@jivany – Read what Boone did for the CUNY commons:
http://dev.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2009/12/06/upgrading-from-buddypress-1-0-to-1-1/
Pay special attention to the beginning and end of the post.
I’d just go into the MySQL database for the old one with PHPMyAdmin or whatever tool you use for a MySQL GUI and export table by table, then import to the corresponding bbPress tables in Buddypress. You’ll need to hand-edit some stuff in the meta tables and generally mess around, but I’ve done it a few times on my testbed and it’s worked just fine.
Set up a testbed BP install first and populate it with some test data to see how things fit together — it’s not all that complicated. Then try the export-import process on some test installs, figure out what needs to be done. Basically, now that I thought to look at it, what Boone talks about in the post r-a-y linked.
Thanks guys. I figured I would have to do it manually.
Is this recommended over the “Forums Setup -> Use an existing bbPress installation” import?
I tried it, and for the life of me I can’t get it right. Not right enough anyhow. I installed a clean bbPress, added two forums, populated them with about two threads each. Then I try BP’s magic button. The config was successful it says, and I go check it out. The best I’ve gotten is one group with the threads from one of my forums, while I’ve no clue where the threads in the other forum went. I’ve tried this over and over with different settings. Just not getting there.
Since adding additional users to bbPress is a pain I haven’t gotten around to doing that yet, so I don’t know yet if users would import properly, or if that’s a problem too.
Is it just me or does the bbPress importer leave a lot to be desired?