Topic: Question about simple portal

[stang7043]

Hi everyone ... I need some advice / help / direction.

Right now the site I manage / belong to (m-g-club.com) is running SMF 1.1.13 and TP v1.0 Beta 3. Both products are great. My problem / concern is TP has gone away and for the most part closed its doors. So this has kinda concerned me in regards to support and updates for security reasons. So after talking it over with the other admins of the site we are going to move on to simple portal (great product btw) since it seems like it is the easiest to use and one of the popular ones. So I stood up a  test site with the newest v of Simple Portal 2.3.3 and SMF 2.0 RC5. Which in my preliminary test seem to run great together. My problem is our site is 673 members strong with a custom theme / member groups/ permissions /  forum layout etc etc etc ... Im sure you get my point. My question is is there anyway to import the member list / groups / forum / theme etc etc etc ... or do I have to basically rebuild it to mirror the live site ? Any help would be much appreciated.

[AngelinaBelle]

The simplest answer is -- uninstall TinyPortal, install SimplePortal, and you are done. No need to set up a new SMF forum, or fiddle with any of the SMF permissions (except those which are directly related to the portal) or membergroups.
You MIGHT need to fiddle with your theme, depending on the theme type and how much custom TP stuff you have done to it.
My advice would be to set up a test forum that is a copy of your production forum. Install SimplePortal. Spend some time figuring out any custom theme issues. Many of the custom HTML and PHP blocks you used under TP will work perfectly under SimplePortal. Others might neeed a little tweaking (if they depended on anything particular to TinyPortal). If you have any TinyPortal articles -- you'll have to figure out a good way to handle them. Perhaps you could recreate them as posts, so you can use them in the SimplePortal article system. Or else you could recreate them as SimplePortal BBC pages -- depending on how you wanted to use them. Using an exact copy of your forum will help you to understand all the steps you'll have to take to convert your portal.
But you will not have to set up a new production forum.

[stang7043]

Sounds easy enough. That would make my life a lot easier. I already have a test site setup for testing mods and updates before we go live with them. But Ill backup the live DB and import it over the test site so we have an exact copy and do what you suggested. I appreciate the help. Ill let you know how everything went.  Thanks 


Ok so Im curious how much work would it be to stand up a new smf forum / simple portal site and (not sure if this is the right terminology) import the member groups / list / threads from the live site now to the new site running the latest smf and simple portal ? Sorry curiosity got the best of me. Had to ask.

[AngelinaBelle]

Well, since you already know how much work it is to install SMF from scratch, install a mod, and import a database, I think you probably know how much work it would be. Setting up a completely fresh website is pretty much like setting up your test forum, right?

[stang7043]

Correct but maybe I wasnt completely clear ... Standing up a new install and transferring permissions / member groups / and forum threads from the current live site to the test site instead of uninstalling TP and installing SP on the live site. I wont be doing this since uninstalling TP and installing SP is pretty much a couple of clicks here and there and maybe a tweak or two. Just curious of how labor intensive transferring the live site running SMF / TP to SMF / SP would be without just simply uninstalling and reinstalling.

[AngelinaBelle]

I'm sorry.  You were asking about converting portal-related permissions?
SimplePortal does not come with any "portal conversion" tools. Of course, all your SMF groups will remain the same. But, after uninstalling TP, and installing SimplePortal, you would need to set up SimplePortal's permissions from scratch.  I'm pretty sure you will find that the permission settings are not exactly the same. The two portals have some different features.  So I'm going to suggest that the time required will be about the same amount of time it took to set up permissions for TP in the first place.  Probably less, since you now have a better idea of what you want.  And you can work from screenshots of your TP settings, to help you remember everything.
And then, of course, there are all your custom BBC, HTML, and PHP blocks, and your TP articles. If you don't have a whole lot of them, the most straightforward way to handle them would be to copy the source (BBC, HTML, or PHP) into text files, then copy that into new blocks and, topics (and set as article), and/or pages in SimplePortal.