Greetings

LouisCT1

Hi all,
I am Louis from Cape Town, South Africa. I am the founder of Cycadfriends, basically a community of people who grow cycads (living fossils; endangered species; flora) from all over the world. We have just shy of 2500 members on an extremely fragile phpBB installation. I was attracted to Flarum when I realized it seemed future-proof in terms of supplying for our forum needs. It's beautiful, has a practical layout, awesome features and very clean. I noticed it is not yet intended for production, but I can see us benefiting without having to customize anything, so we are not at risk of broken extensions or anything as we want to keep things basic. So last night I installed Flarum on a sub-domain on a hosted server and everything went really well. Today I am going to try & export/import the DB & content from the phpBB server, hoping it goes as smoothly. I managed our phpBB forum for 10 years without coding knowledge. I only know basic html. LOL. But i've been messing around with computers & technology since 1994 and working in IT for 23 years so I'm exposed to enough boffins and SMEs to have learnt through listening to their endless complaints about programming challenges 😃 Anyway, this is me. Wish me luck and thanks for making available this awesome platform.

Prosperous

LouisCT1 Great to have you and we are very happy that you have chosen Flarum to continue your community.

Definitely post a link once it's up and running so we can check it out. You are very right in what you said about keeping the forum basic and with as little customisation as possible; this will lead to less issues/bugs when upgrading to newer versions and is the right mindset to have until a stable version is released. There are already many examples of communities using Flarum with little to no issues whatsoever, and if you ever do run into issues, you have a plethora of knowledgeable minds here that can assist. 😉

LouisCT1

Prosperous Thanks so much, am really happy I found this platform 😃 I got stuck on trying to migrate the DB & Content from our phpBB forum into the new Flarum instance, so decided to refer to my hosting provider instead. He is much more familiar with the technology than I am so I thought to transfer this exercise & rather pay him to do it 😆

He said he would start on it last week but guess he had some other pressing issues to deal with and haven't gotten back to me yet. Currently looking to find a new host & someone who can assist with the above transfer.

This forum community is extremely knowledgeable and helpful! I'm busy learning php on the sideline, but for now I will rather not plague the experts with dumb questions until I figure out the way forward. Maybe in the near future when I have learned a bit more, will I try to do the DB & Content migration myself. lol

In the meantime reading & learning about Flarum! Thx so much & keep up the gr8 work!

luceos

LouisCT1 Wish me luck

Good luck!
My employer has also been running phpBB for a very long time (https://bokt.nl - over 100 million posts). It's a very mature product, but hasn't been able to keep up with time. I hope Flarum is able to transient the 10 years, but it should be easy with it existing almost 5 years already without a stable release 🙈

LouisCT1

Thanks buckets full @luceos 😃 That forum is just stunning, very well customized & presented, obviously took a lot of sweat & tears to achieve!! I felt php just became too loose after a while...not sure how to describe it...

Looks like our dev-guy managed to successfully import the DB to our new Flarum forum at http://talk.cycadfriends.co.za/ after chatting to him this morning. Am overjoyed to see things coming together in principle. Can see there are still going to be some challenges with content & looks like user accounts didn't migrate correctly as access is not working, but I do remember seeing something about that here, so I am chilled to the max 😃
At least we made it this far and it's looking promising.
I love the admin/user experience on Flarum, compared to phpBB and I'm willing to wait for a stable release because I know potential when I see it. Fortunately we run an NPO so not risking any financial losses 😃

Prosperous

LouisCT1 Glad you managed to make a start in the migration. If you’re still looking for a new host let me know. I’ve been using Liquid Web for quite some time now and their service has been second to none thus far.

LouisCT1

Thanks @Prosperous . Is quite a relief 🙂 I am shelving the changing of hosts for now, but not permanently. Once everything is transferred and working nicely for a few weeks I might consider it again. Would ultimately love to host it with someone who can also assist with dev changes & maintenance on the forum itself, eg. keeping it running smoothly. Thx again for the ref I will refer back here 8)

Prosperous

LouisCT1 No problem at all mate, always happy to help where I can. Liquid Web wouldn’t help out with the day to day administration of your forum but they’re always there to help with errors, issues, etc, related to the hosting or backend side of things.