DotNetNuke - Best Way to Move From Professional to Community Edition

Question

What is the best process of moving a 200+ MB DotNetNuke site from Professional to Community edition? I am asking the Stackoverflow community since DotNetNuke's standard line is "there is no supported option to switch from PE to CE", or to contact their customer support. However DNN support told a fellow team member tell us that it was not possible to go from Professional to Community, so that was a waste of time.

Based on research there are a couple possibilities for doing this:

1. Create a new Community Install and then module by module going through and moving it piecemeal. Here - http://www.dnnsoftware.com/forums/forumid/0/threadid/427840/scope/posts

2. Make backups of the Professional and then install the Community Edition over it, and then go through the web.config and verify that each piece is correct. Here - http://fl2rs.com/downgrading-dotnetnuke-from-professional-to-community-edition/

Which one has the most success of converting DotNetNuke Professional Edition to Community Edition? Also, if you know of a better method please share. Thank you for your time.

Edit
Looking back at this question the only real way to convert a complicated site is to basically rebuild it which I did successfully. And if you are trying to switch from an older version of Professional to a newer version of Community even more so. I would also like to note that going to Community was the correct decision since none of the extra functionality we even used, and their support was never helpful anyway.

Answer 1

I don't think there's a built-in downgrade feature from Professional to Community Edition. As it was noted here in this question, DNN professional and DNN Community Edition share the same codebase. In other words, DNN Pro is DNN CE with some extra built-in extensions such as document manager, impersonate user, different caching, etc. That means 99.9% of modules and skins will run fine in either edition.

Option 1: Seems tedious but would surely work.

Option 2: I would make a backup copy of the site on a development machine and try to do it there before attempting it on the production server. Please post the results for this if you try it.

Good luck.

Answer 2

Option 1 would work, but I'm not sure about Option 2.

I've heard that this is not supported by DNN, but if you open a support ticket, they can walk you through the process.

This is what I found in their support forum: http://www.dnnsoftware.com/answers/cid/414288

If you have troubles with this, I've found DNN on Social Media (G+ and their forums) are more responsive. Sometimes a little prodding is needed.

Answer 3

Late to the party on this one - another option might be to do a portal/site export and then import it into a CE version. It has its own problems with modules that do not support this but if you are HTML content heavy then you can do it.