Moving old phpBB and CMS Made Simple site into vBulletin
 

Hi

I have been thinking for a while about migrating my old phpBB-based forum into vBulletin. Doing this seems like a no-brainer with all the import scripts etc. On top of that* my forum is really dead* only 30 messages and most by me. So no problem here.

However* my actual site is pretty "active" and also my only income. I have about 100 articles on top of CMS Made Simple. I am thinking of moving all of these into vBulletin CMS.

My site is on a web hotel with 4 databases (all used up) and somewhat heavy package as my site gets quite a lot of traffic.

I am thinking about how to rebuild my site on top of vBulletin and then release it to the public.

Building up the new site

Should I build my site on my local computer and when ready* delete my current site and upload it to the web hotel?
Should I get another similar web hotel (pretty expensive as the package is quite big) and then copy all the files and databases into production web hotel?

No dead links

I am also wondering how to make sure I get no 404 to my users. Is there some way to "record" all of the requests to my web server that have been "fulfilled" and then make a list of appropriate 301 redirects? I am under the impression that I should make one huge .htaccess with all the redirect rules.

Setting up the domain names

My last question is about the domain names during the migration and the links. When I am building up my new vBulletin site* I guess I have to do a lot internal linking in my pages. How can I make sure that my links do not die when I go live. Like* if I build the new site up at a temporary domain and then move all those pages to the live domain* which is a different one.

Any help appreciated.