Should/ Could I convert to SMF???

[weedguru]

I have been running a phpbb forum for the last decade or so and am in the process of trying to decide what i wish to do with the site as a whole, starting with the forums.

I have 75000 indexed pages on google...which I am loathe to lose as I assume they help massively with the site's ranking on search engines. To be fair I have little idea whether that is a high or low number, but regardless I don't wish to lose the rankings.

I guess my main questions are...

Will it be easier to customize the look and feel of SMF?

How tricky is the conversion from PHPBB3+ to SMF?

Are the selection of MODS comparable?

What would I lose in the conversion?

One of the reasons the code of my phpbb is a little haphazard is due to the many years of installing MODS and uninstalling them incorrectly, leaving a fragment code on a page somewhere which has never been cleaned up. In general I have very much enjoyed phpbb but find it easy to produce errors and far from intuitive to administer.

I am planning on updating the front end of my website in turn, but first the forums. Any advice is welcome.
Cheers,
Daniel

[Ricky.]

Weedguru.. thats a nice name and I guess forums is also about weeds ..


Anyways, conversion should not be issue, I suggest you to make copy of your forum and then try conversion there to see how things goes and I am sure you will like SMF for its features as well ease to customize, above all you will find lots of help here.

However, serious thing is your indexed pages, though one can do 301 redirect but if there is nothing to related  old page to new pages then I doubt redirection can be done properly.

Here is you can download convertor :
http://download.simplemachines.org/?converters;software=phpbb

Here you can download modifications : (those can be installed without touching code)
http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/


Here you have themes :
http://custom.simplemachines.org/themes/

[weedguru]

Since attendance seems to moving down, the indexed pages are the most important thing for me to consider when deciding whether to upgrade/ convert the forums.

Is there a chance that conversion may well lead to the site starting from scratch, at the mercy of spiders slowly congregating the content, page by page, week by week?

[margarett]

I came from phpBB also, several years ago. At that time, I confess that I couldn't care less about search engines ranking. One thing that the conversion broke were internal links, due to the different construction of it in both systems.
But, if I remember correctly, the ID of the topics is kept, so a query in the database should solve that easily.
As for the search engines... Unless you can create an internal forwarding from "viewtopic?t=12345" (Is it like this? ) I assume some links will appear as broken and damage (?) your ranking.
But search engines are very smart. While some links will be considered dead, some others will be added. Of that hurts your ranking... I don't know...

[marsi]

Right now I am also looking for some way to convert to SMF and I'm sure there should be a good solution. So, I'll let you know if i find something.

[kat]

Would you like some Spam, with that, marsi?