After several months of intense planning, preparation and testing I recently converted a Vbulletin forum (vBulletin 4.2.0 Patch Level 3 with PHP 5.4) to SMF 2.0.14 with PHP 7.1.6.
Stats as follows:
| Members: | ~10,000 | (Only about ~2,500 were legitimate and there were more than 2,000 accounts that had never been activated) |
| Posts: | ~142,000 |
| Topics: | ~8,000 |
| Attachments/Avatars: | ~10,000 |
The new SMF forum is successfully running 130 official mods (including one that I wrote specifically to implement functionality that existed on the vBulletin forum - see
Membergroup-based Signature Permissions and another that I cloned to add a similar feature) plus quite a few other customisations that I either coded myself or found via the SMF community. In addition, the new forum is using Simple Portal (with a shoutbox), a customised theme (with the option to choose the default theme or a third theme), a separate mobile theme and has Tapatalk enabled.
The conversion process had to be done in several stages as I discovered that the vBulletin converter wouldn't work with SMF 2.0.14, I had to clean up some of the imported data, vBulletin 4.2.0 wouldn't work with PHP versions later than 5.4 and a few mods needed minor changes to work with PHP 7.x. In addition, the new forum URL dropped the 'www' prefix, was converted to https and was moved from the root directory to a sub-directory.
The final - and one of the most important - changes I had to implement was to update .htaccess to redirect links to the previous forum address format (which took two forms due to the recent removal of vBSEO) to the SMF forum address format. This was achieved as follows:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
Redirect /index.htm /forum_smf/
# SMF rewrites for vBulletin after vBSEO removed (including forum directory)
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^t=([0-9]+)&page=[0-9]+&p=([0-9]+)#[0-9]+(.*)?/?$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^t=([0-9]+)&page=[0-9]+&p=([0-9]+)(.*)?/?$
RewriteRule ^(forum)?/?showthread.php$ /forum_smf/index.php?topic=%1.msg%2#msg%2 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^t=([0-9]+)&page=[0-9]+(.*)?/?$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^t=([0-9]+)(.*)?/?$
RewriteRule ^(forum)?/?showthread.php$ /forum_smf/index.php?topic=%1.0 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^f=([0-9]+)&page=[0-9]+(.*)?/?$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^f=([0-9]+)(.*)?/?$
RewriteRule ^(forum)?/?forumdisplay.php$ /forum_smf/index.php?board=%1.0 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^do=newthread.f=([0-9]+)(.*)?/?$
RewriteRule ^(forum)?/?newthread.php$ /forum_smf/index.php?board=%1.0 [L,R=301]
# SMF rewrites for vBulletin before vBSEO removed
RewriteRule ^f[\d]+/.+-([\d]+).*/index([\d]+).html/?$ /forum_smf/index.php?topic=$1.0? [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^f([\d]+)/index([\d]+).html/?$ /forum_smf/index.php?board=$1.0? [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^f[\d]+/.+-([\d]+)-post([\d]+)/?$ /forum_smf/index.php?topic=$1.msg$2#msg$2? [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^f[\d]+/.+-([\d]+).*/?$ /forum_smf/index.php?topic=$1.0? [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^f([\d]+)/?$ /forum_smf/index.php?board=$1.0? [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^archive/index.php/t-([\d]+).*html/?$ /forum_smf/archive2.php?topic=$1.0? [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^archive/index.php/f-([\d]+).*html/?$ /forum_smf/archive2.php?board=$1.0? [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^archive/index.php/?$ /forum_smf/archive2.php? [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^members/([\d]+).html/?$ /forum_smf/index.php?action=profile;u=$1? [L,R=301]
# SMF rewrite for cms author
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^author/([0-9]+)-.*/?$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^r=author/([0-9]+)-.*/?$
RewriteRule ^cms/list.php$ /forum_smf/index.php?action=profile;u=%1? [L,R=301]
# SMF rewrite for calendar
RewriteRule ^calendar\.php /forum_smf/index.php?action=calendar? [L,R=301]
# Rewrite all non-existent directories and folders to /forum_smf/index.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /forum_smf/index.php? [QSD,L,R=301]
The end result is a forum that is much faster and more secure and which has all the functionality - plus some! - the forum community had wanted for quite some time (unfortunately the admin of the vBulletin forum had not had the time to devote to managing it for several years which is why I got involved) and a bunch of very happy forum members!
