1 - The script does not replace or import the userID of 1 for either Vanilla or SMF - I've assumed this would be a generic admin account.
<b>Modify settings.php</b> with your configuration
Then run the following scripts in this order: users.php categories.php discussions.php comments.php
http://www.lansmash.com/SMFPasswordHash.tar.gz
As my previous post - This extension has been unchanged
Works perfect! only issue I'm having is that I have about 100,000 'comments' and it's dying after about 75,000. Any way I can set a pause or something in the script? I'll sit here and press "Next" for 2 hours if I have too. :)
Edit: Just put set_time_limit(0); on line 1 of comments.php.
Alright, here is the only issue I've found: I can't get the passwords to work. I guess if worse comes to worse I can have all users reset their password.
However there are still two problems: special characters are still replaced by a "?" (not only french ones, but also things like "Ü" for example) and the SMFPasswordHash extension seems to be half working. From what I've tried with different accounts, it appears passwords with mixed numbers & letters don't work, but I'm not sure about this. It may also be a length issue since those which worked were 10 characters long or less.
Anyway your script rocks, many thanks for sharing this. I'm looking forward the international characters fix :-)
Warning: main(include.php): failed to open stream: Permission denied in /vanilla/smf-to-v/users.php on line 3 Warning: main(): Failed opening 'include.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:/usr/local/php/lib/php') in /vanilla/smf-to-v/users.php on line 3 Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in /vanilla/smf-to-v/users.php on line 6
i have it inside the vanilla root, i'm assuming even though you are calling it an extension it's not an actual extension that would be activated like Vanilla extensions that's why i have it in the root
From the error it looks like a permissions thing - make sure you've got the right owner set and chmod all the files it to at least 644
smf-to-v is just a standalone script not an extension - it does not need to access any of vanilla's files other than the database.
Password problems:
SMFPasswordHash however is an extension - It looks like SMF 1.1.x uses a different method for password salting - I'll have to update this to accept both 1.0.x and 1.1.x passwords.
fixed the permissions error, everything appears to work ok, as you do each one there are error messages but it imports anyway ie Notice: Undefined index: pun in
on users.php there was an avatar path error but that could have been my end,
the avatar section inthe settings is not clear, are those two paths for smf or vanilla ? i set the avatar config to path but it still apparently tired to pull them
The avatar paths are for whereever you are going to store your avatars after the import to vanilla
by default SMF stores system provided avatars in www.yourdomain.com/PATH_TO_SMF/avatars and user uploaded avatars in www.yourdomain.com/PATH_TO_SMF/attachments
Vanilla (the plain Vanilla without extensions) does not have any directory structure in place for storing these, so you need to decide where on your server you would like to store them, copy them there and then define the paths
Hi, it's amazing to see that it's possible to migrate SMF to Vanilla!
I'm having a dilemma now. I'm not sure whether I should stick with SMF or Vanilla now. I started out with SMF at my video games forums and had just started a engineering discussion board with Vanilla.
Although I do like the web 2.0 feel and extensibility of Vanilla, I do say SMF looks more tidy to me. The main page of a SMF forum is categorized in categories (unlike the discussion page of Vanilla) and we could have child boards in SMF.
Since I made this post in a Vanilla user forum, I'd expect people to say that it's better to use Vanilla. Come on, shoot me :)
If the categorised view and sub categories are important to you then sure go with SMF. It bugs me ever so slightly when people come to vanilla and then complain that it's not really what they want but they want to use it anyway (cant blame them, it's a lovely piece of software) so how do they make it do 'xyz' when other forum apps out there already do that.
If you can live without the categories/subcategories (or can get used to using the categories tab) then use vanilla.
I agree some of the smf packaging is attractive but Vanilla will one day have the ability the have categories of categories and sub categories, its already in the works I believe someone is tinkering with it,
the way I look at both is this, Vanilla is a discussion board with an emphasis on discussion, the feel is different from SMF which like most forums can be looked at as a multi-cultural symposium of stuff which needs to be broken down into many categories of stuff, takes longer to find because you have keep clicking to find what you want,
Vanilla is straight forward discussion you can see everything at a glance and its addicting once you get started, I know there are those who get itchy when new people are comparing Vanilla to other forums, its only natural,
the bottom line is Vanilla is forum software the only difference is Vanila is re-arranged for uses to get the most out of their discussion, you could just as easily rearrange your SMF to appear like Vanilla but that would be no easy task not to mention Vanilla is all CSS this alone is worth its weight in gold when customizing it,
I also believe, as mentioned previously that people considering Vanilla over their existing Forum should be highly respected and that the sacrifice they make converting to Vanilla is proof of the value of Vanilla,
Why do I call it a sacrifice ? Simply because hands down SMF has much more to offer than Vanilla, but what it doesn't have is the CSS, the simple arrangement of discussions and doesn't have the emphasis on discussion that Vanilla has,I had to think long and hard before switching from SMF and don't regret it one bit ;-)
I'd recommend try Vanilla here on Lussumo get involved in dicussion and see how addicting it becomes
Hi bugsmi0, I have to agree Vanilla's choice of using CSS was a great one. One could theme Vanilla so much easily compared to SMF.
Hmmm... I never thought that it was addictive to the discussions in Vanilla, and it turns out it is. I would come back just to see what kind of new discussiosn there are. You can't get this in SMF, where you would have to go into each category and see a reply/topic to that category. In vanilla, you see everything, every reply/topic in every category, whih may urge readers to click and read.
bugsmio has highlighted a key feature of what makes Vanilla distinctive. Apart from its inherent css (which will appeal to admins), it's the discussion-centric nature of Vanilla that truly makes it stand out from nearly all other forums. As already said, having to wade into each category to find new posts favours the category over the discussion.
I was wondering about why I suddenly started liking Vanilla: I thought I'd become enlightened, but maybe the discussion-addiction has kicked in!
By the way I'm not knocking SMF. If I were to choose an alternative forum software it would be in my top three due to its robustness, support, security and easy upgradability. But Vanilla offers something else too, and does it extremely well.
---delete--> at first I thought the smf import was wacking out my Vanilla but that's not the problem, its a vanilla safari ajax issue perhaps still testing ;-)
I have made the decision to shift my smf forum and make it into a vanilla forum.
It sure means a big step for me as I'm now integrating it with wordpress. and they are both working perfectly.
(well just one bug currently, if you're registering thorugh vanilla, you will only get a contributor role in wordpress. If you register through wordpress, you willget an author role. Either way, it works!)
this links don't point to files anymore :( it takes you to fron page of a blog. Is it possible to get any link updates or alternative download locations? That would be great thx
I have to say, I hate all forum software. I always have found them contrary to the natural process of conversation.
Then comes Vanilla.
My forum has been buzzing with great conversation ever since. Every time I have to go over to another community (usually vBullatin) I shudder with disgust. Those guys have no idea what they are doing.