VB 4 to 5 & VBseo

[t-h-c]

Hi Everyone,

Have ran into a problem which is a right nightmare! any help would be much appreciated! need to upgrade to vb 5 and due to vbseo (100k posts all indexd currently) when upgrade happened it of course broke every existing url so we had to switch back....

How can we do this without causing a huge upset to 100k indexd posts ? and posts linkd from other sites etc...

Thanks in advance...

[Paul M]

It depends on what url structure you used in vbseo, but generally the answer is you cannot do much at all, at least unless you are quite experienced in writing redirect rules, and even than, it still depends on that initial question (the url structure used).

[TheLastSuperman]

I'd gather a set of URL examples from your current site, since vBSEO is not longer available, look for DB Tech's DBSEO instead and inquire with them directly on their site i.e. provide the URL examples to them and ensure they state those will work in DBSEO upon purchase etc. <-- that is if you want SEO done easily w/o any need for you making changes.

[cellarius]

Depending on the vBSEO rules you used, it is not too hard to 301-rewrite them back to standard vB format (unless, of course, you choose to omit ids from your urls, then you're royally screwed). From there, vB5 should do the further redirect I think.

[bridge2heyday]

You can easily 301 redirect to the new content URLs , even if you don't use ids in your url , you can use a small workaround to match url_ident .. it is not the perfect solution but just working fine .

[cellarius]

Please explain. How do you redirect old thread urls without an id (without doing every thread manually, of course)?

[bridge2heyday]

Well , this will require one or two file edits
in file 'includes/vb5/frontend/routing.php'
line 239 just before throwing

PHP Code:

throw new vB5_Exception_404("invalid_page_url"); 


I have made some work
I used $path variable , exploded it and got the last element .. then queried node table for urlident equal to this value .
if true .. this returns node id
Then

PHP Code:

$url = vB_Api::instanceInternal('route')->getAbsoluteNodeUrl($id); 
header('Location: ' . $url, true, 301);
exit; 


I did this for a client who converted from smf with pretty URLs and working fine
I will post the full code when I have access to my home PC tomorrow.
Note : if the URL doesn't end with '/' you have to do additional work in includes\api\interface\collapsed.php'

[Paul M]

What exactly do you mean by "the urlident" ?

[Replicant]

Originally Posted by Paul M

What exactly do you mean by "the urlident" ?

That would be the urlident column in the node table. It contains the hyphenated version of the text portion of the url and can be used successfully many times to compare to seo pretty urls.....

[t-h-c]

Excellent thank you very much bridge2heyday it worked!!

Final problem though...as this is on a main domain ie domain.com/forum how do we prevent it creating /forum/forum, I noticed even does this on VB site this is the final hurdle.