From the old to the new. I upgraded SlapShot.net.nz this evening from SMF 1.1.14 to the latest bbPress plugin for WordPress. I’d been running an out of date, unpatched, insecure SMF installation for well over a year now. Plus I haven’t been doing any backups of it. By moving it to the bbPress plugin I can now run it on the same infrastructure I use for the rest of my sites and hence keep things a little more under control. SMF isn’t quite as feature rich as I’d like, but I understand WordPress a lot more and have infrastructure and systems in place for handling it, so the cost on my time will be much less. My other option was to kill off the forum, which I really didn’t want to do, even though it’s mostly a ghost town these days as people have migrated towards Facebook to discuss hockey in NZ these days.

Here’s what it used to look like …

Here’s the interim look for it as I needed to convert it to run on the phpBB3 software first (there’s no direct SMF -> bbPress converter).

The conversion to bbPress went okay. It takes a while, but works well.

Here’s the default look of bbPress. Unfortunately at this point the topics/forums appeared to be a bit munged. Thankfully it fixed itself later on in the importation process.

And here is the final view of the forum. It’s a little boring looking, but at least it’s all secured and stashed permanently for archival reasons.