The phpBB2Drupal is one of those throwaway module - those that need it will use it once and then ignore it. I took over this module because I had an itch that needed scratching. I fixed a few simple bugs (patches supplied by others) and then ported it to Drupal 6.

phpBB3 Support, other big changes.

This is something that should have been fixed already, but I am getting around to it (others are free to jump in - I am already indebted to Meshel, rayneitami and others). My original plan was to have a release that supported both phpBB2 AND phpBB3, but that seemed to defeat the need for simplicity in this module. I have just made a commit to HEAD which fixes some of the issues and sets up for the future:

1. Removal of support to import from phpBB2. phpBB2 will be supported through the 1.x series of releases, but not any later. This has also allowed me to remove other complexity from the module - no need to choose encoding data - phpbb3 and Drupal both use utf8.

2. Polls are no longer imported as polls. phpBB2's polls, while different from Drupal's, they could be forced to resemble what Drupal does with the poll module, but for phpbb3, polls are more or less tacked on onto discussions. The discussions will be migrated, but not the poll data - I will leave that for an additional module and the data will probably need to go to adv_poll.

3. phpBB2 and Drupal (5, 6) use MD5 for the password hashing. phpBB3 used phpass, which will also be adopted by Drupal 7. For the short term, phpass could be used to keep the passwords.

4. forum/container set up was totally rewritten a couple of months ago to get past the limitations of the previous approach, but the current code is badly broken. I need to fix this, but I cannot see any obvious reasons for this.

Past endeavours - phpBB2 to Drupal 6

The port to Drupal 6 was released within a short time of the release of Drupal 6 itself. This was my first real "project" of any kind that was not simple deployment of a CMS, or custom coding following a howto guide ("how to write a simple php email contact page"... ) There was a little bug fixing, and the privatemsg import was broken into its own module.

I expected this to be a real big thing - I suspected that admins migrating from a customised phpbb2 to the new phpbb3 would have to go through massive pains, especially since phpbb modding is not that pleasant(TM) - similar to moving to a totally different platform.

privatemsg

Unfortunately, there was a hitch in the plan - the privatemsg module does not yet have a stable Drupal 6 release - there is a semi stable patch porting the 5.x-2.x-dev to Drupal 6, but it is not fully functional. Recently, there has been a re-engineered dev release for Drupal 6 which hopes to lay new foundations for the module. I am looking forward to it and the nightly 1.x-dev release is compatible with this privatemsg release - but users should know that not only may privatemsg break compatibility with other modules and itself at any moment - that release is also lacking in features.

Album Import

I also made a semi working attempt at a module to import the data from the phpbb2 album mod to Drupal 5. This occasionally works, depending on the conditions. What the database type is and what direction the wind is blowing in. I have no idea how to fix the errors, so unless I am struck with inspiration, that is as far as I will go.