Migrate to Jetonomy from bbPress, wpForo, or Discourse

Moving a community is a high-stakes job. Your members have years of posts, your forum has search rankings you cannot afford to lose, and a botched cutover means broken links and confused regulars. This guide walks the whole path: from a careful backup, through the actual import, into redirects that protect your SEO, and finally the cutover where you tell people the new home is live.

Jetonomy ships one-click importers for bbPress, wpForo, and Asgaros. Those importers move topics, replies, users, attachments, and basic metadata. Discourse is a separate platform with no one-click importer, so we treat it honestly as a manual or assisted migration further down. Whichever source you are on, the safe pattern is the same: install alongside the old forum, import into a parallel structure, test, redirect, then switch.

Before you start

Do not touch the old forum yet. The first phase is all preparation, and skipping it is how migrations go wrong.

Back up everything first. Take a full database backup and a copy of wp-content/uploads. If you have never restored a backup, now is the time to confirm the file actually works, not the day after a bad import. Keep this backup until the migration has been live and stable for at least a week.

Install Jetonomy alongside the old forum. Jetonomy installs cleanly next to bbPress, wpForo, or Asgaros. They do not collide, because Jetonomy stores its data in its own custom jt_* tables rather than in wp_posts. That separation is the whole point: a legacy forum bloats wp_posts and slows your entire site, while Jetonomy scales on its own tables. Activate Jetonomy, but leave the old plugin active and public for now. You want both present so you can import, compare, and roll back if needed.

Map your old structure to new spaces. Before importing anything, sketch how your current forums and categories should become Jetonomy spaces. Often this is a clean one-to-one mapping: one old forum becomes one new space. Migration is also a good moment to consolidate. If you have ten half-dead sub-forums, this is your chance to merge them into three active spaces. Write the mapping down. You will refer to it while reviewing the import report.

Document your moderation and roles. Note your current trust rules, who your moderators are, and any custom roles. Jetonomy has its own trust and moderation model, so you will re-create these rather than import them verbatim. Having the list written down means nobody loses their moderator badge on launch day.

A short pre-flight checklist:

• Full database backup taken and test-restored
• wp-content/uploads copied
• Old forum URL pattern recorded (for example /forums/topic/{slug})
• Old-to-new space mapping written down
• Moderators and custom roles listed

Migrating from bbPress

bbPress is the most common source, and it has a one-click importer. Because bbPress stores its topics and replies as custom post types inside wp_posts, and its users are already WordPress users, the import is direct.

1. Go to the Jetonomy import tools in your admin and pick bbPress as the source.
2. Confirm the space mapping you sketched earlier so each old forum lands in the right new space.
3. Run the importer. It moves topics with their author and timestamp, replies and their thread structure, users linked by their existing user ID, attachments, and basic categories and tags where bbPress stored them.
4. Wait for it to finish. A few thousand topics typically completes in minutes rather than hours, since it is a database-to-database move within the same install.
5. Review the import report. This is the step people skip and regret. The report lists what came over, what was skipped, and any conflicts. Skipped items are usually replies tied to deleted users or orphaned content. Decide case by case whether to accept the skip or fix the source and re-run.

Because members keep their existing WordPress accounts, nobody has to re-register. Their post history follows them. For a fuller worked example of a bbPress move, see the bbPress alternative page, which covers why teams leave bbPress in the first place.

Migrating from wpForo

wpForo also has a one-click importer, and the flow mirrors bbPress closely. The key difference is where wpForo keeps its data. Unlike bbPress, wpForo uses its own custom tables rather than wp_posts, so the importer reads from those tables instead. From your point of view the steps look the same.

1. Open the Jetonomy import tools and select wpForo as the source.
2. Map wpForo boards and categories to your Jetonomy spaces.
3. Run the importer. It moves topics, replies and their nesting, users, attachments, and the category structure.
4. Review the import report exactly as you would for bbPress, paying attention to skipped items and any board that did not map cleanly to a space.

Two things are worth checking after a wpForo import. First, wpForo add-on data such as polls or custom profile fields lives in separate add-on tables and is not part of the core import, so plan to re-create or remap that content. Second, wpForo’s own permalink format differs from bbPress, so your redirect map will look different. We cover redirects below. For background on moving off wpForo, see the wpForo alternative page.

Migrating from Discourse

Be honest with yourself here: Discourse is not a WordPress plugin, and there is no one-click importer for it. Discourse is a standalone Ruby application with its own database, running on its own server. Migrating to Jetonomy is a manual or assisted job, and you should budget real time for it.

The work breaks into two halves, and one half is genuinely easier than you might expect.

The content half is the harder part. You export your Discourse data using Discourse’s own admin export tools, which give you a database dump or structured files. You then map Discourse categories to Jetonomy spaces, topics to Jetonomy posts, and posts to replies. There is no automated button for this, so it is a scripted or assisted mapping rather than a click. Plan for iteration: export, map a sample, check it in Jetonomy, refine the mapping, then run the full set.

The account half is simpler. In Jetonomy your members are standard WordPress users, so once accounts exist in WordPress you can attribute imported content to them by matching on email or username. You are not maintaining a separate forum identity system the way Discourse does, so there is no parallel SSO layer to reconcile after the move.

Treat a Discourse migration as a small project rather than an afternoon. Run it against a staging site, verify a representative slice of threads, and only then plan the production cutover. If you are weighing whether the move is worth it, the Discourse alternative page lays out the trade-offs of running inside WordPress versus a separate platform.

Preserve your SEO with redirects

This is the step that protects years of work, so do not skip it. Search rankings depend on URL stability. If your old forum URLs start returning 404s after the switch, you lose the equity those pages built up, and the traffic drops within weeks.

The fix is a 301 redirect from every old forum URL to its new Jetonomy URL. For bbPress and wpForo, the importer can generate a redirect map that pairs each old URL with its new one. You take that map and load it into one of:

• A WordPress redirect plugin such as Redirection. Easiest to set up, with a small per-request cost.
• Cloudflare rules or a Worker. Best for performance, since the redirect happens before the request reaches WordPress.
• An Nginx or Apache rewrite map, if you control the server directly.

For Discourse there is no importer-generated map, so you build the old-to-new URL pairing as part of your content mapping work and load it the same way.

Whatever method you choose, test it before and after cutover. Pick twenty real old URLs, including a few deep links into specific replies, and confirm each one returns a 301 to the correct new page and that the new page loads. Member profile URLs may change format too, so include a couple of those in your test set.

Cutover and tell your members

With the import reviewed and redirects tested, you are ready to switch. Do this deliberately rather than all at once in a panic.

1. Test on a private or staging URL first. Click through real threads, post a test topic and reply, and confirm the import looks right against your space mapping. Do not expose the new forum publicly until this passes.
2. Set redirects live. Load and activate the redirect map so old links resolve the moment the new forum is public.
3. Switch the public URL to Jetonomy. Publish the new forum at your old URL prefix and verify the redirects fire correctly.
4. Deactivate the old forum plugin. Running both long-term confuses members about where to post. Keep the old plugin installed but inactive for a short grace period in case you need to reference it, then remove it.
5. Recount and verify. Run Jetonomy’s recount so post counts and space totals reflect the imported content, then spot-check a few member profiles.
6. Announce the move. Post a short, friendly announcement explaining the new home and what is better: faster pages, a real mobile experience, voting on helpful answers. Most members will not comment on the change at all. They will just keep posting, which is exactly the outcome you want.

A useful habit during the first week: watch your 404 logs. Any spike points at an old URL pattern your redirect map missed, and you can add a rule before search engines notice.

For a full worked example of this entire path on a real forum, including the member experience and what changes after the switch, read the full bbPress migration journey. It walks the same steps with concrete timings and the small details members actually notice.

A realistic word on effort

None of this is hard, but it is not zero. A bbPress or wpForo move is mostly a one-click import plus an hour or two of careful testing and redirect setup. A Discourse move is a genuine project with a scripted content mapping and a staging rehearsal. The expensive mistakes are always the skipped ones: no backup, no import-report review, no redirects. Do those three properly and the migration is calm. Jetonomy core is free, so you can install it alongside your current forum today and run a test import before you commit to anything. Pro, from 69 dollars a year, adds the extras like reactions and polls once you are settled in.