Sadik B
Well-known member
Hello guys.
I had been wanting to migrate my Club Oracle Forums to xenForo ever since the Resource Manager was released but due to all the xenforo client work I was doing, I never had the time to get to it.
Finally after almost two weeks of preparation and some very useful help from @0ptima I have managed to bring everything along.
Some points to note,
We had articles in the vbCMS, forums and thousands of documents in downloadsii. It was very important that everything moved over.
The response has been overwhelmingly positive and I haven't seen any drop in unique visitors or organic traffic so far. The pageviews has taken a bit of a hit though, which was expected given xenforo's usage of AJax.
Google hasn't yet updated all the links in their search index, so keeping an eye on traffic. One thing which sucked and in hindsight I should have not done is not use Shabab's vbseo redirects. (Where the hell is that guy now?). Since I kept content ids I should have gone with direct htaccess redirects instead of relying on the xenforo redirect scripts by Kier because at the moment there are 3 301 redirect hops. VBSEO Url -> showthread.php -> url with only id -> url with id and keywords
Google doesn't like more than 3 301 redirects, and 3 I guess is almost borderline. But it was already live for a couple of days before I realized this and didn't want to again present new redirect targets to google. Hopefully it won't matter much.
Also, Still to do - Got to get the Quick Search to show up above the visitor panel.
Hope this info is useful for someone doing a similar import.
And I intend to release the downloadsii importer I made. I will make a post about it when I do. Sadly, my importer only imports files from downloadsii and not links since in our old system we did not allow links or external files. So my importer will only be able to import files.
I had been wanting to migrate my Club Oracle Forums to xenForo ever since the Resource Manager was released but due to all the xenforo client work I was doing, I never had the time to get to it.
Finally after almost two weeks of preparation and some very useful help from @0ptima I have managed to bring everything along.
Some points to note,
We had articles in the vbCMS, forums and thousands of documents in downloadsii. It was very important that everything moved over.
- So I first installed xenforo 1.1.3 on my server and then used Jake's vb4 importer so that the CMS articles came along.
- Next up used the vbSEO Likes importer and Jakes likes rebuild query to import vbSEO likes.
- Then used the custom made importer for DownloadsII (with 0ptima's help) to import downloadsii categories, files and comments as reviews.
- Then used Shadab's vbseo htaccess redirects generator from my custom vbseo url xml backup to generate redirects for vbseo'd urls.
- Wrote htaccess redirects for the downloadsii files, it was possible because I carried over the file id from downloadsii to resourceid.
- Cleaned up users (deleted all zero posters)
- Installed PemBer, got the subscriptions going and Bam! it's live..
The response has been overwhelmingly positive and I haven't seen any drop in unique visitors or organic traffic so far. The pageviews has taken a bit of a hit though, which was expected given xenforo's usage of AJax.
Google hasn't yet updated all the links in their search index, so keeping an eye on traffic. One thing which sucked and in hindsight I should have not done is not use Shabab's vbseo redirects. (Where the hell is that guy now?). Since I kept content ids I should have gone with direct htaccess redirects instead of relying on the xenforo redirect scripts by Kier because at the moment there are 3 301 redirect hops. VBSEO Url -> showthread.php -> url with only id -> url with id and keywords
Google doesn't like more than 3 301 redirects, and 3 I guess is almost borderline. But it was already live for a couple of days before I realized this and didn't want to again present new redirect targets to google. Hopefully it won't matter much.
Also, Still to do - Got to get the Quick Search to show up above the visitor panel.
Hope this info is useful for someone doing a similar import.
And I intend to release the downloadsii importer I made. I will make a post about it when I do. Sadly, my importer only imports files from downloadsii and not links since in our old system we did not allow links or external files. So my importer will only be able to import files.
