XF 1.5 XF & Wordpress (no bridge)

[snoopy5]

Hi,

on one of my sites I need to switch from Xenporta & XF 1.5x to Wordpress & XF1.5x. I do NOT need a bridge. No users will e merged, no shared registration etc.

My "problems" are the directories/URLs. I do not want to loose SE ranking and neither backlinks to forum postings.

Currently I have Xenporta as the "homepage" on the main URL (www.mydomainname.com). The forum is under "www.mydomainname.com/forums/".

This is done in the ACP without actually having a directory "forums" on the server. In ACP options/basic board information I have "/articles" as the index page. Xenforo is installed in the root. See sreenshot for the ACP settings



The Forum-threads look like this: "www.mydomainname.com/threads/seo-friendly-url"


My questions are now:

1. Ho do I have to install wordpress, so that the main landing page for the domainname is the wordpress site and not xenforo?
2. Ho can I make sure, that the URL structure/links stay the same for the XF content? ("www.mydomainname.com/forums/") and all old links to the forum postings are still valid? ("www.mydomainname.com/threads/seo-friendly-url")

Thanks

 

[Mr Lucky]

I think this is tricky if you want your xf installation to stay in the root, as wordpress needs to be in the root also if it is to be homepage, and they both need their respective index.php page there.

I would be tempted to move xenforo into a subdirectory, e.g. /community/ and then have specific redirections for xenforo that don't affect the wordpress pages. So although the xf pages have redirects, your SEO won't be disadvantaged.

Something like this would probably work:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^forums/(.*)$ /community/forums/$1 [R=301,NC,L]
RewriteRule ^threads/(.*)$ /community/threads/$1 [R=301,NC,L]
RewriteRule ^resources/(.*)$ /community/resources/$1 [R=301,NC,L]

 

[rfc0001]

You'll need to install WP in the root of public_html folder, and Xenforo in a /forum/ subfolder. This will maintain the structure you have now. You'll also want to update your Home page in Xenforo to your root domain URL.