Discus Converter?

jeanineh · June 21, 2011, 03:07:28 PM

Ok I saw the area for requesting converters for switching over to SMF boards but I am totally green at this so wanted to ask some questions first and hope that is ok?

I have a discus pro 4.006 and have had it for 10 + years, it's getting old and starting to break down little by little and don't think there is anymore support for it. I have 3 other SMF boards and love them! I think it is past time to switch over. My problem, IS there and easy way to do this? I pretty much will be starting over. If it can't be converted is their a way to move previous post from Discus to the new board? I would hate to loose all or the older post, although I don't need to keep all of them at least the most recent ones. It's kind of complicated when I think on it to hard so thought I would start here and get idea on the best way to go.

I really don't mind just creating the new board but like I mentioned, if there is any way possible to move members post that would help a lot!

Any suggestions would be appreciated!!

tempster · July 12, 2011, 05:57:23 AM

I saw some discussion here about a discus converter but, I'm having trouble finding it again. This could be it http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=37636.msg1264403#msg1264403

Also,

word press has a plugin and drupal has a module to import html. Discus Pages are simply html pages under a series of numbered directories under the "discus/messages"directory. Once data is in wordpress or drupal, there are converters listed here to convert wordpress and drupal to smf AND, both wordpress and drupal export to RSS or some RSS equivalent (for maybe importing into smf via rss). The import html modules wouldn't import any users or passwords, just the html pages

The Drupal module is a bit more involved in that you need certain xml / xslt support enabled on your server for it to work. However, I have been playing around with the wordpress import html plugin and it is very straight forward. If you set the word press import html plugin to import content based on the "body" html tag, it will import the entire content on all of the discus pages along with maintaining the directory structure. The Plugin has the option of importing the pages as blog entries or pages. The wordpress plugin also generates redirect statements for the htaccess to redirect to the wordpress page.

I was looking for the SMF converter for Discus because I am now curious as to whether the smf converter imports everything between the <body> ans </body> tags or if it is uses some other criteria.

If you are familiar with Discus then you know that, on a given discus page, you can have a whole of very different kinds of information, like "announcements", messages, links to messages and links to any sub-directories that may be under a specific page. It seems very complicated for a script to try to sort out all of this. However, if you have the entire Discus page in wordpress or Drupal, you can then go in and edit the page to a format that would make sense when it is converted to smf.

jeanineh · July 16, 2011, 07:45:00 PM

LoL, oh dear you 'lost' me at WordPress! Seriously though, sorry I didn't get back to you sooner, I had given up getting a reply so was surprised to see yours. I'm a bit tech impaired when it comes to all that but I wondered if it could be done if I found someone to do it.

I'm not to sure just how all this works. Are you saying that moving to WordPress you could actually move all the post and threads you wanted to? Not sure just how you move it over but just trying to get the gist of everything and see if it would be worth it.

tempster · July 20, 2011, 12:50:05 AM

sorry if it sounded confusing.

If you want to import Discus into smf and have the Discus data look like a forum in SMF, it probably is best to use the older converter and the older version of SMF. The wordpress route will import the Discus pages as pages, with no structure.

The bottom line is that Discus is basically a directory of html files. If you ftp into .../discus/messages/, what you see is simply a directory of html files.

Wordpress and Drupal have plugins that allow you to import a directory of html files into Wordpress and Drupal. The plugin for Wordpress is the simplest and most straight forward. These plugins were designed so that you could convert a static website of html pages into a wordpress or drupal site.

I imported one of my discus boards into Wordpress and the plugin works. It doesn't import anything else but the html files and I configured the plugin to import the html pages as Wordpress pages. I have not taken the next step and tried to import the resulting wordpress into smf.

Notes: some times the index.html page under a Discus Messages directory has a size of 0, which will cause wordpress to skip this file. I edited all of the index.html pages that had size 0 by putting in text identifying its directory number.

The word press plugin will import "the entire Discus Page" as is - as it exists in Discus. So, while the page will be in Word Press, everything on the page will still show what it showed in Discus. I don't want to sound confusing but, if you use the Wordpress generated redirects for your htaccess file, even though the page will have Discus links, when someone clicks on the old Discus links, the htaccess will redirect them to the appropriate page in wordpress.

tempster · July 20, 2011, 02:09:36 AM

I think I may just leave my discus boards "as is" , make them completely static and create a rss file for the main topics on my Discus boards. I think it may be a better user experience to leave the boards as is with an rss file / sitemap to the boards even though the wordpress "import html" plugin will import the entire board and create pretty urls for all the pages.

Randem · September 15, 2015, 05:00:49 PM

If you are still looking to convert from Discus to SMF look here http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=513910.0

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Discus Converter?

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