XF 1.5 VB4 DragonByte SEO to XenForo URL rewrite rules

[Cyberclaw]

Hello,

I'm in the final stages of converting my vBulletin 4 forum to XenForo 1.5. The vb installation previously used VBSEO before it vanished, and now it uses DragonByte SEO (otherwise known as DBSEO).

I can use assistance in redirecting the old URLs to the new XenForo URLs. Here are some examples:

Old DBSEO URL structure

Forums home: domain.com/forums/

Example forum: domain.com/forums/publishing/

Example thread: domain.com/forums/publishing/18402-finding-publisher.html


New XenForo URL structure

Forums home: domain.com/community/

Example forum: domain.com/community/forums/publishing.17/

Example thread: domain.com/community/threads/finding-a-publisher.18402/


A few important points / questions:

• As shown in the examples above, the new forum is in a directory called "community." The old forum was in "forums."
• The new XenForo installation is using "full friendly URLs." Does that impact the rewrite rules?
• Do I need to upload special scripts to make this work? Or can it be done entirely through the .htaccess file?
• Given that the old and new forums are in different directories, where would I place the .htaccess file with the redirects?

Also, I don't want to be pushy, but I heard that @Jake Bunce is the grandmaster of URL redirects. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Jake Bunce]

The ids are the same so it can be pure htaccess.

Add these rules to the top of the .htaccess file in your /forums directory:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^[^/]+/([0-9]+)-[^\./]+\.html$ /community/threads/$1/ [R=301,L]

Or you may want to explicitly define what I assume are forum names in your old URLs in order to avoid possible incorrect redirects if other "routes" in the old URL system use the same format as threads:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^(publishing|category2|category3|etc)/([0-9]+)-[^\./]+\.html$ /community/threads/$1/ [R=301,L]

If the /forums directory no longer exists then you can use these rules in the web root instead:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^forums/[^/]+/([0-9]+)-[^\./]+\.html$ /community/threads/$1/ [R=301,L]

...or again with the optional list of forum names:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^forums/(publishing|category2|category3|etc)/([0-9]+)-[^\./]+\.html$ /community/threads/$1/ [R=301,L]

 

[Cyberclaw]

Thank you Jake! This is exactly what I needed.

 

[RobMacKay]

Yes thank you - this works perfectly!