Huddler to Xenforo
Overview
We have recently done a successful forum migration from Huddler platform to latest Xenforo. It was a very exciting and challenging project. Challenging because each and every Huddler forum is unique. Additionally, there is no documentation on it. Huddler only provided us a PostgreSQL database dump that had table structure of their own. Huddler did not provide us any clue which table is for what purpose. However, we did reverse engineering on the Huddler database to figure out which table was use for what purpose. Same challenge we faced with Xenforo. Unless you purchase a Xenforo forum you will not get any idea about their database structure or how it works. So the initial estimation of this project was difficult.
It took us two months to successfully convert and migrate the whole forum with most of its existing feature with tons of additional new features. We have migrated ALL users’ data, including forum posts, comments, username, email address etc. forums.saltwaterfish.com had 26 sub-forums, 3,279,000+ messages, 370,000+ discussions and 301,000+ users.
forums.saltwaterfish.com has some additional feature beside of forum: Gallaries, Articles and product reviews. These are all custom features. We have also migrated these features and integrated them with Xenforo. For the custom features we have used CodeIgniter framework. It was done in a way that same user session with be shared seamlessly so users will never feel that they are actually using two different platforms.
We build custom theme for Xenforo installation that was done using Xenforo’s custom framework. Xenforo doesn’t have proper documentation on their product. We had to complete the whole project purely from our vast experience and knowledge of software engineering.
The finished product was way better than Huddler. It’s highly secured. We met audience demands, which is a well-run forum with spam, childishness, cliques and bad language kept out. The new forum has tons of new features that Huddler doesn’t have. The final switch over also went smooth. We kept the downtime minimal. All existing users retained. The forum users are happy with the new forum, as it is better than Huddler platform.
