Thread

I’m migrating my vBulletin forums to EE, and I want to map the new URLs for each thread/post to the old ones (so that people are properly redirected to the right thread when the click, for example, a google search result)

One person suggested we use an .htacces file and a set of rewrite rules. 

But my developer noted that we have tens of thousands of URLs on our forums, and that it would take forever to write an .htaccess entry for each of them

I’ve heard that people here have successfully migrated their phpBB forums to EE.  Any insight from that camp?

You could also use a mod_rewrite, but it depends on how you are doing the mapping and if it’s predictable.  I hope others that have done this step in, but redirects may indeed be your best, most reliable, bet here.

Thanks Lisa..  If the community here could offer some further advice, it would be great. 

We’re working with 50,000+ posts, so any recommendations for redirecting that number of links would be appreciated.

The problem with .htaccess is that mod_rewrite really does not have the ability to do math.  For example, the phpBB links for a forum topic look like this:

site.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=562169

While those for ExpressionEngine’s forum module are like this:

site.com/index.php/forums/viewthread/55784/

I suspect there will not be an exact correlation in topic ids or post ids after importing, so you would have to know how the numbers are adjusted from one system to the other and do the redirect based on that.  My best suggestion would probably leave some of the old phpBB files in places, like viewtopic.php, and then inside those you use PHP to convert the old phpBB URL to the EE forum URL.

A follow up question to this…

What if we just needed to migrate the member accounts from vBulletin to ExpressionEngine?  Does that make this endeavor any easier?

No, this only does URL requests and has nothing to do with the actual data being moved.  If you are attempting to redirect from vB to EE member account URLs, this could help, but you would probably need another set of htaccess rules.

Sorry, I actually meant to post my last question in another thread dealing with migrating forum posts, etc. from vBulletin to EE.

So, my question was not about URL request, but rather the level of effort required to migrate user accounts from vB to EE. 

Has anyone done it for just user accounts?

I don’t know if anyone has, but I don’t think it would be hard.  Do you JUST want to import the members- or will they need to be linked up with data they have entered- such as forum posts, etc?  If it’s just a matter of getting them into EE as members, you could query the VB tables and get the members out in a delimited text format.  Then use the member import utility to go from text->xml->EE.  If you have custom member fields, you may need to do some coding, but I’ve done it pretty easily using the xml parser class.