Complete forum reinstall but want to keep the same members...

[romeoyankee9]

Ok I think I have done enough searching in the forums but I havent found something exactly like what I wanted to do.  Hopefully this isnt something that is right under my nose...

anyways.

I have a site now with a forum that was originally switched over from xmb forums and was bridged with the coppermine gallery.  All that combined with the slow speed of my host and other issues has made me decide to completely redesign my site on a new host. 

The actual information in my old forums are not necessarily needed but I would like to keep the members instead of making them resignup

so this is what I am going to do.

A complete redesign of my site.  A complete brand new installation of smf. 

Everything should be nice and clean and fast.

Am I able to just grab the members list out of the old database.. make a copy of it and then copy over the member list in the new forum?

Im not that great at mysql but I can follow instructions! 

Thanks

[N3RVE]

In phpMyAdmin -> In the Forums db -> Navigate to this table "smf_members" (or whatever your prefix maybe.) Export the table ->
After the fresh SMF Installation, drop the table "smf_members" and upload the downloaded members table.
More data can be imported if necessary

-[n3rve]

[greyknight17]

Hi romeoyankee9 and welcome to SMF.

Did the reply by [n3rve] resolve the issue?

[romeoyankee9]

hey guys sorry to take so long in answering but yes it did!!! worked perfectly thanks so much

[N3RVE]

hey guys sorry to take so long in answering but yes it did!!! worked perfectly thanks so much

Glad you resolved it

-[n3rve]

[bullbreedluverz]

Ive been reading thru lots of posts and this one seems to come closest to what im looking for - im relatively new to running a forum and created my forum and understandably have made mistakes along the way as ive never done it before and my forum does have some problems going on and at times seems to have a mind of its own - all my fault for doing this that and the other whilst learning what the hell i was doing but now im making a duplicate of my forum and done a fresh install of my forum and setting it up to look identicle to my present forum (so no1 notices its a new forum  ) and i would like to copy all the members, posts, pictures from the present forum to the new 1 but none of the mods i added.

would i be right in thinking that i export the relative tables from my present database then drop the same tables from the new databse and then import the tables into the new database of the information i want to add that i exported from the database of the old forum

[N3RVE]

bullbreedluverz,
Get a local web server and mirror your live content on your local system, make the changes that you intend to make, backup the local db - restore on the server with the forum's files.

-[n3rve]

[bullbreedluverz]

as i said im a bit of a newbie to all this - do you have any recommendations for local web server ?

[romeoyankee9]

Im pretty new at this as well but what he might mean is this.. On your server set up a new clean empty database.. then set up a new folder as well and install a clean brand new forum there

(if your old forum was in the http://www.yoursite.com/forum/ [nofollow] then make your new forum http://www.yoursite.com/forum_test/ [nofollow] or something like that)

then set up/install the forum and do all the testing you would like on that new forum!

After testing if everything works the way that you want it to then save reinstall the forum into the www.yoursite/forum/ folder..

Make sense?

[N3RVE]

Well this is what I meant!
Get a local web server, Xampp and Wamp should do this perfectly. Both web server have phpMyAdmin (What is phpMyAdmin?) which will be used to import and export your dbs for this task.
I believe you know how to restore and move your forum files including the database from one server to another. We have documentation on these.
You can see the following:

• How do I move my SMF board to a different host?
• How do I restore the database data?
• How do I save my SMF board?
• How do I save the database data?
• How do I use FTP? / What is FTP?

We'll be doing this so you can mirror exactly what's running on your live forum and uninstall mods, make all the changes you intend to, etc. When you know your local forum is ready - we can transport the files and the db to your server.

-[n3rve]