Help With Custom Routing / URL Rewrite Format - MyBB Migration
Hello Vanilla Community,
I have been having a play with Vanilla on a local development install over the last couple of weeks and am extremely impressed with it so far.
I am the Administrator of a very large forum which is currently running MyBB and am looking at the possibility of migrating over to Vanilla.
The #1 problem standing between this being an idea and a reality is surrounding the use of custom redirects / routes to maintain the SEO and URL formats.
Have done some research on this however it seems a bit complicated and I’m not 100% sure whether it’s even possible. If I can’t make the URLs match up I won’t be able to proceed with the migration ☹ So I’m really hoping that someone here would be able to assist.
We have a lot of external websites linking to our forums and will have to preserve these links and ensure they are correctly redirected.
MyBB – Default URL Structure
Categories (Forums) - http://localhost/mybb/forumdisplay.php?fid=1
Threads - http://localhost/mybb/showthread.php?tid=1
So forums use fid and individual threads use tid
We have been running a plugin on our MyBB forum which converts the format above to a more readable URL: https://github.com/frostschutz/MyBB-Google-SEO / https://community.mybb.com/thread-202483.html
It’s a very old plugin – probably not under current development hence me exploring the possibility of moving things over to a newer system (also the fact that MyBB is not responsive design by default but that’s another story!)
This converts the URLs with the titles of the thread/forum as per the following example:-
MyBB – SEO Plugin URLs
Categories (Forums) – http://localhost/mybb/Forum-This-Is-A-Test-Forum
Threads – http://localhost/mybb/Thread-This-Is-A-Test-Thread
The Forum- and Thread- part of the URL we have created (and could be set to something else)
So my question therefore is based upon the above, is it possible to setup Vanilla using Custom Routing / 301 redirects / Apache Rewrite rules to mimic the MyBB SEO URL format listed above???
And, assuming that it is possible, can anybody assist me with the Custom Routes / Rewrite Rules that would be required to achieve this?
I look forward to receiving a response 😊 Thanks in advance!
Comments
Yes, this is what the Routes feature in the Dashboard is for. I did something similar for vBulletin routes long ago:
Be aware that Vanilla has not had a proper built release in more than a year and I have serious doubts that there will be more in the future. If you're comfortable doing software builds yourself, they are still releasing the source code on GitHub, but it requires a build step with Composer on your part to get it running and they haven't published documentation on it.
Hey Linc,
Yes I have got a working development environment now and figured out how to build from source :) Also think I've got a solution with this issue with the routing and migration, but have been disappointed to find that PHP 7.4's about to go end-of-life and Vanilla doesn't work under PHP 8!
Hoping that there might be a solution for this? Trying to re-write parts to make it work under PHP 8 is beyond my scope of abilities!