Sticky How to move, copy or merge my old Kunena forums from one site to another

In my case, I would be most happy to simply keep the posts. There is no way the users would match up, plus, they aren't even the same users.

Does not matter to me if the users are properly associated with their posts, so long as folks can continue threads from the last post.

Is that at all possible?

karaokeamerica wrote: If the users are migrated already (keeping the same ID's) ...

Well, it depends on whether the users in one site are same as the users in the target site. Again, it all comes back to the definition of what you mean by "migrate". If migrate means move from A to B then there's no issue involved here about keeping user IDs the same, because they will be the same. But it migrate means merge whatever is in A with whatever is in B then it's a whole new ball-game.

You can't merge the users from A to B and keep the same IDs they were originally using before the merger took place; it's just not going to work. Likewise, if you ignore who owns which messages posted in forum A when you merge the messages into forum B then I don't know how you go about sorting out the mess.

Basically, you need to change all these ids (user ids, topic ids and post ids (and possible category ids, too) before you undertake the merger. This is not for the faint-of-heart or novice SQL player.

mlewis wrote: Does not matter to me if the users are properly associated with their posts, so long as folks can continue threads from the last post. Is that at all possible?

I haven't tried it; I don't know but I doubt that this would work. You could take the approach that introducing a pile of unsorted confetti posts into your target forum might be retrievable somehow and they may not overwrite or ruin what you already have ... but I wouldn't be taking that risk without having a good, reliable backup and recovery plan before I attempted to do it.

What's more likely to happen is that posts from forum A will go into forum B in the wrong categories with the wrong users owning them. You could have a situation where in forum A, user X says "I think black is white" and in forum B, user Y is now attributed as the owner of the "black is white" posting. But, as I said, I haven't tried this for myself so I don't know the outcome.

sozzled wrote:

karaokeamerica wrote: If the users are migrated already (keeping the same ID's) ...

Well, it depends on whether the users in one site are same as the users in the target site. Again, it all comes back to the definition of what you mean by "migrate". If migrate means move from A to B then there's no issue involved here about keeping user IDs the same, because they will be the same. But it migrate means merge whatever is in A with whatever is in B then it's a whole new ball-game.

You can't merge the users from A to B and keep the same IDs they were originally using before the merger took place; it's just not going to work. Likewise, if you ignore who owns which messages posted in forum A when you merge the messages into forum B then I don't know how you go about sorting out the mess.

Basically, you need to change all these ids (user ids, topic ids and post ids (and possible category ids, too) before you undertake the merger. This is not for the faint-of-heart or novice SQL player.

Sorry if I wasn't clear. What I meant by that statement was that I migrated them using ARRA user migration component and they should have the same ID's they had on the old site. therefore, I'm thinking that the posts would still work as long as the Kunena stuff was self-contained if that makes sense?

I'm not familiar with ARRA user migration component, how it works or what it does and therefore I am unable to comment on what may do (or, more likely, what it is unable to do) with Kunena. Kunena "stuff" (as you describe it) is tightly coupled to the original Joomla user tables. If you modify the Joomla user tables, you need to modify the Kunena message tables. As I keep trying to say, this is a non-trivial exercise.

Understood. Hopefully an industrious and skilled coder will make a migration component of some kind....

FYI: this is the ARRA component:

extensions.joomla.org/extensions/migrati...mport-a-export/12607

It's free for Joomla v1.5x. There is a commercial one that will migrate to Joomla v1.6 and likely v1.7 by now, but I haven't tried that one.