I am looking for people to help me make converters. They will all be in PHP and so you must know php. You don't need to know it well, just well enough to write queries and stuff.
What a converter involves doing:
- Members
- Passwords - since password systems are different, it is best to send out a random password to everyone through their email. People would want to announce the conversion ahead of time to make sure emails addresses are up to date.
- registration date - most systems are pretty much the same with their dates but you will want to change the date system to match yabb se.
- all other info such as IM systems, email, signature, etc would just be transferring it from one file/db to another
- Topics
- Bulletin board code such as the YaBBC Tags are different on nearly every bbc. The converter will need to go through all topics and message to find these tags and change them to YaBBC (not hard with an array)
- There are a lot of other things such as name of poster and stuff
- Read topics - YaBB has a VERY unique system for getting read topics. Most systems do it by cookie, if so you won't have to add anything to that table. IF not, the script must find the read topics
- System Info
- Templates - we have an easy template system but other places are very hard and don't really make it easy to convert. If you are converting something like phpBB, you may want to just give them the default template and have them work with it. No use in trying to work on something that won't work.
- DB settings, script locations, etc - the script must know where it is getting the information from, make fields for all of yabb's settings or just make it include the settings folder of yabb. If the other BBS is using a db, it must have the db, host, prefix, and everything user info. If it is using flat text, you are going to have to tell it where to get the info from.
- It should check for safe mode and if the converter can even run on the systetm due to disabled functions.
SO..... anyone interested? It is not that hard. Most of the code is already made in the yabb -> yabb se converter and in the profile, registration, and post scripts.
The first bbs that I am interested in is phpBB because people don't like their template system but have nothing to come here with. Also, they have tons of converters so if people want to convert from them or other bbs' they can always take the hard route. Also, they are like yabb and it wouldn't be hard to convert the db.
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