Thinking of the move from Vbulletin4+vbseo help please?

[Cannabis.com]

Hi guys, we are a old forum that has long been indexed in the search engines,
We are running vbulletin4+vbseo (which is dead now), So in the process of thinking of removing vbseo, we also determined that the move to xenforo might be the easiest way out.

How hard of a process will it be to make sure the old indexed urls are redirected once I convert to xenforo?

will the fact that I have vbseo isntalled make the conversion to xenforo difficult?

How about photo albums, and pictures and attachments? those should convert over well ok?

I am given confidence that avforums have made the move as well as many others, so very intrusted as I do not want to hurt our rankings and our alexa rankings,

thanks much for any guidance on this matter, as we feel we are stuck since vbseo is now dead, and upgrades for vbulletin wont work because vbseo is now dead and the process to remove vbseo seems like a huge task.

 

[Adam Howard]

Do I need the Resource manager, and enhanced search..,... input from people please and can I add these on later?

You can always add these later, but you don't technically need them (unless you feel you do).

Since you have over a million post, I will assume you have a VPS or Dedicated Server. With that in mind the enhance search could help improve the speed of your search.

 

[Cannabis.com]

This can be done 2 ways....

XenForo allows you to make pages and you can easily have those as "front page" (commonly refereed to as a portal by many). There is also 3 add-ons that you can depend on if you wish that can easily do this as well.

Mine site has a simple example of one http://www.SociallyUncensored.eu/forum Of course I'm using it only really to draw attention to my blogs & thus not using it to it's full potential. But it does give you a real basic live example.

thats awesome, i was totally needed soemething like this, thank you for your example...

 

[Adam Howard]

Is there a sepearte converter I have to download ?

The importer comes standard. So no extra download is required for you to import from vBulletin to XenForo

 

[Cannabis.com]

You can always add these later, but you don't technically need them (unless you feel you do).

Since you have over a million post, I will assume you have a VPS or Dedicated Server. With that in mind the enhance search could help improve the speed of your search.

Is managing the files harder without the manager addon?

 

[Cannabis.com]

Is the script well developed enough to have moderators and such? as I depend on moderators for board cleanup and enforcements

 

[Adam Howard]

man, seeing that digitalpoint made the jump is really giving me confidence, and It seems easily modded by a programmer

XenForo is very customizable and fairly easy to code for. There is a wide range of free quality & paid quality add-ons as well as styles. Many developers from vBulletin are making the transition to here as well & so I expect continued development of need add-ons and styles to look forward to.

 

[Adam Howard]

Is the script well developed enough to have moderators and such? as I depend on moderators for board cleanup and enforcements

Yes, you can define the roles of user groups and permission settings.

 

[Cannabis.com]

Yes, you can define the roles of user groups and permission settings.

thank you for taking time to answer my questions, ive really been miserable throughout the vb4, and vbseo and its dying, and the direction vb5 went.

Also, is there like a mobile view , for smartphone users? or some kind of addon for that?

 

[Adam Howard]

Also, is there like a mobile view , for smartphone users? or some kind of addon for that?

Better....

XenForo's default style (the one you're looking at right now) is a responsive design. Go ahead and change the size of your browser & you will notice that it will automatically adjust to your screen size.

This means your mobile web users will have native support without the need for a special app or special independent style, which normally gives up functionality for compatibility.... ie... With XenForo your mobile members get everything they would as if they were on a desktop PC.

However, you also can look into 3rd party support if you would prefer, as TapaTalk also has an add-on for XenForo (at no cost to you).

 

[Cannabis.com]

that is just sweet, Just from the speed increase alone will be worth it,
Looks like Im going to have to finally make the switch and alongside it all the stuff I wanted to do , like mobile views
and If anything custom I need, looks like some coder than easily mod it for me

And as long as my attachments move along and I can redirect, and I can finally leave vbseo debacle and vbulletin behind will be great.

 

[Adam Howard]

I made a video to show people on my own site, http://www.SociallyUncensored.eu/forums on how well the responsive design works.

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This shows an example using the developer tools used in Google Chrome as well.

 

[Cannabis.com]

One big question, How do I determine the redirect for htaccess after the install so the vbseo url will go to the correct place? is there a link for that somewhere?

 

[Jeremy]

You will need to insert them yourself, but plenty of the people on here can help you out.

 

[Cannabis.com]

i know development is ongoing is there anything in vbulletin that it does better than xenforo at this current moment?

 

[Jeremy]

You will received biased answers. However, vBulletin has had more time to mature and includes more features. You should fire up a demo and compare the features important to your site.

 

[Cannabis.com]

well it seems the xenforo platform is the ideal platform to add on tons of customizations at this point from what i see, and how digitalpoint has done, so i feel pretty confident going the xenforo route, hopefully It goes well on a test install

 

[Jeremy]

The XenForo framework is quite powerful and flexible.

 

[Alpha1]

OK, is there anything special about the install instructions about converting a site with vbseo in place already? do I have to remove vbseo first?
Where and How do I get help on the rewrite rules? Will support assist in this once I purchase?

XenForo can not replicate your url structure, but you can indeed use rewrite rules. There is no script for vbSEO to XenForo urls yet, but its in the works. Until that is released its useful to checkout what others in the same situation have done. There are plenty of threads about this topic.

Do I need the Resource manager, and enhanced search..,... input from people please and can I add these on later?

Your site does not need the resource manager, but you probably need enhanced search. You can add this later if you want.

Is there a sepearte converter I have to download ?

Its not absolutely needed, but I would certainly advise to buy this converter:
http://xenforo.com/community/resources/vbulletin-big-board-importer-vbulletin-3-vbulletin-4.1981/
This converts your site in minutes, while the default converter takes days for a site of your size. Consider that you will want to do a number of test imports, plus start over if anything has gone wrong. So this will save you a lot of time. Read that thread to see other big boards who used that. It was originally coded by digitalpoint for their conversion and adapted by slavik so that it could be used for other sites as well.

Is managing the files harder without the manager addon?

No, I do not see anything on your website that you need the resource manager for.

Is the script well developed enough to have moderators and such? as I depend on moderators for board cleanup and enforcements

Most certainly.

well it seems the xenforo platform is the ideal platform to add on tons of customizations at this point from what i see, and how digitalpoint has done, so i feel pretty confident going the xenforo route, hopefully It goes well on a test install

I think that once you start testing xenforo out you will find it a fresh breath of air after the whole history with vb. Your members will love it.
There are upsides and downsides to the fact that xenforo is still young. XenForo is much more modern and has various functions that vbulletin has not. As mentioned before xenforo does not have decades of development behind it which means that a lot of essential functionality is still missing. There are loads of addons that you will need to add. I will add about 85 addons to my sites and IIRC @Adam Howard has about 60 addons installed. Unfortunately this does mean that you will be dependent upon addons similar to using vbSEO.
But I think the main difference at this point in time is that the xenforo addon community is flourishing, while the opposite is the case for the vb platform.

 

[Cannabis.com]

Thanks

XenForo can not replicate your url structure, but you can indeed use rewrite rules. There is no script for vbSEO to XenForo urls yet, but its in the works. Until that is released its useful to checkout what others in the same situation have done. There are plenty of threads about this topic.


Your site does not need the resource manager, but you probably need enhanced search. You can add this later if you want.


Its not absolutely needed, but I would certainly advise to buy this converter:
http://xenforo.com/community/resources/vbulletin-big-board-importer-vbulletin-3-vbulletin-4.1981/
This converts your site in minutes, while the default converter takes days for a site of your size. Consider that you will want to do a number of test imports, plus start over if anything has gone wrong. So this will save you a lot of time. Read that thread to see other big boards who used that. It was originally coded by digitalpoint for their conversion and adapted by slavik so that it could be used for other sites as well.


No, I do not see anything on your website that you need the resource manager for.


Most certainly.


I think that once you start testing xenforo out you will find it a fresh breath of air after the whole history with vb. Your members will love it.
There are upsides and downsides to the fact that xenforo is still young. XenForo is much more modern and has various functions that vbulletin has not. As mentioned before xenforo does not have decades of development behind it which means that a lot of essential functionality is still missing. There are loads of addons that you will need to add. I will add about 85 addons to my sites and IIRC @Adam Howard has about 60 addons installed. Unfortunately this does mean that you will be dependent upon addons similar to using vbSEO.
But I think the main difference at this point in time is that the xenforo addon community is flourishing, while the opposite is the case for the vb platform.

Thanks for the info, I am hoping to use xenforo as my platform for many customizations in mind, and I was not happy with vb4 platform. So this is probably the best for me, thank you for the converter link as I will likely have to use that as to save time!

If you all have anything else to point out, please let me know,

I hope to try this on some test installations, which will take time to set up in of itself, and see how the conversions go on the test install and go from there. Probably using the converter tool you linked,

 

[Stuart Wright]

Hi guys, we are a old forum that has long been indexed in the search engines,
We are running vbulletin4+vbseo (which is dead now), So in the process of thinking of removing vbseo, we also determined that the move to xenforo might be the easiest way out.

How hard of a process will it be to make sure the old indexed urls are redirected once I convert to xenforo?

will the fact that I have vbseo isntalled make the conversion to xenforo difficult?

How about photo albums, and pictures and attachments? those should convert over well ok?

I am given confidence that avforums have made the move as well as many others, so very intrusted as I do not want to hurt our rankings and our alexa rankings,

thanks much for any guidance on this matter, as we feel we are stuck since vbseo is now dead, and upgrades for vbulletin wont work because vbseo is now dead and the process to remove vbseo seems like a huge task.

Your post is interesting. Check out my post here!
I moved AVForums.com (vB3.8.2 plus vBSEO) over to Xenforo just over a week ago. 19 million posts.
I would strongly advise you to pay Jake Bunce to help you. He would use the fast importer, I expect.
He made the process a complete breeze for us.
The hardest part was ensuring we had the right addons to cover our essential existing vB mods. And that was as much fun as it was tricky.
We were down for only 9.5 hours and that was to ensure the new editorial section was working, plus we had to import the post table twice. If you have less than 19 million posts, I expect your forum would be down for much less than that amount of time.
If you need any advice, I'm happy to help.