nodebb-plugin-import-vanilla

A Vanilla forum exporter to be required by nodebb-plugin-import.

Changelog

• 1.0.2: Changes the location of where to move attachments and profile pics, to utilize the privacy features of NBB.
• 1.0.1: Adds attachments, and some other stuff, released to npm
• 0.2.0: Updating to work with nodebb-plugin-import > 0.3.41 (for NBB version == 1.0.0)
• 0.0.1: Inital framework

What is this?

It's just an exporter of Vanilla Forums data, that provides an API that nodebb-plugin-import can use to exporter source forum data and import it to NodeBB's database. So, it's not really a conventional nodebb-plugin.

Why is it even a NodeBB plugin?

It doesn't really need to be, nor that you can use it within NodeBB itself, but, having this as a plugin have few benefits:

• a nodebb- namespace, since you can't really use it for anything else
• it can easily require NodeBB useful tools, currently

Usage within NodeJS only

// you don't have to do this, nodebb-plugin-import will require this plugin and use its api
// but if you want a run a test

var exporter = require('nodebb-plugin-import-vanilla');

exporter.testrun({
    dbhost: '127.0.0.1',
    dbport: 3306,
    dbname: 'vanilla',
    dbuser: 'user',
    dbpass: 'password',

    tablePrefix: 'GDN_'
}, function(err, results) {

    /*
        results[0] > config
        results[1] > [usersMap, usersArray]
        results[2] > [categoriesMap, categoriesArray]
        results[3] > [topicsMap, topicsArray]
        results[4] > [postsMap, postsArray]
    */
});

What does it export?

Read carefully:

• ####Users:

  • _username YES.
  • _alternativeUsername NO. There's no equivalent in Vanilla
  • _password MAYBE. Vanilla uses bcrypt, unless it's been migrated from another platform. NodeBB uses multi-pass bcrypt, so if you know Vanilla was using bcrypt and you set nodebb's encryption rounds to the same number, you might get the same hash. If you use nodebb-plugin-import it will generate random passwords and hand them to you so you can email them.
  • _level (administrator and moderator) SORT OF. Admins will stay Admins.
  • _joindate YES.
  • _website NO. There's no equivalent in Vanilla
  • _picture YES. You have to move or copy the (entire, not just the contents) <Vanilla Root>/uploads/userpics folder into the NodeBB/public/uploads/profile/ folder.
  • _reputation YES, if you had the Kudos plugin installed on Vanilla. You'd have to set the custom option: "importKudos" to true: { "importKudos": true }
    • Note that reputation is a function of upvotes - downvotes, so you will get the kudos attached to the posts as upvotes and downvotes
    • Also note that there's a setting in NodeBB that prevents users from casting a downvote if they don't have a certain threshold of reputation. Make sure that setting is off or set to 0.
  • _profileviews NO. There's no equivalent in Vanilla
  • _location NO. There's no equivalent in Vanilla
  • _signature NO. There's no equivalent in Vanilla
  • _banned NO. I haven't used this feature in Vanilla so I don't know what the data looks like.

• ####Categories:

  • _name YES
  • _description YES

• ####Topics:

  • _cid YES (but if its parent Category is skipped, this topic gets skipped)
  • _uid (or its Vanilla user id) YES (but if its user is skipped, this topic gets skipped)
  • _title YES
  • _content (or the 'parent-post` content of this topic) YES (HTML - read the Markdown Note below)
  • _timestamp YES
  • _pinned YES (0 or 1) (I don't know how many you can pin in NodeBB)
  • _viewcount YES

• ####Posts:

  • _pid (or its Vanilla post id)
  • _tid (or its Vanilla parent topic id) YES (but if its parent topic is skipped, this post gets skipped)
  • _uid (or its Vanilla user id) YES (but if its user is skipped, this post is skipped)
  • _content YES (HTML - read the Markdown Note below)
  • _timestamp YES

• ####Votes:

  • You can import votes on posts, if you had the Kudos plugin installed on Vanilla.
  • Enable with { "importKudos": true }

• ####Bookmarks:

  • The place each user left off in a topic is preserved
  • Enable with { "importBookmarks": true }

• ####Attachments:

  • Move or copy the whole <Vanilla Root>/uploads/FileUpload folder into the NodeBB/public/uploads/files/ folder.
  • Assumes you have the File Upload plugin installed for uploads
  • Grabs records from the GDN_Media table to get the file paths of your attachments on the file system

• ####Messages:

  • imported as Chats in NodeBB

Known issues:

• Not Migrated:
  • Subscriptions / watched topics
  • Multi-user bans (simple user-based banning is imported, but I haven't been able to test it)
  • permissions
  • roles
  • tags

Vanilla Versions tested on:

• Vanilla 2.1.8p2

Custom plugins note:

This importer enables importing data from custom vanilla plugins:

• kudos
  • Import these with the option { "importKudos": true }
• File Upload
  • Migrate these into embedded images (for image files), and links (for all other files) with this custom attibute: { "importAttachments": true}
  • With this plugin, users can have the Canonical link inserted into the post after upload, which breaks things if you are migrating to a new domain name. You can use this javascript snippet in the pre-process section of the Post-import tools utility to remove those duplicated, or broken links:

  content = content.replace(/<.*?your\.domain\.com.*?\/>/g, '')
  

• Spoilers
  • You will need to do a post-convert step using the bbcode-to-markdown option, since this plugin inserts bbcode tags to denote spoilers

Other custom transformations

• Quoting
  • Quotes in vanilla use the tag <blockquote rel="author"> to denote quoted text and the original author. Since "rel" isn't a standard attribute in HTML, the library being used to convert HTML to markdown won't recognize the author properly. As a workaround, you can use this javascript to transform the Vanilla quote blocks to BBCode style tags, with the proper attribute that can be converted back to HTML, and then to markdown:

  content = content.replace(/<blockquote rel=([^>]+)>/g, '[quote author=$1]').replace(/<\/blockquote>/g, '[/quote]')
  

Markdown note

read nodebb-plugin-import#markdown-note

It's an exporter, why does it have 'import' in its title

To keep the namespacing accurate, this exporter is designed to export data for nodebb-plugin-import only, also for a 1 time use.