vBulletin to Xenforo Migration Watchouts?

[Alfuzzy]

Let's say I'm pretty close to deciding to migrate my vBulletin 4.2.5 website to Xenforo 2.1. The database migration goes fine...I do some initial appearance tweaking...etc. Are there any vBulletin to Xenforo migration "watchouts or cautions" anyone can share please?

Items that a novice doing a migration like this for the first time may not know about or even think of due to no previous experience?

One thing I'm very concerned about is anything that would effect SEO. Would everything SEO related still be in place after doing the migration? I'm think of items like backlinks, internal/external links, etc.

I also see there's a product called "Xenforo vBulletin redirect addon". Is this something everyone doing a vBulletin to Xenforo migration needs to think about installing...or is this a special case sort of addon?

Thanks much

 

[Mr Lucky]

Yes you have to have the redirect addon

permissions is a big one, if you can face it I’d recommend you start from scratch after reading the documentation - it’s very different

 

[Max Taxable]

Have a talk with @MySiteGuy he's done 100s of these.

 

[Alfuzzy]

permissions is a big one, if you can face it I’d recommend you start from scratch after reading the documentation - it’s very different

You saying group permissions from vBulletin to Xenforo don't migrate very well?

Thanks

 

[MySiteGuy]

@Manster54 , thanks for the recommend.

Yes, you need to use that redirect addon. But you must select "retain content ids" when doing the migration to have a 1:1 relationship of VB content IDs to Xenforo content IDs stored in the database.

Permissions do migrate - to an extent. It is highly recommended you verify them because Xenforo has more permissions levels and different permissions precedence.

In my experience with most migrations, if you had anything other than stock VB permissions settings, permissions in the migration will be stricter than they were in VB. And this makes sense... if there's not a direct 1:1 relationship of permissions its better to be more restrictive than permissions that are too relaxed.

 

[Dragonfruit]

I've found the forum/node permissions doesn't entirely migrate well. I overlooked it because it did seem all the permissions replicated thoroughly. Certain sections restricts certain groups from making threads or posting, but found all groups were able to. So it just required a bit of review on that.

Rebuild your Search Index manually after, some postings were missing in the searches until I did that.

Those were some of the "watch out" stuff I kinda wish I knew about and had to find out. Hope it helps you!

 

[Mr Lucky]

You saying group permissions from vBulletin to Xenforo don't migrate very well?

Not great, but if you intend to check them and especially if you are going to change them I’d recommend you get your head round the different way they work and it can be less confusing to start again from scratch.

That has been been my experience anyway.