Converting from custom made forum to vBulletin 3.6

[mapdaddy]

Hi there,

Newbie here (my very first posting, as a matter of fact).

I programmed my own, custom made forum a few years ago. I would like to migrate the data to vBulletin 3.6.

Of course, ImpEx doesn't support my old forum's custom database structure.

So how should I progress to convert my old forum to vBulletin 3.6? Is it possible to write directly into the vBulletin 3.6 MySQL tables? Or should I first export the data to flat text files before I import them into vBulletin 3.6?

I'm an experienced programmer, so I don't mind making my own conversion programs.

Any ideas on how to do this? Thanks in advance!

Best regards,
Asle Skarpengland
Oslo, Norway

[Jerry]

I'd advise a few things, first is not to write to the database directly as that gets very messy.

The two options are typically, get your data (as much as you can) into a system that ImpEx supports, i.e. phpBB2 then do the import as ImpEx will take care of the defaults, missing data and linking users to posts etc.

OR ....... have look at the phpBB2 importer code, the modules, and try and modify the SQL and fieldnames to match your custom source.