In preparation for the launch of my school’s blogs community site, I set about migrating the school band’s website over to the WordPress MU platform.

Now, the Band site was running on Joomla 1.0x. It featured an integrated Gallery2 for photographs, MSO Shoutbox for a shoutbox and discussion forums via the Joomlaboard component. Alas, the site was getting dozens of spam posts (including some from Band haters??) What this meant was that there were several registered users that were undesirable and ought not be transferred to the new site.

Importing posts from Joomla was very fast and easy thanks to the Joomla2Wordpress Import Wizard. Static content were not imported and I had to copy-and-paste the content into WordPress manually, though this probably wouldn’t have been necessary had I first migrated the site to Joomla 1.5 and assigned categories to the static pages.  Images didn’t seem to transfer well though, and needed to be re-inserted manually too. Users were not imported, which was also fine with me.

The Joomlaboard migration on the other hand was not quite as straightforward and needed  a bit more searching. The ubiquitous phpBB3 or SMF would be too massive for the site’s purpose, and a fast loading forum was a priority, which lead to the decision to use PunBB. But the complication was that the Joomlaboard project seemed to be defunct and there did not seem to be any direct way to import it directly into PunBB. So in the end, the migration process would be

Joomlaboard –>upgrade to  Fireboard –> import to phpBB2 –> import to punBB

Here’re the links to the relevant pages and downloads:

• Fireboard 1.04 component
• Fireboard to phpBB2 import script ( I used the XMAS Script 0.3. Also note that it imports to phpBB2, not 3)
• PunBB Migration Tool 1.40

The migration tool only worked for PunBB 1.2x though, but the import did complete successfully without hitches. After verifying everything was OK, I then upgraded the install to PunBB 1.3 with no problems encoutered. All users and posts have been migrated successfully from Joomlaboard to PunBB 🙂 True the forum and blog are no longer closely integrated (an intentional move), but the forum’s latest posts are reflected via an RSS feed block.

In all, the migration went very smoothly and the most time consuming part was sourcing for the best migration path.

Now, the next step would be to determine what is the best way to integrate Gallery2 (visually) into WordPress, and check out viable shoutbox type blocks that can be moderated (even more important now that the site is more closely integrated with the school websites).