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Howdy!
I promise I did some basic searching before asking this question! Honest!
I run a WordPress install for a friend at http://outlawvern.com
Without going into everything suffice to say despite my recommendation to have a forum from the get-go he didn't want one. A few years on an some posts created just for off-topic conversation with thousands of comments now he wants a forum lol.
I pick Simple:Press which is just great, install, buy support, but a feature I figured would be at the top of the list for any WordPress-integrated forum is nowhere to be found. I see the Blog Linking plug-in but don't think that's what I want.
Basically there are a series of posts like this one:
http://outlawvern.com/2011/09/.....crackdown/
What I had hoped to do was create forum posts for each similar blog post, import the comments as replies to the topic, then delete the comments from the blog posts and have the post re-direct users to the forum for any additional conversation, thus slowly weening them of using the blog for off-topic stuff and rely on the forum instead.
Is this possible? Is there a guide? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Chris
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Hi Chris.. Yes you do need the blog linking plugin. It's in the plugin's list.
What i have done on my site is added the link to my new posts. And have tinkered with the disabling comments in WordPress and trying to steer the members over to the forums. I would advise against deleting any existing blog comments as I'm sure there are plenty of back links indexed into search.
Here are a couple of screen shots of my setup for blog linking and SEO plugin. They should be helpful in getting your forums set up correctly.
- Doc ~ An old Fidonet SysOp. Just hanging out in cyberspace keeping up with tech.
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Thanks, but that's not what I am trying to do. In the future there won't ever be posts to the blog for these general discussions, so the functionality of that plugin (which at first look appears to only handle creating new posts with a link, not converting old blog entries) doesn't do what I need.
Obviously I could do things the hard way, create some fake replies to identify where Simple:Press stores the info, write my own SQL to export the comments as forum post replies and then jam in the appropriate user, but I am lazy and was hoping for something automated.
For example, I have created new topics for each of the 7 blog entries I want to become forum topics. I did this manually. Now I need the comments, and one of the posts has over 1,000 by itself. But going forward, as people occasionally do add comments to these older entries, locking comments makes sense, but doesn't solve the need to grab all of the current comments and insert them as post replies in Simple:Press.
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It would be the way to go if blog linking could working on existing posts (ie import them)... currently, it cannot though its pretty high on our To do list to add that capability in... then you could link them to a forum topic and then delete the blog post...
but until that time, there is not currently a way to import blog posts as the forum topic and blog post comments as replies in that topic... but hopefully not too far in the future...
you could manually edit each blog post and link it to a forum topic (ie create it) and it will get created... if you have the blog linking comments set up right (use forum for comments), I 'may' pull in the comments too - just not sure... But if you have a lot of blog posts, that will be tedious... might be worth a try if you have a cloned test site...
Andy wrote the blog linking plugin and will be along in the morning and could shed more light on that...
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