Xenforo importer preserves unique id's

[AndyB]

I just learned that if I import my vB4 forum to Xenforo, there's an option to preserve unique id's. This means the following id's are preserved; userid, threadid, postid and attatchmentid. I assume there are other id's which are preserved, perhaps someone from Xenforo could follow up and indicate which ones.

Preserving unique id's is extremely important for larger forums wishing to migrate to Xenforo because a simple mod-rewite rule can be used to redirect back links to the new Xenforo URLs.

Another great feature related to URLs is that admins like myself that prefer Standard URLs, the type without any titles in the URL have an option in Xenforo to use that type of URL. An example of Standard URLs:

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/2333/
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/2333/#post-34537

 

[Sadik B]

Hi Andy, Nice to see you here.

Yes Xenforo's importer (both the official vb3.8 one and the unofficial vb4 importer) have the option of preserving member, thread, forum ids (and I believe the visitor message to profile post id as well, though not sure on that).

Actually the fiasco with vb5 changing Ids is because they have adopted the approach of treating all content as same in the database and only differentiating between the content type in the presentation layer. So a thread post, a blog post, a visitor message or a private message are all stored in absolutely the same way in one single table. They will then be easily able to query content by just passing the contentType as a parameter in a single retrieval function. Because of this design decision, the content ids are renumbered and hence anyone migrating (it's a migration, not upgrade) from earlier vb versions to vb5 will lose their content ids, which will then be kept in a mapping table in the DB.

The theory is very good for a non-web application, but vbulletin being a website builder, obviously people don't want to lose their URLS. They can still do a backward compatibility implementation, if they provide dummy showthread.php and other files and then perform a query in those files to get the correct content id based on the url thread / blog id and display the content to the user. So it's possible, but obviously I doubt you will see a solution for months, possibly years there.

Xenforo has different tables for different content, much like vb 4 and earlier versions so they can insert the old Ids being migrated which is what they do in their import. The friendly URL structure, without the title is also very nice.

 

[AndyB]

Thank you sadikb.

I agree it's a major flaw in design to lose unique ids. It's far more elegant to retain ids so that a simple mod-rewrite rule can redirect URLs to the new location. One will always be able to see that the two URLs point to the same thread by virtue that the id is the same. Example:

http://someforum.com/community/showthread.php?t=2333/
http://someforum.com/community/threads/2333/

 

[DBA]

I just learned that if I import my vB4 forum to Xenforo, there's an option to preserve unique id's. This means the following id's are preserved; userid, threadid, postid and attatchmentid. I assume there are other id's which are preserved, perhaps someone from Xenforo could follow up and indicate which ones.

Preserving unique id's is extremely important for larger forums wishing to migrate to Xenforo because a simple mod-rewite rule can be used to redirect back links to the new Xenforo URLs.

Hey Andy, I've been using this redirection script and haven't had any issues.
http://xenforo.com/community/resources/vbulletin-4-x-url-redirection.120/

http://www.domain.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1996
Redirects to
http://www.domain.com/threads/1996/

Another great feature related to URLs is that admins like myself that prefer Standard URLs, the type without any titles in the URL have an option in Xenforo to use that type of URL. An example of Standard URLs:

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/2333/
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/2333/#post-34537

Unchecking this option should do what you want.



Edit: You know it looks like you're the very reason we even have that option. lol However I've yet to see a XF forum that uses it.
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/please-provide-the-standard-url-option.2333/#post-34606

 

[AndyB]

Hey Andy, I've been using this redirection script and haven't had any issues.
http://xenforo.com/community/resources/vbulletin-4-x-url-redirection.120/

http://www.domain.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1996
Redirects to
http://www.domain.com/threads/1996/

Thank you for the mod_rewrite examples DBA. Of course these only work due to the preservation of the unique id's that the import script offers.