Before Cool Cavemen, there was Funky Storm. The band is long gone but I still keep an online presence as a sort of web memorial. Recently I added there an old copy of the forum.

The original forum was powered by a Phorum 3.x instance. The current incarnation of the website runs on WordPress. So I produced some months ago a quick & dirty Python script to migrate Phorum content to WordPress.

The script browse Phorum’s MySQL database and generate an XML file. The XML produced respect the WXR dialect (WordPress eXtended RSS), which means the file can be directly imported to a plain WordPress site.

A Phorum thread produces an empty page with the thread’s title only. All thread’s replies are then added as comments of that page. A top-level page is finally created, and all its threads are linked from that parent page.

The script requires the following python modules:

  • lxml
  • PyMySQL
  • bbcode

They can easely be installed on Debian with the following commands:

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

The script is available on GitHub so feel free to send pull request! :)