Transfer of Garage

oklamopar · Post by **oklamopar** » Thu Apr 01, 2010 10:49 am

Is it possible to transfer garage from one member to another....
seeing as i sold the R/T to another member.

Post by **racer12306** » Thu Apr 01, 2010 10:57 am

Doubtful.

The other thing is the garage feature will be going away soon as it's not supported in phpBB3.

Post by **Diablo0** » Thu Apr 01, 2010 11:07 am

It is. I've done it before for grambo's ACR. It's quite the PITA. The thing is, the garage won't be with us for much longer.

When I update to phpBB3 the Garage won't be able to move over as the developer seems to have abandoned the project. It looks he was close to being finished but hasn't had any major releases in over a year and is still sitting in Beta.

Hopefully at some point he'll pick back up on it and finish but until then we'll be without the garage on the new board.

oklamopar · Post by **oklamopar** » Thu Apr 01, 2010 7:59 pm

Thanks

kevo · Post by **kevo** » Fri Apr 02, 2010 12:21 pm

Diablo0 wrote:It is. I've done it before for grambo's ACR. It's quite the PITA. The thing is, the garage won't be with us for much longer. When I update to phpBB3 the Garage won't be able to move over as the developer seems to have abandoned the project. It looks he was close to being finished but hasn't had any major releases in over a year and is still sitting in Beta.

Hopefully at some point he'll pick back up on it and finish but until then we'll be without the garage on the new board.

poyntesm has abandoned phpbb garage but from what i can gather, the mod still works with 3.07pl1. Not sure how long that will last considering phpbb 3.10 will be out in late May. If you are dead set on having a garage, i would encourage you to gain svn access to phpbb garage. There are a number of fixes dating back as far as june of 09.

I'm surprised to hear you are actually updating the board some 2.5 years after phpbb3 was released. Since phpbb3 went through a security audit and found zero critical core errors, tons of people have been using it. I have done tons of phpbb forums over the past year so if you need any help, especially where custom themes are concerned, please let me know.

Post by **Diablo0** » Fri Apr 02, 2010 12:40 pm

Yeah, I've seen the pages upon pages of fixes to get it to work properly. It's worth a shot and I have contemplated having a go on it but right now I'm not dead set on it.

Yeah, I'm really dragging my feet on it. Mostly due to hoping for poyntesm to finish. Last time as soon as I nearly gave up waiting thinking he abandoned it he then comes out with a release and I'm back to hoping again. I've completely given up on that now and decided it's time, we have to move on regardless.

From my understanding and maybe you can clarify, the converter for the garage can still be run at a later date if the phpBB2 database is not removed, correct? By that I could still bring the garage over at a later date as long as I don't remove the old database so it can connect to it and pull the old data from it?

kevo · Post by **kevo** » Fri Apr 02, 2010 1:42 pm

Diablo0 wrote:Yeah, I've seen the pages upon pages of fixes to get it to work properly. It's worth a shot and I have contemplated having a go on it but right now I'm not dead set on it.

Yeah, I'm really dragging my feet on it. Mostly due to hoping for poyntesm to finish. Last time as soon as I nearly gave up waiting thinking he abandoned it he then comes out with a release and I'm back to hoping again. I've completely given up on that now and decided it's time, we have to move on regardless.

From my understanding and maybe you can clarify, the converter for the garage can still be run at a later date if the phpBB2 database is not removed, correct? By that I could still bring the garage over at a later date as long as I don't remove the old database so it can connect to it and pull the old data from it?

Depends on what you want to do with the current database. Are you planning on ditching the current database? If so, how?

Are you using the existing database, closing the site and then upgrading? If so, the tables will remain intact.

You can optionally just backup the garage tables and try at a later date.

I don't like to tell people what to do but this is how i would go about things. make a dump of your existing database and phpbb2 install. Get yourself some spare server space and dump all files to that server and try migrating from 2.x to 3.x. The migration itself is super easy and should really only take you a few minutes. Then take the time to look through the garage. Make note of any changes (there are still people in the garage forums that claim the script works fine) and then do the migration on the live site.

On another note. not sure what you plan to do about the theme of the site. There still is a subsilver theme set in phpbb3 but i would warn you, some mod authors have stopped supporting it. It might be in your best interest to just make a similar colored theme for the more modern prosilver theme.

Post by **Diablo0** » Fri Apr 02, 2010 2:19 pm

Plan at this point is to leave the current database intact, disable the forum so no posts can be made while the backup and conversion is taking place. Once disabled make a dump of the database and let phpBB3 pull all the data out of current phpBB2 database and populate the one used for phpBB3. That would essentially leave the phpBB2 database completely intact and untouched allowing me to be able to bring the garage over at a later date.

I've done a test run of this about a year ago to work out what problems I'm going to run into and how to fix them when I go live. That's where I found the problem of phpBB3 not pulling PMs that have been replied to. Everything else looked to work fine other than some fine tuning with sub-forums, permissions and a few other odds and ends.

As for theme, that was my intention like how smartDark is the sister to subSilver. Makes modifying the forum a lot easier since they're so similar.

kevo · Post by **kevo** » Fri Apr 02, 2010 2:53 pm

Diablo0 wrote:Plan at this point is to leave the current database intact, disable the forum so no posts can be made while the backup and conversion is taking place. Once disabled make a dump of the database and let phpBB3 pull all the data out of current phpBB2 database and populate the one used for phpBB3. That would essentially leave the phpBB2 database completely intact and untouched allowing me to be able to bring the garage over at a later date.

I've done a test run of this about a year ago to work out what problems I'm going to run into and how to fix them when I go live. That's where I found the problem of phpBB3 not pulling PMs that have been replied to. Everything else looked to work fine other than some fine tuning with sub-forums, permissions and a few other odds and ends.

As for theme, that was my intention like how smartDark is the sister to subSilver. Makes modifying the forum a lot easier since they're so similar.

Yep, everything mentioned would work just fine. There's really no wrong way of doing this. If you are literally making a duplicate database, you should have the garage tables intact, you can possibly work on them while the site is live by simply hiding the garage link until you are done.

As for the theme, mods are the biggest issue with custom themes. I made one roughly one year ago for a site i help maintain and i have regretted it ever since. If i remember correctly, there was an awesome theme called carbon that has colors very similar to this site but it's a prosilver based theme. The theme has gone unmaintained unfortunately. The good news is a quick file compare should help copy most of the css attributes over to 3.07. If you happen to like it, i can port that over to 3.07 really fast for you.