Move Forum From Root to Directory and Install Wordpress in Root

[CR Forum]

Hello Folks,
I have a SMF at www.mydomian.com and I wish to move it to www.mydomain.com/forum and install wordpress at www.mydomain.com/
My challenges are the following:

1. I have thousands of Search Engine Listings. I need to redirect each page to the same pagein its new location at www.mydomain.com/forum. I have prettyurl installed and thus all the listings in Search Engines ends something like mydomain.com/category_name/page_name/. This means I may need some htaccess hack that will redirect visitors based upon what category their landing page exists inside. I don't have much knowledge of htaccess so I am requesting some expert help from you. I am sure this  can be done.

2. Once I have the SMF moved to mydomain.com/forum, I would like to install wordpress in the root directory. I need to somehow seamlessly integrate the design in such a way that the forum header ( and footer) is replaced by wordpress header ( and footer). I have been reading about this for hours but it is still not clear to me how to achieve this.

Thank you in advance for your willingness to help. My SMF is at www.clinicalresearchsociety.org. If you would like to provide paid assistance, please visit http://www.freelancer.com/projects/PHP-Website-Design/SMF-Wordpress-Design-Integration-Some.html

Best regards

[CR Forum]

I seem to have found a solution to the redirect problem. I figured out the cpanel redirect does the job quite efficiently when wildcard option is added.

[Kindred]

you are going to run into trouble with those redirects, since wordpress also uses index.php


As for theme integration...   I'll ask you the same question I asked the other person looking for wordpress help.
Why are you using WordPress?

as for the header and footer....   you will have to make some edits in index.template.php to remove the SMF header....   but it's more complicated than that since many SMF pages may rely on information in the header (like linktree, menu buttons, etc)
you could use the global header/footer mod to include your wordpress header/footer around the SMF ones..

Do be careful though...   I believe that wordpress apparently uses some of the same function names as SMF, which leads to conflicts as two of the same function are attempted to load.