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!