Dynamite Forum

Migrating a 20+ year old Lotus Notes website to Wordpress was easier said than done

problem

The late, great Judy Sinner build the original DynamiteForum back in the 90s with a friend who worked for IBM. Her friend spend countless hours building customizations to IBMs Lotus Notes database in order to serve a Blog website that could handle infinite numbers of child-threads. After about 20+ years of operation, the blog started to show signs of failure and corruption, so it became imperative that we migrate the site to a modern relational database.

solution

I built a custom Lotus Notes importer using PHP that ingested the TXT file database exports, and was able to import all 60,000 blog posts while keeping the hierchial structure intact between the OP and reply posts. We also implemented a pay wall to collect subscriptions via PayPal and/or Stripe.

year

2016

timeframe

1.5 months

tools

Wordpress | BuddyPress | Elementor