IPB Conversion & Costs

[ChurchGeek]

Has anyone successfully completed a conversion from IPB to vB? How easy was it or were there problems?

Also, I've noticed that the IPB cost has gone up from $25/year to $55.12/year now and I am thinking that vB becomes nearly the same economically. Are there any other costs associated with vB other than the license cost that I would incur?

Thanks.

[Hartmut]

There is a ImpEx script which allows to import from IPB to vBulletin. Actually you can buy vBulletin 5 Connect which is still beta but you have access to all the stable version before (e.g. vBulletin 4 Publishing Suite).

[fwulfers]

All future releases for vB5 (and vB4) are included as well so you don't have to pay renewal fees to stay up-to-date. I was looking at IPB as well. With the forum, content, blog and gallery initial purchase cost plus the 6 month renewal fees of $60 for the IPB suite made a vB5 purchase of $224 (with the discount) actually a very good value. For the next 2 years, IPB would cost $289 + 240.

[TheSonic]

Has anyone successfully completed a conversion from IPB to vB? How easy was it or were there problems?

I have done that using Impex. I had some trouble with Charset-Encoding after the the import. There are advanced options in the Config-File of Impex, so you have to play around with it. If you have no special chars, there should be no problem.

In Poills, IPB allows more question than one, vB only allows one question, so you will lose some data in this cases. Other datas imported successfully (forums, posts, threads, users (have to reset passwords), PMs, Usergroups, etc.) I just imported forums (not IP.gallers/Blog/Content).