I just finished modifying a freeware UBB to connect to a mySQL database (the freeware version was downloaded over a year prior to InfoPop's license change). My impetus for this transformation were the numerous episodes of corruptions in the threadlist, lastnumber and lasttime files, which often resulted in the loss of thread data. I was tired of frantically trying to find the source of the corruption to save the threads from further destruction, and thought that converting UBB to a mySQL backend would provide greater reliability.
The majority of the coding was finished in 3 days in 2 stages. The first stage was migrating the user profiles. That took a day and then I spent the following week clearing out bugs. Phase 2 was migrating the threads into a series of tables, and altering the UBB code to access and update the tables. Phase 2 was very labor intensive. Lots and lots of code modifications and migration scripts - what's left is really a shell of the original UBB. In fact, it would probably not take too much time or effort to completely rewrite the remaining portions of the original UBB.
I kept everything in Perl except for the script that displays a thread, which I wrote in PHP. The search routine also had to be rewritten to work with mySQL.
Phase 2 took me 2 days to code. Then the following week, I spent fixing bugs (and there were some BIG bugs). Some of the threads did not migrate correctly and have yet to be fixed.
Anyway, I am very pleased with the result. Now that the forums are stabilized, everything seems to be running smoothly and quickly, and I really like being able to administer the thread base from a mySQL console instead of editing and deleting files in subdirectories.
For those of you who want to see my work, here is the URL:
www.headwize.com . If you are thinking of trying to convert your UBB to a database backend, I highly recommend it. Just make sure you back up your original program files. And be prepared to do a lot of troubleshooting.
Despite the bugs, the conversion was not that difficult. I think InfoPop should sell a version of UBB with a database back-end. It would certainly lessen any defections over to vBulletin.
