XF 2.1 Upgrading from 1.5 to 2.x and URL structure

[OccultSci`entist]

Hi,

I have a forum with millions of posts and I'm looking to upgrade to the latest Xenforo 2.
After copying the live site to a local folder and running the upgrade the old URLs 404 and the structure has changed.

My question is this, is it possible to change the URL routes so be as they were for example:

Old URL: /forums/category-name/forum-name/threads/thread-title.123456/
New URL: /forums/threads/thread-title.123456/

Also:

Old: forums/category-name/general-chat/
New: forums/forums/general-chat.63/

and:

Old: forums/new-users-corner/
New: forums/categories/new-users-corner.54/

I'd really appreciate any feedback you can give as quite keen to upgrade but concerned about the hit we'd take on search engines for so many indexed pages suddenly returning a 404 error!

Thanks in advance.

 

[Paul B]

There is no change in the URL structure between XF versions.

It's the same in 2.2 as it was in 1.0.

Categories have never been part of the thread URL so presumably you use an add-on for that.

 

[OccultSci`entist]

Correct, we were using the [bd] reroute add-on but I cannot find a Xenforo 2 equivalent. Are there any that you know of?

 

[Paul B]

You would have to check with the author if there is an XF2 version, or search here: https://xenforo.com/community/resources/

 

[OccultSci`entist]

OK, will do.

You don't think there's any way to achieve this with XF2 without a plugin?

 

[Paul B]

It would require an add-on.

 

[OccultSci`entist]

Looks like I'm stuck on Xenforo 1 then which is a pain.
No new add-on that I can find and no reply from the author.

Damn

 

[⭐ Alex ⭐]

Looks like I'm stuck on Xenforo 1 then which is a pain.
No new add-on that I can find and no reply from the author.

Damn

If you're fine with ditching the old long urls and going with the XF default...

You could use redirect rules in your webserver. with a regex you can find URLs of form

/forums/category-name/forum-name/threads/thread-title.123456/
/forums/(Some letters)/(Some letters)/threads/(Some letters).(Some numbers)/

The bold is a capture group and redirect those to /forums/threads/(captured group)/ using the 301 status code (moved permanently).

This is good for SEO, you can keep it for as long as you think is necessary maybe a couple months then remove it. We need to know what web server you're using and whether or not you have access to editing the website config such as routing.

 

[OccultSci`entist]

Hi @blablafixer, thanks for the response.
Yes I have complete control of the server so this could well be an option.

I'm using nginx in front of apache to serve static files at the moment

 

[⭐ Alex ⭐]

I'm not familiar with that setup, but let me know if you need help making the regex redirect, you'll have to let me know if you're doing it in nginx or apache.