Thinking of migrating from vB4. A couple of questions.

[dimitrisx]

Hello.
I run a greek forum with vBulletin 4 which looks terrible on mobile devices. I’d upgrade to vB5 but I know for sure it’s buggy, from a friendly forum that has gone through with the upgrade and after a year they're still having big troubles and think of migrating.

Right now, I’m looking into the possibility of migrating my forum, too.

What I need:
a) a tool, or at least super detailed instructions, of migrating from vB4 to xenoforo
b) a greek language pack would be handy, eventhough most probably I’ll edit it heavily as I’m very picky about phrases and translation. I could even created one from scratch, if there are good instructions.
c) a frontpage
d) my vB articles placed in that frontpage
e) an easy way to add adsense ads
f) a chatroom
g) that the new software can be adjusted to parse some custom tags like [ΠΛΟΚΗ] for hiding spoilers or [Δ] for strike through.
g) a collection of free skins to pick one and adjust it myself.
h) integration with facebook would be nice

I understand that the price is $140 and then there are yearly “renewals”. Does it mean that I need to renew my license every year in order to be able to keep running my forum? Or is it just for the tickets support? I don’t think it’s clear in the pricing page. And to sum it up:

Q1) How much money will it cost me to have a forum with the functionality I described, above?

Q2) What happens with external links to specific posts/treads? Are they going to become broken if migrated threads get a different kind of url?

Q3) Will my forum be suitable for easy use with mobile devices?

Thanks!

 

[whynot]

I understand that the price is $140 and then there are yearly “renewals”. Does it mean that I need to renew my license every year in order to be able to keep running my forum? Or is it just for the tickets support? I don’t think it’s clear in the pricing page.

You can keep running your forum forever, you don't have to renew.
Without renewal you cannot have ticket support and cannot upgrade to newer versions of XF.

 

[Mr Lucky]

There are good redirection scripts available, I migrated from vbulletin two years ago and they work fine for inbound links and internal links.

I would recommend using a development site and practising/testing the migration a couple of times.

You mentioned vbulletin articles, luckily I had only a few of these and imported manually into xenforo Resource manager and/or pages and then made manual redirects.

There are also article addons, e.g XenZine and AMS. If you have a lot of articles and use one of those than maybe those devs can help with import/redirection may be necessary.

There are many free styles, but I would advise you initially use the default style and customise, as xenforo 2 will hopefully be out this year and will need restyling anyway.

There are various front page addons, but any page can be made the home page. You don't need to have it in the toot and the forum in a subdirectory as with vBulletin.

I am using the addon Widget Framework which gives you a Widget page and my front page uses that, a combination of latest posts widget, popular posts widget and a couple of html widgets.

 

[StarArmy]

For chat, I recommend Chat by Siropu ($25), it's what I use on my site. Another good one is Taigachat ($45) but it has less features but likely requires less server resources.

I think the custom bbcode feature should be usable for adding your Greek bbcode tags. It's included in standard XenForo.

XenForo supports Facebook login integration.

e) an easy way to add adsense ads

There's some good add-ons for this that let you easily do things like put the ad between the first and second post or every X replies.

 

[Mr Lucky]

There's some good add-ons for this that let you easily do things like put the ad between the first and second post or every X replies.

It's also easy to add the adsense code directly into the default xenforo ad location templates. Not sure if they include the after 1st post though.

 

[dimitrisx]

The pricing sound reasonable then. And does it look well on mobile devices?

I suppose if x/f 2 is about to come out, I should wait till it does.

@Mr Lucky, how are inbound links handled then? With some form of redirections?


If anyone could post a link to their xenoforo forum, to check out, that'd be great.

 

[Mr Lucky]

If anyone could post a link to their xenoforo forum, to check out, that'd be great.

Mine is in my signature

Here is a test URL from my old vBulletin to new xenforo:

 http://cafesaxophone.com/community/showthread.php?10559-Various-books

I have three redirections involved there, all nicely working.

1. Redirect from vBulletin via the script)
2. Redirect from subdirectory /community/ to root (.htaccess)
3. Redirect from http to https (.htaccess)

Redirecton Script is here:

https://xenforo.com/community/resources/categories/redirection-scripts.2/

 

[DarkGizmo]

For the articles/frontpage, there is XenPorta 2 Pro which is $40. You can find that Here. However, the impoter and greek translation for it might be an issue, you'd have to speak to @Jaxel about those.

As for free skins, there are plenty in the resource center here once you've become a licensed customer.