Question I want to migrate my forum to Kunena ...

Read more...

Kunena is a free and very good product. If they don't feel a converter that will convert everything is important that's their decision. IMO, in about a year, without a proper converter Ninjaboard will take over the entire joomla forum scene and kunena will become irrelevant.

Also, Agora is a very good forum but the developer ran into some problems so people are looking to make a change. There are probably some very good forums that will be migrating to ninjaboard because there isn't a proper converter. If Kunena wants to boast about how many downloads they have that's fine but the total downloads doesn't equate to how many people have active forums. IMO, active forums are the ones who make forum components popular in the long run, not downloads.

Please see update to this article here: Help us test the new import framework

Sensible. Very good choice.

How about instead of trying to build an importer from other forums, make one generic importer that imports from a pre-defined CVS format similar to what other extensions like SOBI2 allow. Have a component/script that you can set up with column row variables to define "anything in column A is X-value", "anything in column B is Y-value" etc. Then the component/script would import it based on the values that are set up beforehand.

It seems with an existing "forum importer", even if not perfected, the "get it into Kunena" half of the problem is thought out. It's the "how to interpret the original data" part that needs a solution. I would be very happy if I could simply export my existing forum data into a CSV, format it and manipulate it in Open Office then import it into my new forum.

Hopefully, I explained that well enough for it to make sense.....

Well, unfortunately the issue is not so simple that you can just use CVS. Some of the data needs to be converted during migration process and some data needs to be mapped to different values. So creating CVS importer from another forum is probably much more work than just write few SQL queries for your old forum (you need to do it anyway).

So we are actually doing just what you are saying: Kunena Importer takes data as pre-formatted arrays. So we have already solved most of the problem and the only thing you need to do is to take our example exporter and fill all the custom data into it.