Migration from phpBB2 SEO URLV2 to SEO phpBB3 advanced

genial.soul · Joined: 18 Jun 2007 Posts: 8

Hi Everyone,
i currently have a phpbb2 forum installed which i am willing to upgrade to phpBB3. The biggest hurdle in upgrading is that currently i have the mod SeoURL v2 installed. But i want to go for this advanced seo url mod for phpbb3. Doing so will create a junk of 404 pages for my site and all the bookmarks that people have had and all the back links will be lost. Any way or script to make old urls redirect to the new ones?
A reply will be appreciated and surely waiting for it.
Thanks

HB · phpBB SEO Team Joined: 16 Oct 2006 Posts: 809

I'm not familiar with that mod, but it looks like it generates the same pattern as phpBB-seo's:

-www.example.com/phpBB/blah-blah-blah-t1234.html (topic)
-www.example.com/phpBB/blah-blah-blah-f4.html (forum)

If so, no URL migration required. Even if the URL patterns are slightly different, you have options. The phpBB-seo mod is highly configurable; you could modify it to match your existing URLs. Or you can change URLs and rely on phpBB-seo's "zero dupe" mod to redirect to their new location.

I recommend you install the phpBB-seo premod 3.0.1 onto a test server (or local installed XAMPP) and run the phpBB install/converter. It will pull in your existing database into a new one so you can compare the old/new boards side-by-side. That will give you a better idea of the best next step.

genial.soul · Joined: 18 Jun 2007 Posts: 8

Hi HB,
Yes you are right.
The urls generated by that mod are of the kind that u have put in.
I am going to download the premod version and going to test drive it on my local machine. Once its done, i may go for live environment
Thanks

SeO

Yes SEO url V2 is pretty close to our URl rewritting standard, so the redirecting should be handled properly without doing anything for forums and topics, but, If I recall well, it's as well building pretty complex urls for other pages and may use a slightly different pagination standard. Post url may as well differ.

So, to do the migrating without trouble, you need to make sure about this, this idea is that you'll need to keep the old SEOurl V2 rewriterules up and running in your new .htaccess for all cases that are not similar to our standard so that the zero duplicate (included in the premod) will do it's job.

There is no problem to redirect even massively, but you want to do it right on the first online try.

As HB said, try a test conversion, since it's required in all cases (even if not using the premod, this part is the same as with phpBB3) to make sure it's going well, then set up your url standard playing with the SEO options.
There is no real need to keep the same exact url standard, converting is a the occasion to think about it to to put together the best url standard for your needs.
Option such as forum id removing and virtual folder trick can be good to activate at this stage if you want to. Again, there is no problem with this, since you'll properly redirect everything.

Once you have your url standard set up on the test forum, you can keep it on the online on by just using phpbb_seo/phpbb_seo_class.php and the files in the phpbb_seo/cache/ dir you created on the test server on the online on. Will keep all the option and configured forum urls from the test board.

The only additional thing you'll need will, as said, be to keep some of the previous rewriterules in your new .htaccess.

Please post here your old .htaccess and I'll tell you what to keep, so that you'll be able to even test all redirecting on the test forum before going online Wink