import

Old blog posts from WordPress 2.6 found and imported

Posted on by Dennis

I spent this afternoon digging around my backups, and I was lucky to find my site backup from the end of 2008. I had to find a way to import the posts from WordPress 2.6 into WordPress 3.5.1. Since I had a full site backup, I was able to load the WordPress files and database backup onto my Mac’s local MAMP web development environment (Windows users might use WAMP).

From there, I followed the WordPress upgrade procedure. I upgraded directly from WordPress 2.6 to 3.5.1 directly without a hitch, although it recommended to go version by version. Then with a click of a button, my posts were exported into an XML file. And two clicks later, my posts were imported into my new site. It’s awesome that WordPress has a very easy upgrade and import/export functionality.

I spent a couple hours combing through the blog posts (good memories of high school and university!) making some edits, and fixing links and images.

The only thing now is to find my WordPress backups from 2009-2011. Needless to say:

Update: After a couple hours of digging, I’ve found the backup and have loaded the posts here. The archives here are pretty much complete!

MyBB: Reasons Against a Database Import Feature

Posted on by Dennis

Ever since MyBB had a facility to create database backups, we have had questions on why there wasn’t a similar facility to import backups.  The following reasons were taken into account while designing this feature:

1. Security

Reason

If a user somehow managed to get into an administrative account with the correct permissions, they could potentially revert your forum to an earlier state, or run arbitrary SQL queries on your database.

The Alternative

The use of an externally-installed database administration application reduces the chances that a malicious user can perform these actions on your database through MyBB.

2. Focus

Reason

We are developing a bulletin board system. We are focused on bringing you the features that will help run your bulletin board. Although database backup and restore are important tools, they are not used on a day-to-day basis in your forum’s administration. The backup function has more frequent use than the restore anyway. Our development resources are limited and we do not have the capacity to develop a fully-featured database administration program into the bulletin board software.

The Alternative

Third-party database administration programs are specifically developed for the purpose of managing your database. Their features are more robust than what we can provide. Just like how we concentrate on discussion board features, their development teams concentrate on what their product is: database administration.

Weight

Reason

In order to keep the MyBB package a reasonable size, we have to be conscious of what features are implemented. It is a waste of both physical and human resources to have a large package (clunky to install and update) with a steep learning curve (difficulty of usage).

The Alternative

Dedicated database administration solutions have the ability to incorporate more useful administrative features because that is their focus.

Reliability

Reason

In the hypothetical case where an import facility is indeed incorporated into MyBB, the requirement of using it is a working version of MyBB. Let’s say you just upgraded to MyBB 1.4, but you do not like it. Your database backup is 30MB. You start restoring it via the MyBB 1.4 Admin CP, but the restore times out part way. Your database is now half MyBB 1.2.x and half MyBB 1.4.x and neither version will operate correctly. You will need to resort to a third-party database administration program anyway to complete the process of reverting. A doctor can’t heal himself if he is unconscious.

The Alternative

A third-party database administration program does not depend on anything you are operating on. Even if an operation times out, this does not affect the program, you will be able to use the same program to correct the problem.

I hope this sheds some light on the rationale behind not including a database import feature.

MyBB: Progress Report

Posted on by Dennis

Well as you can see I haven’t been blogging about MyBB much.  In fact I haven’t been blogging that much at all, but that’s for a different blog entry.

I’ve been busy with school work and other stuff for the past several months, as I’m sure other people on the staff have been to.  But nonetheless we are pushing forward with MyBB 1.4 at a steady pace.

We have seen Chris blog about the new built-in search-engine-optimized URLs.  Although these “SEO” URLs are only present for pages with content that is “interesting” to search engine spiders (such as thread display, forum display, user profiles, announcements, and the calendar), they provide a much better “look” to the regular user than the standard ugly query string (for example, thread61881-5.html instead of showthread.php?tid=61881&page=5).

Then we have MyBB Merge (or is it MyBB Import, or MyMerge… ah well I don’t know exactly what name we have coined it today).  This idea of having a centralized import/merge system has been an idea of Chris Boulton for at least one or two years, but we did not have the time to really develop it.  But thanks to the work of Tikitiki (who is the lead of this project) users from a variety of other bulletin board systems can easily convert to MyBB.  But you ask, why does the name have “Merge” and not “Convert”?  Well because you can not only convert from another MyBB, but also merge the converted data to an existing MyBB forum if you wish.  Imagine what you can do with this system: You can have an existing MyBB, and merge another forum (from SMF, phpBB, vBulletin, Invision Power Board, and others, or even MyBB itself) into it.  Now how smart is that?  Of course if you don’t have an existing MyBB, you can just convert your forum, since you have nothing to merge it with.

Recently we ported MyBB Merge so that it is compatible with MyBB 1.2, and at the time of writing it is under beta testing.  Hopefully we can stamp out all the bugs so that we can release it to the general public.  We’re expecting that the release of MyBB Merge will bring a whole new community to MyBB who would not have considered converting because of a variety of reasons (converter does not exist, converter is broken, etc).