I have been running Threads for 6 years now and have been itching to upgrade to something more forward-leaning. I like a lot of what you have done with 7.0, but have a few questions:

1. I notice that the Portal Page is loaded as a page off of the ubbthreads directory. Is there anyway to have people see the portal page as my index page? In other words, when someone hits I want them to see the Portal. Possible?

2. How "spider friendly" is 7.0? I get a fair amount of google-bots and others on my site now that crawl all over the place. As a result, my site is ranked #1 for a certain set of key words. Id hate to loose that.

3. I read in one of your posts that you were considering an integrated picture gallery. Any idea how far down the road that is? (I have both an integrated Gallery and Classifieds now which I would have to give up to move to 7.0. I could still have them, they just would not be integrated).

4. Does 7.0 have any provision for making Generic integrated off-forum pages? In other words, I have several pages that I've added to my site which use the same header/footer and styles as selected by my users. Can this be done easily with 7.0?

5. If I import from 6.5.1, will anything be lost? (attachments, avatars, user profile fields, private messages, etc). Just would like to have a feel for what might be lost from the current community.

Thanks,
Basil

(I'll probably think of another question as soon as I hit the Submit button).

Hi,

1) You can redirect this either within a vhost.conf or htaccess file - or create an index.php with

<?php
header("Location: http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/threads/index.php"); /* Redirect browser */

exit;

?>

If you already have an index.html in that root folder, just make sure the server reads index.php first

2) Can't comment as I haven't checked yet - but it looks good so far - not sure how others have found it.

3) In the next version or two - photopost works well with ubbt7 at the moment - and hopefully Rick will have an import available (he hopes )

4) Yes you should have no problems

5) Everything should be there - however you might need to alter paths and manually copy over images if your forums are located in a new sub-directory. Or build your new site in a new directory, then when you are happy copy it to your existing directory overwriting the the files (not forgetting to alter the paths in the config files)

Hope that helps - I am sure Rick or one of the others will correct me if I am wrong, or expand upon any answers.

the best way is to follow Ian's sugguestion of the header redirect on a php page.

I get a huge chunk of my traffic from google; I've done a lot of checks of the spider compatability and it looks great, the only improvement i can hope for in the future is a "fake .html extention" like UBB.C had... Though keep in mind us UBBDever's partially a reason Infopop/Groupee does short urls now adays hehe...

For now we're working on bugs, so it'll be likely that it'll be a couple of months until 7.1 gets out... I'm sure the picture gallery and newer features will come in each full release, but we'll all be on the lookout...

I can't really comment on the others as I'm not a .t6 user...