Upgrading from phpBB to XF via vB

[Paul B]

I understand that phpBB will be quite low down on the list when it comes to creating importers/convertors.

For obvious reasons the primary focus will be on vB and then other paid forum solutions as the owners of those are more likely to purchase a licence for XF than forum owners running free software.

I don't really want to wait as long as I expect it will take to create an importer for phpBB so that leaves me with one other option: that is to upgrade from phpBB to vB and then to XF.

So my questions are:

1. How easy is it to upgrade phpBB to vB? Has anyone here done it?
2. Will it be a completely clean database after doing so or will some manual editing of the tables be required to get everything to work correctly; custom BBCodes, etc?
3. What would a rough price be to purchase a (temporary) vB licence, bearing in mind I only want it for the purpose of upgrading to XF?
4. Would doing a double upgrade from phpBB to vB to XF have any impact on the XF install? Presumably not.

Hopefully I'm not breaking any forum rules by asking these questions here.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

 

[Paul B]

OK, thanks for the clarification.

 

[Gravity]

I'm in a similar situation to Brogan, wanting a phpbb -> xenforo import. I'm using 3.07.
One of the most important requirements for me is that the new forums maintain the previous SEO URLs I have used, so that incoming links are not broken. I do not know if this behaviour is a normal outcome for an importer, or not, having never used one before.

 

[mlx]

mod_rewrite should be able to take care of that. You might need to setup a custom rule though.