Hello,

We are actually on vBulletin 4.2.5 with publishing suite. Our CMS contains about 3,600 articles and as you can guess, we don't want to loose them.

So we are looking for an engine that could convert those BBcode and HTML-written articles in a portal (TinyPortal, Simple Portal, other?) in another way than copy them one by one.

I didn't find any tool to convert vBCMS articles so I'm a bit afraid it could be more difficult than we expected to migrate from vB to something else (we also tried phpBB3 but the problem is the same: what to do with the CMS?).

If you have any idea, I would be pleased 

Thank you in advance!

I converted a vBulletin 4.2.0 forum to SMF four years ago - it took quite a bit of planning and lots of testing/checking and I had to make some small changes to the conversion software in relation to some vBulletin add-ons (and their related content).

I haven't used it but there is an articles modification/add-on for SMF that may suit your needs - see SMF Articles.

Hello GL700Wing and thank you for your answer

Yes, I found that mod and some others; for now I'm testing Simple Portal which seems to fit our needs as an article-manager.

The main question is: how to convert our vB articles in SMF articles, using SMF articles mod, or TinyPortal or Simple Portal or else.

SMF Articles notes that you can import articles from TinyPortal for example, but from vB4, I don't know and I didn't find any converter I could try.

As i'm no coder, I cannot imagine how difficult it can be to build up a converter from an existing one or from scratch. This could be a solution if possible, as I know some people who can handle MySQL, PHP and so on, but if a converter already exists, it would spare them much time!

Thank you again.

A convertor for other CMS systems does not exist that I know of. You could convert things via SQL probably in a lot of cases just depends on the amount of features/data you want to retain.

Thank you for your answer

Well in fact most of our articles only contain basic BBcode such as links, tables and images.

Here's a sample:

Durant votre bref séjour à Château-Suif, vous pourrez parler à différents personnages tuteurs qui vous donneront divers conseils sur la façon de prendre en main votre personnage, utiliser ses capacités, gérer son inventaire... n'hésitez pas à leur parler si vous avez oublié certaines choses, et encore moins si c'est votre première partie !

[table][tr][td][IMG]http://www.baldursgateworld.fr/filesmods/imagescms/bg1/solution/winthrop.png[/IMG][/td][td]Votre personnage se trouve près de l'auberge de Château-Suif ([url=http://www.baldursgateworld.fr/lacouronne/content/chateau-suif-3055/]2[/url]).  Muni/e de toute votre richesse, n'hésitez pas à aller rendre visite à son tenancier, [url=http://www.baldursgateworld.fr/lacouronne/content/bg1-winthrop-166/]Winthrop[/url].  En plus de disposer de chambres, il vend également un peu de matériel qui vous permettra de survivre dans ce monde hostile et dangereux.[/td][/tr][/table]

[table][tr][td]Vous y croisez également [url=http://www.baldursgateworld.fr/lacouronne/content/bg1-perleflamme-cheveux-d-elfe-164/]Perleflamme Cheveux-d'Elfe[/url], qui vous envoie chercher un parchemin d'[URL=http://www.baldursgateworld.fr/lacouronne/content/bg1-identification-2935/]Identification[/URL] auprès de Téthtoril, qui devrait se trouver au centre de Château-Suif.  Si vous choisissez de lui remettre le parchemin, il vous récompense d'un peu d'[url=http://www.baldursgateworld.fr/lacouronne/content/experience-72/]expérience[/url] et vous lance un sort de [URL=http://www.baldursgateworld.fr/lacouronne/content/bg1-protection-contre-le-mal-2865/]Protection contre le mal[/URL].  Néanmoins, vous pouvez également vous contenter de conserver le parchemin pour votre usage personnel.[/td][td][IMG]http://www.baldursgateworld.fr/filesmods/imagescms/bg1/solution/perleflamme.png[/IMG][/td][/tr][/table]

Au rez-de-chaussée de l'auberge, vous trouvez également un coffre dont la serrure est à [url=http://www.baldursgateworld.fr/lacouronne/content/crochetage-des-serrures-2217/]crocheter[/url], ou à forcer si votre personnage n'est pas un voleur.  Il faut pour cela que votre [url=http://www.baldursgateworld.fr/lacouronne/content/force-76/]force[/url] soit suffisante... si vous arrivez à ouvrir le coffre, vous y trouvez des parchemins d'[URL=http://www.baldursgateworld.fr/lacouronne/content/bg1-armure-2928/]Armure[/URL] et d'[URL=http://www.baldursgateworld.fr/lacouronne/content/bg1-infravision-2936/]Infravision[/URL], ainsi que dix-huit pièces d'or.

And if needed, the link to the article: https://www.baldursgateworld.fr/lacouronne/content/chateau-suif-3055/ [nofollow] (I see it is not active but no matter )

Our greatest fear lies in the URL of the articles themselves: as you can see, each article has a number and a name. And the links in our CMS are related to the numbers only so we can modify article titles without breaking existing links.

Maybe a SEO hack could make those links still effective?

TinyPortal ( and I am sure SimplePortal also ) allow you to have a short name for the post which you can set to be chateau-suif-3055 in your example which will make the link index.php?page=chateau-suif-3055

You can then have a .htaccess file to redirect all requests from content/* to index.php?page=*

Or if you want to keep the old url format then some kind of seo mod will be needed.

For example RewriteRule "^lacouronne/content/(.*)$" "lacouronne/index.php?page=$1" [R=301,NC,L]