Work / Dynamite Forum
Dynamite Forum
Migrating a 20-year-old Lotus Notes community, all 60,000 posts, to WordPress.
- Year
- 2016
- Timeframe
- 1.5 months
- Services
- Website migration · development
- Industry
- Online community
01 / The problem
The late Judy Sinner built the original Dynamite Forum in the ’90s with a friend at IBM, who spent countless hours customizing a Lotus Notes database to run a forum with unlimited nested threads. After 20+ years, it was showing signs of failure and corruption, and it had to move to a modern database.
02 / The solution
I built a custom Lotus Notes importer in PHP that ingested the database’s text exports and brought across all 60,000 posts with the thread structure between original posts and replies intact.
We also added a paywall to collect subscriptions through PayPal and Stripe.
Tools
WordPress · BuddyPress · Elementor · PHP
