I had two bbPress forums to archive for Cool Cavemen. The first one, which was private, was exported as a mailing-list last month.

For the second forum, which was public, I created a Python script to transform them into pure WordPress objects. This means transforming forums, topics and replies to pages & comments.

This script is in fact a fork of the one I created to export Zenphoto content to WordPress . Like the later, it reads data from MySQL then produce a WXR file.

A bbPress thread is imported as an empty page with the thread’s title. All its replies are imported as comments of that page. A top-level page is then created for each forum, and all its threads are linked from that parent page.

The dependencies of that script can be installed with the following commands:

$ sudo aptitude install python-pip python-lxml
$ sudo pip install PyMySQL

My use case for this script is to be able to archive an hosted bbPress instance from a dedicated server to the free wordpress.org hosting.