Customising S9E Text Formatter

Jbugy

Hello All,

So after migrating my forum from IPB to 3.0, it appears a lot of the BBCode is not being parsed. I believe having done a lot of googling that I can customise the S9E config used by flarum to format the posts correctly.

Let’s say I have the usual <b>, any ideas or better still anyone got a simplistic code change they can share? Thanks

JoshyPHP

I'm subscribed to this discussion in case someone is very motivated in creating some sort of migration framework/guideline and could benefit from some concise advice.

It's possible to create an entire independent parser that understand up to 100% of IPB's (or any other software's) markup. It could even be configured to output tags that are compatible with Flarum's, e.g. it would create <URL> tags even if IPB's tags are called link or whatever. The downside is that you'd be stuck forever supporting IPB's markup in Flarum, which is less than desirable. The next step would be to safely convert the XML representation of that IPB-style parser into something that looks like it was created on Flarum directly. For that, I created the ParsedDOM utility. However, I don't think anybody has ever used it.

Original text from IPB
↳ (gets fed to) ↴
Special parser configured for IPB
↳ (which generates) ↴
XML representation for IPB content
↳ (that can be transformed into) ↴
XML representation that looks like it was generated by Flarum

The parser would be completely independent from IPB and the convertor does not necessarily need anything from Flarum, which makes them unit-testable in isolation. They're just tools that transform text into XML for the former, and XML into slightly different XML for the latter.

I would consider personally writing the IPB parser as a bundle as part of the s9e\TextFormatter library if a motivated individual with an official IPB license handled everything needed on the IPB side.

Jbugy

@JoshyPHP I am not sure i fully understand, You have a utility called ParsedDom that could translate the BBCode into something that Flarum could understand? Where would that end up, back in the Flarum database?

I have an old licence, not a new one and most likely this is beyond my simplest google coding skills sadly.

JoshyPHP

I'm going to write some kind of explanation but really it's only useful if you're knowledgeable in this specific topic. Flarum uses s9e\TextFormatter, a library that I created and maintain. It's designed to be flexible enough to be used by any software. Flarum uses it with a specific configuration that changes depending on which Flarum extensions are installed. The same library could be used with a different configuration designed to handle IPB's markup. The library outputs XML for storage, that's what gets saved to the database. Different configurations produce different XML. The library provides some tools to simplify converting one type of XML into another in a safe manner.

So what you need to convert IPB posts to Flarum posts is:

An IPB parser. (IOW a TextFormatter parser configured for IPB markup)
A translation tool that converts the XML from the IPB parser into the same type of XML that Flarum would have produced.

Neither of which requires an active installation of IPB or Flarum, which is good because it's easier to test and maintain separately. All of the conversion scripts that I have seen use ad-hoc operations during the data transfer/copy, which is harder to test and more susceptible to bitrot. If you don't understand any of that, that's okay.