Migrating users from phpBB 3 to Drupal 7 - is drupal_users the only table to modify?

Question

I'm going to migrate a phpBB 3.0.7 site with 4700 users to Drupal 7.0.

I won't be copying their avatars and passwords - but will ask the users to reset their passwords (through the "Request new password" form) and upload the new avatars instead. Also I won't be copying any forum posts, because my new Drupal site will be without the forum.

But I must keep the same numeric ids for the users, because there are additional tables with data bound to those ids.

My question is: will it suffice to copy the following 4 fields:

phpbb_users table:    drupal_users table:
user_id            -> uid
username           -> name
user_email         -> mail
user_regdate       -> created

or do I have to set any additional data/tables in Drupal?

For example is there anywhere a number of users stored in some other table in Drupal? I'm afraid to bring Drupal data out of sync.

Thank you! Alex

Migrating while keeping the ids the same is likely to cause problems. Problems in unlikely places. If you need to keep those numbers associated with users I would suggest importing them into a profile field, and allowing the users to be created using either feeds module or one of the many user import modules. — mirzu

Berdir Berdir · Accepted Answer · 2011-03-06T13:49:19

That table should be enough for the basic information, yes. You will also need to handle passwords however and if you want to take over additional profile information you will need to create the responsible fields in Drupal and then move over the data. If you want to do that, it might however be easier to do the migration through PHP and Drupal API's.

There are some modules which allow to migrate from phpBB to Drupal, for example http://drupal.org/project/phpbb2drupal. (No D7 version yet, though)

You mentioned that you don't want the posts and I'm not sure if that can be disabled, but you yould look at how that modules is migrating the users for example.

And maybe there is other data you want to keep, for example private messages. The linked module does support that too.

Migrating users from phpBB 3 to Drupal 7 - is drupal_users the only table to modify?

1 Answers