Recently I needed to do a migration from the Simple Machines Forum (SMF) to the Drupal Native Forum. I think most people by this point have heard of Drupal, and if you're reading this, chances are you're in a similar situation. If you want to migrate from SMF to Drupal, there is no direct route beyond writing your own Migration software from scratch in PHP. In this project I'm migrating from a Bridged Joomla and SMF site that has roughly 16,000 posts and about 1100 users.

Note: I do not support this mechanism, if you mess up your site, you are on your own.  You should always back up often and have a way to get back to where you were before you started.

The setup of the old site is as follows:

• Joomla 1.5.x
• JACL Pro
• Jfusion
• SMF Forum 1.1.x
• Community Builder 1.2.x
• AEC

Migrating to -

• Drupal 6.x
• Advanced Forum
• Author Panel
• CiviCRM
• Node Comment
• CCK
• Views

Pre migration server setup:

• Create a MySQL dump of both your existing Joomla/SMF site and the Drupal Install.
• In the Drupal site edit the .htaccess file and add these lines, to ensure that php scripts don't mass out memory
• php_value memory_limit 256M
• php_value max_execution_time 2000

Optional: Migrate Joomla

To migrate Joomla, I used a module called Joomla2Drupal

http://drupal.org/project/joomla

I made some customizations to join Community Builders fields onto the user import. If anyone is interested in this code I'll post it, just comment on this post. It's not really contribution worthy, but it might help someone get started. If you don't use Community Builder, this is probably a win out of the box.  The phpBB2Drupal import seems to be ok with existing users in the database if you do a Joomla import first.

SMF

To Migrate SMF it gets a bit more tricky. I couldn't find a direct SMF to Drupal type module. I briefly considered extending the Joomla2Drupal module, but after looking at the SMF tables, it would have taken way too much time (considering I'm paid nothing for this work). What made the most sense to use the phpBB3 converter then use the phpBB2Drupal migration tool.

Install phpBB3

First download the phpBB3 and the phpBB3 converter from the link in the paragraph above. Unzip the phpBB3 install folder. Then unzip the contents of the zip file you download into your base phpBB3 folder, it will have files that need to go into the includes and the install folders for the converter.

Now what I did was to put the phpBB3 install folder inside the Joomla folder, run the installer, <yourdomain.com>/phpBB3_folder/install/ and instead of installing it in the Joomla Database, I used the new Drupal sites database. BACKUP YOUR DRUPAL DATABASE. Run the installer, setup a new phpBB3 forum using the standard table prefix. Once this is complete click the Converter tab. Select phpBB3 converter. Enter your older forums location relative to the new forum, usually something like ../smf_forum (or whatever your smf folder is). Setup the database connection for your old joomla/SMF database, I used a root level username to do this, so that it was easier to manage the credentials between migration steps. It doesn't need to be though, it just needs to be a user that has access to that database, the user your SMF site currently uses will work fine. Ensure that your webservers user (www-data, daemon, et al) has ownership of the files in the directory. Using SSH you can run: chown -R www-data.www-data . (if you're currently in the site root (this will cascade ownership into all your site folders so that the migration can copy attachments if needed).

Run the migration. If all goes well, delete the phpbb3/install folder and check out your new site. If it worked you should have a fully migrated phpBB3 site. You actually have the option at this stage of running a bridged phpBB3 Drupal site, where Drupal just syncronizes sessions using the phpbb3 module I don't recommend this. Now you need to prepare your Drupal site to be migrated to.

Setting up Drupal

Download and install phpBB2Drupal. Install Advanced Forum, Author Pane, Post Statistics, comment attach, Phpass, Bbcode modules. Configure a migration with the phpBb2Drupal module, continue to save your configuration until it allows you to continue. It does numerous checks until it finds all the right settings. You will need to read the directions on the configuration screen.

BACKUP YOUR DRUPAL DATABASE!!! I can't say it enough, also use a unique name each time. It's nice to be able to go back to a specific time as you move forward. It's important to have a snapshot of your database before each big move you make. Cleaning up a database after a failed migration can take time and energy that is best spent on moving forward with other challenging design features.

You may want to roll your database back to before you ran the first phpBB3 installer, since you likely have many other things you'd like to work on, and your live forum is possibly still online. Your migrated data will become stale quite quickly. Once you know your migration method works, migrating again shouldn't be so mysterious. Roll back, finish up your site, and run the migration at the very end just before you switch over.