Vanilla Porter is a nifty tool for exporting your old & busted forum into a fresh Vanilla Forum. It will create a zipped text file that can be imported directly to Vanilla via the Dashboard.
Do NOT use Vanilla Porter for UPGRADING. It is for migrating from other forums, including the incompatible Vanilla 1.x series.
Porter requires PHP 5.3+ and a connection to your existing database. That's it!
Please use the official release, which is a single file. View the official documentation for important usage notes.
If you have a PHP-based forum (vBulletin, phpBB, etc) you can likely drop this right on your server and run it from there. For more complicated arrangements (like jForum, i.e. a Java environment), we suggest exporting your database to a PHP/MySQL server and running it there.
To support a new forum source, copy "sample_package.php", rename it to your platform, put it in the packages folder, and follow its inline documentation.
You can run Vanilla Porter via index.php which will use the source files rather than the single-file official release. This makes it easier to keep it up-to-date and debug problems.
Send us a pull request when it's ready, and sign our contributor's agreement (requires a vanillaforums.org forum account).
Porter can run via the command line. Execute the index.php file with the --help flag for a full list of options.
For developers with very large databases or ones still in production, we recommend running your export from the command line on your localhost environment with a copy of the database. It just makes life easier.
Run make.php, which will build a single file named vanilla2export.php. Easy peasy.