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!

[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.