Posted by Cross_and_Flame on August 10, 2007 at 10:32pm
I have an existing phpbb installation. I have been unable to theme and expand the drupal forums to my liking, and being at my wits end, realize that at this time a dual installation will have to suffice.
Does this module and installation work for an existing phpbb database? Or will it only work with clean installs?
Thanks in advance.
Comments
You need to get the users
You need to get the users (user id, email, username, password hash) into Drupal before you can use this module.
That is a subset of what the phpbb2drupal module does for phpBB2 ( http://drupal.org/project/phpbb2drupal ).
I haven't tried it in a while, but it should be easy to adapt. Not sure whether it covers avatars, it probably doesn't deal with phpBB 3.
Will the imported users be linked?
Using phpbb2drupal, I am able to transfer all my users and such into drupal. No problem.
What I prefer to do is NOT transfer the posts and topics, and instead use the phpbb forum. Yes, I know, but as I mentioned above, I can't theme the forums well enough to supplant the phpbb.
But if I do that, how does Drupal and phpbb "talk" to each other? If I login as imported user w/ id#45 into drupal, how does phpbb know that that id#45 has already posted (x) posts in the forum?
I hope that makes sense.
The two don't actually
The two don't actually communicate much.
1) When a user is created in Drupal, Drupal creates a copy in the phpBB database.
2) When a user changes his profile (email, password or avatar) in phpBB, this change is updated in the Drupal database.*
3) When a user logs in/out, Drupal will create/destroy both the Drupal session and the phpBB session
The reason you need to transfer the users is so that they can log in through Drupal.
If you have conflicting users, i.e. user with id X in Drupal is not the same as the user with id X in phpBB, then Drupal will overwrite the one in the phpBB database on the first login. One thing you need to verify is that phpbb2drupal retains the userid mapping exactly.
*: In the phpBB 2.x version of the module it is the Drupal profile that counts and updates the phpBB database. In 3.x I have reversed this because phpBBs profiles are now more complicated than Drupals.