Background

I took over development of a community-based website which was using phpBB for the forum.  The rest of the site was rather plain, but the forum was the important aspect of the site and had some decent use.  I initially installed Joomla! to handle the content of the site, but left the forum unaltered (excepting to change the theme to blend in with the rest of the site.)  Occasionally, I would attempt to tie the login for the forum with the login for Joomla!, but this just created more problems, so I had to revert back to the old way of doing things.

Eventually, I got around to using Drupal more and more and found it to be exceptional!  It has a significantly steeper learning curve, and it's not really for everyone, but once I learned my way around in it, I really enjoyed using it.  I installed a module that would allow people to login using their forum accounts (phpBBforum).  However, people being what they are, combined with Murphy's Law, this wasn't getting much use...

Then we had a new request.  Apparently facebook used to have has a 5000 friend limit (I don't use or care to use facebook at this time...)  They had lifted the 5000 limit on friends, but when posting comments, it apparently didn't allow friends 5001 and up to post (or something like that.)  The request was to allow the discussion to continue on the site.  I felt that having the discussion take place in the forum would be the ideal location (as opposed to a blog) as it would allow neater archiving an people should already be used to it.  The Facebook Connect API seemed ideal, as the facebook members could login with their facebook accounts and we could simplfy the process as much as possible (face it; every extra step you add is going to frustrate some people.)  Unfortunately, the Facebook Connect mod for phpBB isn't complete (and not recommended for production sites.)  In addition, we were having people who couldn't get into the forum (don't you love the old "I can't get in, what's wrong" comment?  I mean, it's just sooooooooo helpful in debugging!)  Since Drupal has a Facebook Connect module that, while not complete, at least is ok for production sites, I began to ponder this route.

Back when I was looking into bridging Drupal with phpBB, I became frustrated with the stance of the Drupal developers to develop their own forum rather than bridge to existing solutions.  I still question whether it should really be a part of the CMS, but then we take for granted that a blog is...  Anyway, I started looking into porting our phpBB forum to Drupal, using the phpBB2Drupal module.  While the migration wasn't completely smooth (hence the reason for this tutorial), I was impressed with the results.  It didn't take long for me to find that Drupal may actually provide a superior forum to phpBB (with the right modules installed.)

I will point out, however, that as of this writing, I have not had other members examine the Drupal forum.  It may end up getting stopped before it goes live, but I still wanted to document the procedure for the migration and getting the forum set up.