Your Advice: Moving from vBulletin 3 to XenForo

Phillip

Active member
I’m a longtime vBulletin user for the past 10 years and am planning on making the switch to XenForo. I’ve been following XenForo closely since last July.

We want to do three things: upgrade from vBulletin 3.6.12 to XenForo, move our forum from “forum.mydomain.com” to mydomain.com/forum (because I believe XenForo will eventually have blogs, cms and more), and move to a new host. The following is my plan for migration. I wanted to run it by all of you who have already experienced this to be sure this is the right way to go. Your suggestions are encouraged.

1. Run a test upgrade at “mydomain.com/beta” to import the vBulletin database and play around with the software on our server.

2. After a period of time for testing. I’ll backup up the vBulletin database. Then do an upgrade to vBulletin 3.7 (so that the XenForo redirects will work.) Then backup the database again after the 3.7 upgrade. (Will mods need to be uninstalled before the move to XenForo?)

3. Then I’ll upgrade to XenForo on the live site at “mydomain.com/forum”. I’ll also install the redirect scripts at “forum.mydomain.com” to point to the new location.

4. We’ll then move to our new host moving only the XenForo database and files over.

Please let me know any potential issues or pitfalls that you can foresee. If you believe I should tackle this differently, please let me know too.
 
I personally would have both hosts/servers running at the same time and bring over some of your configurations to your new server and do the whole process on the new server while your main site is still up and running...then once you have everything done...redo it(incase you gained any mems or whatever). If you close your forum(if you can do this quickly) then you could have your site up and running within 4 Hours(Assuming everything runs smoothly but also making room for any mishaps)
 
I personally would have both hosts/servers running at the same time and bring over some of your configurations to your new server and do the whole process on the new server while your main site is still up and running...

Yes, I plan on not changing the DNS settings until the new site is up and running with the new host. It may take some time to backup/download the XenForo database with the old host and then install XenForo on the new server with the database from the old server. I believe IP addresses can't point to subdomains, but hopefully if I post on the old forum that the new one can be accessed at “http://xxx.xx.xx/forum” that will work until the DNS records propagate to the new site.
 

Thank you for pointing this out. I was not aware of the "www.mysite.com/forum/forums" situation that will arise. I'm not thrilled with that URL alignment, but since I have other files at www.mysite.com it may be the only way to go.

So hypothetically, if XenForo added an official blog, I'd hope the url would be www.mysite.com/blog instead of www.mysite.com/forum/blog. I guess that's for another day though.
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Looks like my plan has changed slightly, I ran the test script for XenForo on my current host and I needed PHP extensions for XML handling (DOM and SimpleXML) installed. They wanted to charge $60 for this so I'll just wait until I move to the new host next month and install XenForo there.

So if I leave vBulletin as is with my current host, when I move to my new host with the fresh XenForo install will I need to upload or install vBulletin at all? Or can I just install XenForo into the “mysite.com/forum” folder with the imported database and upload the vBulletin 3.x redirect scripts in “forum.mysite.com” where vBulletin was previously. Hopefully that will work.
 
I'm now setting up a test XenForo site to play with styles and settings. As someone coming from vBulletin, I would be interested in hearing what tweaks others have made to their forums before going live.

Currently I'm importing a 900 mb vBulletin 3.7 database with no attachements. The installer seems to hang frequently during the import process. I have to refresh the page in IE8 in order to get it going again. Is this common for the importer to hang in a browser? Ideally, I'd like to get to the "import data" stage and leave it for a few hours and come back.
 
You can adjust the memory settings but that's normally only required if you're getting errors related to attachments.

Are you sure it's actually hanging? It can take a while on some steps.
 
I did a search for this but didn't find a clear answer.

It looks the smilies that were used in both vBulletin and XenForo carried over through the import. However it appears that additional ones we added in vBulletin only show the smile code in posts.

If I add the same smile and smile code in XenForo now, will the smilies return in XenForo or will the smile code remain in place? Likewise, if I would've added all of our custom smilies before the import would they all appear properly in XenForo now?
 
Yes, this works great for the smilies. Fantastic.

We've run into another issue though. I installed another version of XenForo in a different directory so that we have one board with an imported vBulletin (which will eventually be live) and another board for the staff to test and play with. I successfully installed the second board fine and was directed to the admin control panel where I'm unable to login. I can successfully login on the second board itself, just not the admin control panel. I even tried reinstalling the entire forum from scratch but I still have the same issue. Both XenForo forums are password protected. Any advice would be much appreciatd.
 
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