How to provide the contents of an old gallery?

Migration
1

Hello everybody,

in December I have migrated a forum from phpBB to Discourse. Everybody, the team including the users, are very happy with that decision. For sure, some users and also mods needed a while to adapt to all the new and different things. But that is a “normal” thing when you change a ten year old software and turn everything upside down. :wink:

What I was not able to migrate is the gallery we used inside phpBB. We used a plugin named phpBB Gallery and it was full of photos. For this gallery every user gets his/her own gallery and can upload photos, edit title and description, create subfolders and organize the photos and so on. Also users can comment on photos and also rate the photos. But both comments and ratings were barely used. But the main feature was to link the photos in posts with special shortcodes.

When migrating everything to Discourse I manually worked on the posts where the photos were directly linked by shortcode or where links were put to the albums. And I kept the old forum online on a different domain (direct link to the gallery itself) in read-only mode to keep the information where I manually linked the migrated posts to. We talk about almost 2500 photos in almost 40 personal galleries here.

I’m posting here now to maybe find a proper solution to integrate this information into the new Discourse instance. To be honest, it took me years for the migration, mainly because I did not find a proper solution (or any at all) for the gallery. But finally, I migrated nevertheless, because continuing with phpBB was not an option anymore.

So, I am open to almost everything, maybe someone can point me into the right direction here. :slight_smile:

Thanks and cheers,
Roi

2

This a very tricky issue.

There’s no Discourse feature that would fit with this, and even less since only a certain number of pictures are allowed in one post.

I suppose I would create a category with subcategories and/or tags.

Category: Sidemount-Forum - Galerie
Subcategory: Sidemount-Forum - Fotowettbewerb
Topic: Sidemount-Forum - 2013-12 Unterwasser (each post would contain 1 image)

I have no other idea right now :person_shrugging:

I’ll also move your topic to migration since the issue is basically how to port the data from a feature from your old platform to Discourse.

1 Like
3

Yeah, too bad… :worried: And yeah, I was already pretty sure that I did not miss something like this when looking closely into everything.

In my eyes that is a missing feature for Discourse.

Not only for projects or imports liked mine. When the forum holds a lot of information to which is referred often, there should be something like this. Like with the existing Docs or Wiki extensions. Referring to random posts when it only comes to the embedded images is not optimal. It should be also hard to find these posts after a time.

There is? I was not aware of that. What is the setting here and can I adjust it. Just checked the settings and did not find a setting. :man_shrugging:

Phew… Sounds like a lot of work for the 2500 photos in 40 personal galleries… Would there be a way to batch this? I did not check for importer scripts, yet. Sonething like the one I used for importing phpBB to Discourse.

4

I think I was wrong. I just uploaded 40 pictures in a test post without any issue :smile: