upgrade to phpbb3 progress

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A very small step 1 made, the phpbb3 converter is installed but has no idea what to do as it wants a blank phpbb3 there for it to install to.

Next step I guess is to give it what it wants.
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A few more microscopic steps forward, removing extraneous options from the installer so you can only see the converter, adding our own intro text and making the name of the forum to be converted get passed around.

This means we are up to the previous stopping point, but cleanly.

Now the real work has to start  
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database blank now created along with associated paths etc.

This is actually pretty good going, as not least the code is geared to raid on the fly the same information used when creating forums, it would have been easier to just copy stuff, but that would create two sets of code to be maintained.
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Quite close now to actually calling the conversion process

Of course even if this works it will not yet convert any of the extras.
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Got past the options verification stage, to the user this will look annoying, but thats tough it only happens once.

Basically it verifies options that the user will not actually get to enter as the values are now prefilled. But there is little point in disrupting the structure of the conversion process to remove this.
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An upgrade is currently under way, a lot of errors though as it has got some paths wrong. Not exactly surprising as we are running a conversion in one phpbb3 directory structure that is in fact aimed at populating another directory structure  
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Last conversion of the night still bombed out at the very end, but has produced what looks like a working forum
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Just been struggling in the office with php creating "barmy" directory permissions, the "barmy" term coming from comments from a user on the php manual pages having similar issues.

I am trying to get avatars to copy across which is the final ordinary part of an upgrade before we get to the myff profile field parsing.

I may leave people to recreate their own portals, there is just to much risk of dragging issues across to phpbb3, as not all portals are on phpbb3 and there is the odd little difference.
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Looks live avatars are making it across, but fail to show.

Also looks like there is a bug in the avatar display code on our version of phpbb3 anyway.

problem with the upgrade is the database path to the avatars gets set wrong.
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and finally avatars show

From here on in it should be downhill.

The profile updates will be tricky but perfectly doable.
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In theory the code is there to populate the phpbb3 profile fields from the xprofile fields.... but the code is not there yet to create the profile fields in the first place.

I am a bit concerned the process will be slower than need be, there is not a direct correspondence between user ids on phpbb2 and phpbb3 and I have chickened out of mechanisms used to deal with this in the rest of the conversion code.

This also someone settles another conversion point with portals, the portals that use the database would be another source of potential problems if converted.

I think we are much better off with a solid upgrade that requires people to add a few things back in, than with trying to drag everything into phpbb3.

There is even a decent case for not converting the xprofile fields. A lot of them will correspond to features like KARMA that are not there in phpbb3, and some will duplicate other features now available in the user profiles in phpbb3.

Any thoughts?
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I think I am coming round to the idea of not converting.

There is a much less than perfect match, and I know I'd want an upgrade to be as solid as possible.

So I think I may quit whilst ahead and get to work on finalizing this.

The "authorization" is yet to be written, currently anyone could start an upgrade for a forum  

Let alone the tricky business of finalizing the upgrades in the DNS.
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Well I think I'll be more secure in the decision if the code to convert is actually tried and tested, at least then it is not a cop out!
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A bit more musing on the sequence of things.

Probably the next logical step once the upgrade code is written is not actually making it available, but a full phpbb3 deployment. This would actually (hopefully) be an invisible process.
In essence we have a client server system, each domain like myfreeforum.org is considered a server, each server can deal with either phpbb2 or phpbb3, but currently only one server myfabforum.org has the up to date code, the same goes for the clients, each client represents one of our servers and can again deal with either forum type, but only Zaphod is running the up to date code.
Bringing things into line is important to getting us ready for the deployment of the upgrade option.
It is one of those big rollouts that are scary from this end, but should just happen invisibly at the forum level.
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