Ben, this is the end of the line for ol' Mike. We're going to stick on XenForo until the Second Coming, because I don't have enough brown hair left to turn gray over another conversion move.
Here's a look at the Usergroup Permissions page for the Adminstrators' accounts -
The Admin account is easy to set up, as I have permission to do everything. So I could click that top green button and immediately allow all permissions for my account.
But there are 73 individual settings on that page. And besides the Admin group, there is a Moderating group, a Banned Group, a Registered group, a Supporting Members group, a Sponsor's group, a VIP group and an Unregistered/Not Logged In group. So, for those 7 other usergroups, I had to wade through 73 settings each. 511 selections, each having 3 possible options.
But it doesn't end there. There are a total of 26 forum categories and forums on the site. And each forum has 48 settings, from 4 possible options. For each of the 8 usergroups. 9,984 selections.
The actual conversion went very fast. I was in here at 4:30. I logged into the IPB forum and uninstalled everything but the Gallery application. I didn't want any more database tables queued up than absolutely necessary. Once I had everything non-essential gone, I closed the forum down for the last time. I logged onto the server via FTP and moved all the IPB files into a new temporary directory, for just in case. I nipped over to XenForo and downloaded a fresh package and FTP'ed it to the server. I logged in via SSH, unpacked the download and moved the files to their new home. (Around 2,050 of them, if I remember.) I set up a new database and installed the XenForo software. I closed it down and went to the conversion script. I pulled the trigger on it at 5:48. At 6:22, it was finished with the conversion of all the members, all the Private Conversations, all the avatars, all the posts, all the attachments, all the forums, all the usergroups, all the members, etc. I then started running some tools to rebuild all the forum's caches, which took another 36 minutes. 1:10 was all the actual database conversion took.
I installed the red style and went to share breakfast with my son and granddaughter. When they left, I was right back in here. I was trying to set permissions for all the usergroups and all the forums and I was getting buried under an avalanche of e-mails and Private Conversations, so I locked the forum back down and finished all the settings before I re-opened the site. I spent the rest of the day trying to clean up little snags and trying to get a redirection script working, so all of the links for the Invision forum would point to the right resources on this site. At 7:30, last evening, I finally decided I had already had all the fun I could stand for one day. Discounting the 90 minutes the kids were here, I was at it for a total of 13.5 hours.
And I was back in here at 5:00, this morning. I've already got 7 hours in, if you can imagine. I finally gave up on the redirection scripts and submitted a ticket to XenForo support. I don't know if anyone had noticed, but the sponsor logos were disappearing and reappearing with regularity yesterday. Every time I would add the redirection rules to the .htaccess file, every .png image on the site would disappear. It was driving me nuts. Turns out they had a slight error in their rules, but it's all fixed now. That way, if someone sees one of our old IPB links on Goober, Bing or another site, when they click the link it will direct them to the proper resource on the XenForo site.
But things are finally starting to come together. The DXF styles have a couple of glaring errors, but I have to live with them for the time being. The styles were written for an earlier version of XenForo, so there are some compatibility issues. I need to sweet-talk the dev that created the styles and hope she will provide updated versions.
I have a Wiki script I can install, but I'm trying to decide if it will do everything I want it to do. I may end up doing some custom pages, to restore our Tech Library.
Has anyone played around in the Media Library yet? That's a pretty slick script.
I was convinced to just live with the standard XenForo smilies, but some people have indicated they want the old ones back. So that's been added to these two pages of my To-Do list. I think it's time to speed this place up a bit, myself. Time to light off the afterburner, methinks.
But if you click on the link for the rules, you'll see the rules. If you click on the advertising link, you'll see a page with our advertising packages. And most importantly, if you want to post something, you can. Thanks be to God for that one.
And the NavBar has snow on it, so what more could anyone ask, right?
