We have a Joomla site with an SMF-forum and a bridge. We are going to upgrade our Joomla system to 1.5 and change the forum to Kunena so we don’t have to have a bridge that causes problems. Our issue is that we can´t lose the indexation in the forum since we get a lot of traffic and our advertisers pay to be seen in our site. What is the best way to convert it from SMF to Kunena? We heard that it would be good to install SEF in our SMF-forum and let Google index the new url. After that we convert it and configure the new Joomla and Kunena so it will create exactly the same url. Is this a good way or are there better ways to do it? Any problems that you can see? Any feedback is highly appreciated! Thank you
If you use SEF and it creates SEO-friendly URLS, the 1.5.x version should also give you the same URLS. If not, you can use one of those 301 redirects. If you are concerned about bookmarks, changing to SEF will not help on that. I have never heard of Kunena, so can not answer that question. This forum ( DP ) uses one of the best forum softwares in my opinion. Joomla uses PHPbb. I see you say you get a "lot" of traffic, but is it unique or repeat users ? If it is repeat, put a note in a prominent place before you make the change so they can be ready. If it is from unique visitors it is not needed.