[veerendradarakh]

Greetings all ye WordPress gurus,
This is pertaining to the site http://www.dentistrytoday.info ( made in drupal 6.34 )

Drupal 6.34 is now outdated. Support for Drupal 6 has been withdrawn and furthermore drupal development is expensive.

So I have decided to migrate the forums from drupal to some other CMS. I also want to move away from Drupal since I find Drupal development is expensive.

To migrate the site from drupal to some other CMS I have some queries.

My queries to this esteemed forum.
1. Which CMS is the best for a discussion forum?
2. I want to migrate to a CMS which is easy to use, mobile friendly, responsive and easy to modify and refine.
3. Plenty of developers must be available for the forums for that particular CMS so that maintaining, refining and upgrading the forums can be done at a reasonable cost.
4. The CMS must get updated automatically. Will the phbBB forum get updated automatically? I am told that wordpress sites get updated automatically. Will the forums made in wordpress get updated automatically?
5. We want conduct all activities on the forum that are usually done on educational sites like webinars, email newsletters, email newsletters with case presentations, blogs etc.
6. If we migrate it to wordpress forums what kind of security precautions shoud I take, pre and post migration. I am told that wordpress sites are more vulnerable to hacking than Drupal sites.
7. Besides the forums must be secure and if possible I want to have the registration form without a captcha challenge.
8. My staff must be able to take offline and online backups of the site easily.
9. Can wordpress forum can support forums of bigger sizes (80,000 forum articles and 30,000 users). Also which plugins will be better for users and forums so that their updation does not affect the live site once it is launched.

Hope to see a lot of responses and many thanks in advance for the same.

Regards,
Dr. Veerendra Darakh

[veerendradarakh]

I would be greatly obliged if I receive a few responses.

Regards,
Dr. Veerendra Darakh

[Robkk]

1. An answer to this is really a personal opinion on what you prefer specifically from each.

2. For WordPress you need a theme, Im sure its the same for others.

3. Just so you know WordPress is the CMS and bbPress is just piggybacking and using APIs from such. WordPress is updated quite frequently. You can allow bbPress to update automatically if you want through some plugin.

4. I don’t know why you brought up phpbb here, but bbPress can be automatically updated using a plugin. WordPress is updated automatically for security releases, and sometimes hosts cann allow you to just allow it to update automatically all the time.

5. Blog functionality comes packaged with WordPress, you can add other features using plugins or themes.

6. Read this for hardening WordPress.

https://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress

7. For captcha plugins that work with bbPress check out this guide.

https://codex.bbpress.org/getting-started/forum-moderation/dealing-with-spam/#registration-spam

8. Use a plugin, or online service, or check your hosting provider.

https://codex.bbpress.org/getting-started/before-installing/backing-up-your-database-and-files/

9. Yes this forum has more than 100k topics. Users you will be fine.

Also which plugins will be better for users and forums so that their updation does not affect the live site once it is launched.

IF you are talking about plugin/theme/WordPress updates. Try to avoid automatic updates so you do not come across issues during an update and check to see if the update does not have any issues below rolling it out. Or just take frequent backups to avoid update issues and just roll back to a previous state.