In this Article I will explain how I successfully migrated a forum from PHPbb to BBpress in 5 minutes. It was easiest than I ever thought. After migrating to BBpress I just add few lines of code in a template file of phpBB to make a clean SEO redirect to the new forum. All worked like charm.
Be careful: Why to move from phpBB to BBpress?
I supose you already spend some time taking this decision, but remember this quick comparison phpBB Vs BBpress:
«bbpress is SIMPLICITY», «PHPbb is POWERFUL».
if you want to migrate a small starting community from phpBB to BBpress, it’s OK, if you want to migrate a large big community, maybe users will not understand the lack of functionality they are used to have in your phpBB forum.
In my case, I did a migration of a phpBB forum to wordpress BBpress because it was a in the early days of the creation of a community, the simplicity benefit of bbpress, worpress blogging integration, and the flexibility to add and mould the website towards the needs of the future community.
The migration from phpBB to BBpress:
STEP 1.- Installation of bbpress (Skip if you already installed it):
- Install wordpress,
- settings–> permalinks –>select post name
settings to migrate phpbb to bbpress
- install bbpress
- settings–> forums –>configure as I show in the screenshot
migrate phpbb to bbpress: configure bbpress like this
STEP 2.- And the only one step to migrate from phpbb to bbpress is:
- then install the plugin «CMS2CMS PhpBb to WordPress migration» , and follow instructions. It’s that easy.
TIPS:
1.- choose a different URL for the new forum. for example, if you used /forum/ in phpBB, use /forums/ in bbpress
2.- don’t delete your phpBB forum.
3.- as an extra, in phpbb you could disable registration of new users, and add a message in the /styles/prosilver/template/overall_header.html file.
Preserving the SEO after moving from PHPbb to BBpress
It’s very easy!!!
and this is very important, not only to avoid penalizations, but to correctly direct potential users that come from SERP results in google to the new forum and don’t loose or frustrate visitors after the phpBB to BBpress migration.
STEP 3.- SEO 301 redirect
Open/edit:
/styles/prosilver/template/overall_header.html
search for:
// Send vars to template
$template->assign_vars(array(
‘FORUM_ID’ => $forum_id,
and just above this lines add this piece of code:
##################################
$titleac = trim($topic_data[‘topic_title’]);
$relativeurl = str_replace(‘ ‘,’-‘,$titleac);
$relativeurl = strtolower($relativeurl);
header(«HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently»);
header(«Location: http://www.YOURDOMAIN.com/forums/topic/».$relativeurl.»/»);
#####################################
Links:
Comparison from the bbpress comunity point of view: https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/bbpress-vs-phpbb/
If this tutorial mof moving phpBB to BBpress was useful for you, please just let me know with a comment
Thank you. I migrated to bbpress with sucess. Now i Will try the redirect.
Gracias, me ha sido de ayuda.
Hello,
The part of code about SEO is for phpBB3 but do you know the code for phpBB3.1?
They change a lot of thing so the code dosn’t work.
Best 🙂
Sorry I cannot tell what should be changed, this post is just an experience I had when I face this problem with phpBB3.
In general phpBB is very well coded, and understandable. To apply/port the same concept I explain in this post to following versions of phpBB, you have to know a little bit of PHP, dig a little bit in the overall_header.html (or template file that corresponds to page header) and more or less add the same code I explain in this post.