Drupal 6 -> VB and arabic language problems

[01101110110110]

I have a drupal website that I'd like to attempt to import into my new VB forum. I know the existing importer is for drupal 4 but it "seemed" to work fine. The import process ran smoothly with few problems, everything seemed to be imported but i still cannot see it on the VB forums (no new users, forums, topics....), I double checked the database and everything seems to have been added so what am I doing wrong ? Have I missed a step somewhere ? I'd like to note that I didn't find the import menu in admincp so I accessed it manually by typing the URL.

Additionally the drupal forum has alot of arabic content, but the importer is importing everything arabic with question marks instead so everything (users, forum names, posts) appears like this "?????????".

[Jerry]

I would need a copy of the source for there to be an official Drupal 6 importer.

As for the char set :

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=267649

[01101110110110]

well drupal 6 is free to download from their website or do you want my existing drupal files & database ? I could provide these (where do I send btw ?) but I imagine it would take a while to update ImpEx to use drupal 6, in the mean time is there anything I can try ? ImpEx seemed to import everything in the source database to the target one yet none of it actually showed up on the forums.

[01101110110110]

Perhaps you could point me at the right direction at least ? There is sort of a deadline to get the site moved so failing this we would need alot of time to transfer content manually.

Like I mentioned earlier the VB database (target) was filled with new tables after using Impex but none of it showed up, if the data conversion wasn't 100% perfect shouldn't I have at least seen garbled content on the forums ? None of the users, forums, topics or posts showed up despite there being tables for them in the database and everything. My experience with the VB database is limited so I don't know what might have gone wrong, perhaps you could offer suggestions ?

There is obviously a difference between the drupal 4.7 database that the importer was written for and the current drupal 6 version, I'll try and see if I can pinpoint these here.

Also a side note, how come I was not able to see Impex from the acp ? The readme seems to suggest simply placing the files in their proper locations is all that is needed, or have I missed a step somewhere ?

[01101110110110]

Well i've been revising the steps several times and true enough it seems I missed a small step, the final step rebuilding the forum cache and other maintenance tasks. After doing those everything appeared on the forums and while I'm still having charset issues at least ImpEx worked for the most part. All the posts are garbled (since they used html heavily rather than bbcode) but I've got the users, forum structure and topics intact so I can live with that. I'm still suffering from charset issues and I had to manually pick encoding from the browser so I can see it all in arabic, which still had some anomalies.

Obviously I can't expect the transition to be 100% and this at least gives me a good base to start from, however now my problem is the charset anomalies. While I had to switch the DB/forum to use the utf8 collation/charset for this to work, it seems that it breaks the recent arabic language packs available for vbulletin. So that means unlike this test run, I can't bring my main forum to use the utf8 charset. Is there a way for the importer to work around that ?

I noticed in the ImpExConfig file these 2 lines

define('use_utf8_encode', false);
define('use_utf8_decode', true);

would setting encode to true affect the outcome ?

[Jerry]

As I said :

I would need a copy of the source for there to be an official Drupal 6 importer.

I don't spend my time taking 3rd party applications and filling them with test data just to write importers for them, customers usualy give me a copy of theirs to work with and that coupled with demand from a few customers results in an importer being written.

[01101110110110]

well i asked where do I send this ?

I could provide these (where do I send btw ?)

Plus I wanted to know about wether the importer can convert the encoding of the source data to conform to the target DB ?