I'm waiting for my order, but I have a question!

[MtaT_Jac]

I've ordered vB and am waiting for my email :) (I'm just a wee bit excited :p )

However in waiting I'm reading up on all that I'm about to do! My website is currently running SMF, and so I've been reading up on how to do "the move" which I think seems fairly simple!

But my question is this, to customize vB do I have to move all of my forum over first? (import SMF contents into the vB forum?)

And if so, is there a way to leave the content on SMF and just copy it over? (I really don't want to have to shut down my forums longer than need be!

Thanks in advance :)

[feldon23]

You can start customizing your vBulletin forum immediately. You import your SMF forum into vBulletin using ImpEx, which is a process you can repeat at any time. You are welcome to (and encouraged to) do a few test imports to see if everything comes in how you want it to.

ImpEx imports your SMF forum without modifying anything, so your SMF forum will stay operational. You could do a test import, experiment for a few days/hours, flush the data, and reimport the latest SMF data. I would put your SMF forum on read-only during the transition so people can read but not post to the forum.