Importing external forum content into Kentico Forums

I've worked through this with the forum base you talk about in the past with Kentico v6. The client wanted to have all old posts and images imported from the old site to the new Kentico site. Unfortunately, in v6 or v7 (or v8 I believe) there is no import tool for forum posts. I started to write some code to do the import although the client decided it was too much effort.

Kentico uses post id's to help generate the URLs so its not a straightforward import process not to mention the mapping of the different systems.

Regarding the API use, you are off to a good start. You'd need the following:

1. All user ID's who have posted (assuming UserID is stored in Telligent)
2. Import users using Import Toolkit from Kentico (assuming license allows) and use existing UserID
3. Create forum group
4. Create forum posts using recurrsion to ensure the posts are linked from top to bottom thread.  Note, There is a limitation of roughly 63 replies to a post(at least in v6 and v7) because of SQL Server Full-Text search limitation of 450 characters.  This goes back to what I mentioned before about using the post ID's to generate a URL.

Hopefully this helped a little!

Good luck! Brenden

Hi Brenden,

Thank you very much for your help. When you did the migration in the past. How did you extracted data (users, posts, forum metadat, etc) from Telligent Community? Did you read directly in the database or was there some Stored Procedures?

I went direct to the tables. I found all the users who made posts and exported them into another table and imported them into Kentico with the same userid. If I remember right, the table structure was a bit confusing in Telligent as well for the posts. It was considerably more complex than Kentico. I still have some of my code as well as all the data and I know I'll be asked to import them some day, just a matter of time and $$$. :)