Well you need some of the WP data as well. The users and usermeta tables are required. No others are required unless you have been using the blog linking option. Export those tables (all SP tbales start with the ‘sf’ prefix) and import into your new database for the new site.

There WILL be some issues. Any embedded links in posts, for example, will point to the old site. You will need to recreate the page for the forum to use. You will need to work thrpough all of your forum settings in case any are not quite right. But many have done this successfully.

Thank you! 🙂

Hope it goes well.

Hey folks,

I needed this exact information.  Does it matter if Simple Press is at two different versions on the two different servers?

As long as the target version is newer than the source then no – bit I wouldn’t chance it the other way around

Interesting.  It doesn’t seem to be working for me.  I’ve exported the relevant tables, installed Simplepress (newest version) on the target site, import brings users, but not topics/posts.  Any thoughts?  I’ve deleted everything and tried fresh twice, now.

Just an update – I did this in every way I could think of… at first I was doing it prior to activation, then after activation.  A couple of notes that may be important – I’m coming from an older version of Simple Press (4.5.1).  I’m hoping to move everything over to my new website.  That website is running Wishlist Member – an installation that was previously integrated with Simple Press.  Simple Press is fully updated on the new server.

All the database tables look normal to me.  However, because Wishlist is there, the wp-users table was already in existence.  Therefore, it resists (mightily) any attempt to upload a duplicate table.  So, I couldn’t migrate that data.  However, all the usernames are the same (as they shared the usernames and such with Wishlist).  

Where we stand now is that all the users are correct and imported, settings look normal, but no posts, groups, or anything like that.  Any attempt to put any data in the database is met with some type of “duplicate” error in the database.  I’ve deleted everything (including database tables) three or four times, tried various configurations of activating and deactivating plugins, and so on.

Nothing seems to help.

In this case, keeping post data is of utmost importance due to my subject matter and the very long, detailed posts that members make. 

If it matters, I’ve also imported (successfully) all the data into a bbpress installation on the old server.  It’s not the “separate site” version, though.

Willing to hear any and all thoughts about this, and happy to provide any more data, files, etc…

I admit that I rather made the assumption you wanted to move this to a new site – which is what people usually ask for – not an existing one. If you already have users and usermeta data in the target site then that will cause all kinds of issues. The user names are of little importance – the real tie up is in the user IDs.

So this might depend on what other data is already in the target database. Such movements really do need totally empty SP tables on the target and empty user and usermeta tables as well to enable the data relationships to be restored. If that is not going to be possible then those relationships are going to be lost…

So, is there any way for me to get my Simple Press forum from my old site to the new one? The user data is, indeed, there. I don’t know that I can change that, given the Wishlist member situation.

I would be content, really, even to have an archived version of the posts only – so people could at least access those. It’s just really the worst case scenario to lose all of that content, and laboriously copy/pasting seems not only wickedly tedious but also probably not ideal – because we would still lose the user associations.

I hadn’t thought it would be so tough! Any solutions out there?

keep in mind that simple press is a plugin for WordPress… as such we are highly dependent on it for lots of information including users… so if you move to a site with new or different users, how we would we reference the posts to users???

if you have all the same users between sites… and the wp page id for the two sites is the same, you can try moving over the forum tables…  you will also have to move any wp user meta data you wish to retain…  its a bit tricky, but possible…

So it begs the question – how are you exporting and then importing the SP DB tables?

Well, I”m just using the mySQL database management – exporting the tables and then importing them through the exact same interface. Sorry if I’m misunderstanding the question.

O)K – so next qusation Does the data actually import? Is the data there in the SP tables?

It appears so.