A Short Guide of SMF to WordPress Migration.
SMF is an Internet free forum application which allows to create and manage forums. It is certainly a good choice for those users who prefer to install and manage a forum without much time and money investing. It provides its followers with a wide range of templates and themes and, what is more, allows total control over the content.
Despite its advantages, SMF has some significant drawbacks. They are as follows:
does not support custom BBCode buttons;
no custom profile fields;
no user rating;
no search flood control;
no customizable private message filters.
It has always been more beneficial to switch from quite simple SMF to more powerful WordPress due to reasons which will be stated below.
WordPress is an award-winning CMS in terms of flexibility and multifunctionality. Where the platform really shines is in the ability to build and maintain not only a forum, but also a blog, a website or any other kind of web project. With a huge number of themes and templates, you may change the visual look of your website and make it refreshed as often as you wish. Basically, the platform is user-friendly and doesn’t expect strong programming skills to master and operate it. Out of all CMSs, WordPress is well-supported and has the largest community out there, which provide a good support in case you get stuck. One more speak-for-itself-advantage is SEO. Needless to say that Google loves WordPress because, by default, its sites are built with clean code and basic templates are free of bloat.
To wrap it all up, if you want to build and maintain a forum without any investments, have no experience with HTML and PHP - SMF is the way to go. In case you are considering a more professional website creation with more functionalities and possibilities - WordPress certainly takes the cake.
If you are currently running a SMF forum but wish to expand your website functionality with WordPress - you have an excellent opportunity to switch from SMF to WordPressby means of CMS2CMS automated service. Here are steps for you to get the general idea of migration procedure:
Step 1. Create an account. It’s just a matter of a few mouse clicks to visit www.cms2cms.com
Step 2. Specify your Source and Target Sites. Then point out URLs of both sites.
Step 3. Create the Connection between your Forums through downloading the bridge file. After extracting the folder from the zip file connect to your SMF forum via FTP. Do the same with WordPress.
Step 4. Start Demo Migration in order to check up the service in action.
Step 5. If you are completely satisfied with the results of Demo, perform Full Migration by clicking the corresponding button.
