moving content from Forums folder to root folder

[Aunt Clara]

Well, I guess the title is self-explanatory. :) How do I go about moving everything to the root folder with a minimum amount of grief?

[Kirk Y]

Umm... just move it, lol. No fuss no muss.

[Aunt Clara]

Is it just that easy?

[Freesteyelz]

I think it depends how your files (avatars, images, attachments) are stored. Unless you moved stuff into a file system it should be easy. After the move check your vB Options in Admin CP to see if your URL and cookie paths are correct. If they are you're good to go. Only once you've made the move and your forum is up then delete the unused forum folders.

[Aunt Clara]

I left the folder system as it came with the installation. The site is working as it should right now. I might have to revise the links in the header and on some external pages.

Can I make a "test move" by copying all the files to the root server before I close shop in the forums server?

[Kirk Y]

Well obviously you'd have to change the path/to/your/forum in your vBulletin Options panel after you've moved, but there's nothing fancy that needs to be done -- no special SQL Query needed or anything like that.

A few weeks ago I moved my forum from mysite.com/forums to it's own domain: forum.mysite.com. I didn't do anything, aside from get a tall glass of iced tea while I waited for the files to move...

[Marco van Herwaarden]

If your goal is to make the forums accessible by a shorter URL only, then maybe better to leave the current directory structure and use a .htaccess rewrite rule to forward to the forum if the main url is accessed.

Would give you more flexibility to the future.

[Freesteyelz]

Good point. You can do it globally or on a forum-by-forum basis. For example, both my Announcements and Tutorial forums, which I'm working on for vB 3.6, are located within the forum directory. Using the rewrite rule I changed it from:

www.mydomain.com/forum/announcements/
www.mydomain.com/forum/tutorials/

To:

www.mydomain.com/announcements/
www.mydomain.com/tutorials/

Having the forum in a separate directory keep things clean. :)

[Kirk Y]

Wish I had Apache... dang Host is too lazy to install! :p

[Freesteyelz]

Yup, get on Apache if you can. I'm still finding out how powerful rewrites can be. I can appreciate search engine friendly URL's and all that but for me just changing the URL is fun. :D

[Kirk Y]

I miss .htaccess in general... I think I'm going to go pester my host till he concedes. :p

[Aunt Clara]

If your goal is to make the forums accessible by a shorter URL only, then maybe better to leave the current directory structure and use a .htaccess rewrite rule to forward to the forum if the main url is accessed.

Would give you more flexibility to the future.That's my point exactly. My whole site is sitting on the forum folder now. My old site was html based, as it grew way too big for maintenance (over 300 pages, which I am still moving) I hacked vB to pieces and came up with a similar site to what I had but based on the vB in the forum folder (check it at DominicanCooking.com (http://dominicancooking.com)). I want a lot of the forums to read dominicancooking.com/forumsoandso as opposed to dominicancooking.com/forums/forumsoandso.

Now about that htaccess rewrite, I've only done basic 301 redirecting, how do I go about "masking" the /forums/ part of the url?

BTW Freesteyelz, your site is sickeningly cool! ;)

[Kirk Y]

I believe there's a tutorial here but if not, I'm sure you can find one on Google. Just search for mod_rewrite.

[Freesteyelz]

I see that you've (Aunt Clara) have already visited vBSEO. They'll be able to help you as they did for me. :)

Thanks for the compliment. I think for the 3.6 project I'm going for a blog look. I don't know if it'll fly for a gaming site but we'll see. :D