Feasibility study of migrating from Vbulletin to Simple Machine Forums

[J65nko]

At this moment I testing the Simple Machines Forum software on a new VPS (Virtual Private Server).

Up to now it looks good. It is less bloated than Vbulletin, while it still provides the functionality that we are using here.At this moment https works and emailing with SPF, Dmarc and DKIM functions as well.

In a few days I need some volunteers who are willing to do some "userland" testing, if you understand what I mean ;-)
Things like registering, sending each other Private Messages, and some test postings. This will be on a clean install, without any data from our current forum. Please let me know

Open issues:

• Our customized BBC codes like [oman=5] ...... [/oman][/code]
  There are some mods or modules for SMF that allows creation of these.
  That needs to be tested.
• Quality of the database conversion from VBulletin to SMF format
  
  SMF uses a different method to refer to threads or topics. So all old links archived by search engines, as well as the internal links of our forum posts, will not work. Unless the rewrite rules, that I found, do the job correctly. And can be converted to the 'relayd+httpd" combo that is used at this moment.

While the volunteers are doing the 'userland" testing, I can concentrate on the database conversion. SMF has a PHP script for that.
But for safety I want to use a clone of our current setup to test that conversion.

We will keep you informed ;-)

[J65nko]

You can use http://daemonforums.org/showthread.php?t=11753 for your comments .....