I think the easiest (& most stable) solution is to use a symlink such as ln -s /path/to/bbpress newname in the folder where you want the new forum to appear (probably at the top level of your server).
Then, once that’s running, open your config.php and change $bb->path = '/newname/';
I think that’s all, and you have the advantage of being able to get the symlink working before asking bbpress to use the new path when creating links.
Anyone see any gotchas with that?
Only gotchas I can see would be in the content of the posts, if there are links from one post to another post within the forum. They will break.
The symlink would mean old URI’s would still work, but any new URI’s generated (on every new page) would point to the preferred address.
I think it’s maybe also worth adding this to robots.txt a:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /your-old-folder
So that any robots that discover one of the older URLs don’t go indexing what they might consider as duplicate pages.
Longer term you could also add a 301 redirect to htaccess to ensure any links to the old content have rank properly attributed to the new location… but this is probably getting waaay too complex if it’s a new installation.
Another alternative, of course, is to just rename the folder and change your config.php – it’s more maverick than the symlink approach, but if your forum is new and has no fully qualified self referencing links contained within, then it’s not much of a wrench to just move the whole kaboodle.
