How possible is it to perform a successful un-install of the plugin without making a mess of my already established phpBB forum?

I'd hoped to convert my site completely over to Joomla but it seems there's too many issues with both the Joomla software and the bugs with the phpBB convertor for me to be able to do this successfully.

Am I right in saying I need to run the plug-in first and convert all the CB users back to phpBB users?

Nope... just simply un-install and your done. The plugin does nothing to mess up phpbb or CB.

Just out of curiosity what bugs are you referring to in Joomla and the connector? Had not seen any posted here from you...

Thanks,
Greg

Nope. I didn't post any as they'd already been covered by other threads so I didn't want to annoy anyone by creating yet another thread on the same issue.

Essentially I had three main issues with the plug-in.

1. The fact the 'plugin control panel' took so long to work, or in the majority of cases just failed to open. Being an already established forum of several years, I have over 2,000+ members and this seemed to cause a great strain loading.

I eventually managed (via the T-One line I have access to at work) to import around 1,000 of my users. However the plugin crashed when attempting to import any username which contained an apostrophe.

2. Also on the user side of things. I'm not keen on the fact that essentially the two run side by side and not toally in sync. I erased some spam user accounts via the Community Builder's usermanagement area, but they were still listed as phpBB users and could still log-in to the forums.

3. Probably my biggest issue and the only one I couldn't see listed on the forums. However I think it's a BIG issue and is most likely not going to have a quick fix to it.

I have a hidden 'staff forum' on my phpBB Forum. Obviously a lot of what's written and discussed in there isn't for the eyes of the rest of my user base, however ALL these posts/topic titles were contained on the user profile page of community builder. Granted, if someone that didn't have access to view them attempted to open them they couldn't actually see them BUT it meant that user's had a rough idea what was being discussed as they could see the titles. If that makes sense?

So essentially, I've not got any major complaint about your plugin. For certain forums, generally smaller ones or new sites, I think this would an excellent addition. However for a site that is already pretty large and established, it's a little too buggy and not quite what we're looking for. I guess I'm talking about Joomla on the whole here as we'll be removing the entire thing later this evening and trying a different CMS/going back to our old custom one as we can't seem to tie Joomla into phpBB as we would like.

I wish you all the best for the future and when the new version is released I'll probably be back to give it another whirl and see if it can work for us.

Thanks for the reply back... Here is the current status of the things you mentioned.

1. We are working on making it better for larger user databases. Have modified it so it does not try to load all of the users at once and a few other tweaks... we will continue testing on this front to make it work on as many cases as possible. The apostrophe issue was a reported bug... I can say that it has been fixed in v2.0.0 Alpha 2... just did it yesterday... also works for other special characters... Just need to implement a cleaning mechanism for Joomla non-allow characters. Oddly enough the apostrophe is one of those characters... but if I import a username with one I can still login with that in my username...

2. With the plugin installed it should delete the phpBB user when the CB user was deleted if they were sync'd up... So if this did not happen then that would be a bug. There should be 2 delete options in that version IIRC. One to delete the user and all posts, votes, etc... and the other to deactivate and rename the user while keeping their posts/votes, etc.

3. I would have to look at the current code (v. 2.0.0 Alpha 2) but I think I have added some code so that only posts which the user profile "viewer" has access to are visible in the list. That was an original ovesight with the thought that the viewer would be the owner... I will double check and if that is not complete I will make it there in the next version. I think I might even put on the future list the possibility for the user to "opt out" having their posts visible in the list by people other than themselves.

Thanks,
Greg

Thanks for getting back to me with an update on those!

It may well be in future when there's a stable release of them with those bugs fixed and whatever new features you have planned that we'll re-install Joomla, Community Builder and the phpBB plugin.

Regarding issue 2, the users deleted weren't erased from phpBB at all. Even though it was apparently synched up. In all honesty that was probably the final straw that convinced me not to go for this solution as it was going to cause so much extra effort for us.

Again, many thanks for your time and indeed getting back to me. I look forward to seeing the next release and hopefully it might be what we're looking for. Cheers!