Invision Power Board : A User Guide E-Book

Table of Contents

Copyright © 2005 Packt Publishing

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Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, Packt Publishing, nor its dealers or distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

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First edition: June 2005

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

32 Lincoln Road

Olton

Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.

ISBN 10: 1-904811-38-8

ISBN 13: 978-1-904811-38-1

www.packtpub.com

Cover Design by www.visionwt.com

Author

David Mytton

Technical Reviewer

Rikki Tissier

Layout

Paramita Chakrabarti

Indexer

Niranjan Jahagirdar

Illustrator

Dinesh Kandalgaonkar

Commissioning Editor

Douglas Paterson

Technical Editors

Paramita Chakrabarti

Niranjan Jahagirdar

Proofreader

Chris Smith

Cover Designer

Helen Wood

Invision Power Board is the culmination of nearly six years worth of work from me and the other developers at Invision Power Services. My ideas and designs have developed over this time in different products, but the desire to create a product that is not only feature-rich, but also easy to use, has remained constant.

My formative years with the Internet began in 1999, and I joined a few discussion boards to help further my knowledge. The ability to communicate with other like-minded people from around the world fascinated me. The discussion boards of the time were fairly primitive and I began writing enhancements for them. My combined background of design and programming gave me a good foundation for improving on the basic formula.

Invision Power Board is the result of those first tentative steps. I have always believed that the best way to develop a product is to garner the thoughts and ideas of the end user and our thriving community of customers is vital to our success. Some of the best concepts have developed from a nucleus of an idea contributed by a user of our products. This symbiosis is at the very core of our development ideals and this book cements this relationship.

For the first time, a comprehensive book is available to guide and instruct fledgling administrators on how to get the best out of their Invision Power Board—a product developed in line with the wishes of our customers who are seasoned administrators. Although the Internet is a great resource for information, I don’t think that you can beat a good book to hold in your hands to consume the knowledge contained within. This book will take pride of place on my bookshelf, fitting in neatly between programming references and instructional guides. I hope it finds a place in your bookshelf, too.

Matt Mecham

Cambridgeshire, UK.

C.E.O. & C.S.A. Invision Power Services, Inc.

David Mytton is a young web developer based in the UK. Although he spends much of his time programming for the Web, he is also a keen writer having written articles for web development resource SitePoint.com and International PHP Magazine, as well as his own website. These articles included interviews of famous personalities such as Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski (PHP architects and Zend Founders), Matthew Mecham (Invision Power Services CEO and Lead Developer), and Nick Lindridge (ionCube Founder). He does all this in between running his software development company, Olate Ltd (www.olate.co.uk), scuba diving, and fencing.

This book is about obtaining, downloading, installing, configuring, managing, and maintaining a copy of Invision Power Board (IPB) 2 on your own website. It covers general forum management, user moderation, templates, and skins.

Invision Power Board (www.invisionboard.com), originally called IBForums, allows website owners to add a community to their existing site within minutes. Visitors are able to register and post threads discussing any topic, reply to existing messages, and generally participate in active discussion with other members.

If you are reading this, it is probably because you are either already running a community forum, or are planning on establishing one. You may already be using Invision Board 2, an earlier version, or perhaps one of the rival products. Either way, by working through the chapters, you will be introduced to, and provided with, detailed information about Invision Power Board 2 and how to manage it.

If you are interested in using IPB2 for your website or want to learn more about its implementation, then this book is for you.

The only requirement for using this book is that you have a copy, or have access to a copy of Invision Power Board 2. It does not even need to be installed or working since Chapter 2 takes you through the full installation process.

Invision Power Board is available as a commercial product from the Invision Power Services website at http://www.invisionboard.com. You can either purchase a license or you can obtain a free trial. Although the free trial is limited (see IPB website for details), it will allow you to work through everything in this book, with the exception of being able to bulk e-mail your members (which is disabled in the trial).

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

There are three styles for code. Code words in text are shown as follows: “To illustrate the difference, you can print_r() the results of both functions”. A block of code will be set as follows:

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items will be made bold:

New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: “clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen”.

Any command-line input and output is written as follows:

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Now developed by Invision Power Services (www.invisionpower.com), Invision Power Board (www.invisionboard.com), originally called IBForums, was created to add more to the existing bulletin board market. Released on June 12, 2002, Invision Power Board (IPB) version 1.0 allowed website owners to create their own community within minutes. Visitors could register and then post threads discussing any topic, reply to existing messages, and participate in active discussions with other members.

Actively developed to keep up with the rival products, IPB quickly distinguished itself as one of the top three bulletin-board applications. Created using the open-source programming language, PHP: Hypertext Processor (PHP), and powered by a MySQL database, the software can be deployed on almost any server platform, adding to its popularity.

Now in version 2.0, IPB has matured into a tool used not only for personal websites, but also for product feedback, corporate communities, and as an internal communication tool for intranets.

This book will focus on obtaining, downloading, installing, configuring, managing, and maintaining a copy of Invision Power Board 2 on a website. We will also discuss general forum management, user moderation, template design, and hints and tips from Invision Power Services team members.

Charles Warner and Matthew Mecham created Invision Power Services in February 2002. Both were working for the company that acquired an existing bulletin board solution called Ikonboard ( www.ikonboard.com). Both of them noticed the software was left wanting on the development front, and they left the company to join together and launch Invision Power Services. While Matt created IBForums, later renamed Invision Power Board, Charles was selling hosting packages and other services through Invision Power Services.

Ikonboard was created using Perl and Matt felt that even though Perl was a great language, PHP offered greater advantages—mainly its being actively developed. As a result, IPB was created using PHP.

Charles managed the business side of the company, and Matt worked hard on the development of IPB 1.0. On June 12, 2002, the final stable version 1.0 was released. Right away, work started on version 1.1. This was finally launched on January 16, 2003, and included enhancements such as an events calendar, improved skin support, private messaging additions, and various other changes.

Version 1.2 was hot on the heels of 1.1 and was released on August 6, 2003. Version 1.3 followed on November 19, 2003. Version 1.3 was the last of the 1.x range (with the exception of bug fixes). Matt began work on version 2.0, which included PHP5 compatibility, unlimited subforums, more attachment support, a rewrite of the templates system, multi-line moderation, and many more new features.

The first 2.0 alpha release was announced on November 25, 2003—just six days after 1.3 was released! Beta tests followed this up to the last public release test, which was made available on September 10, 2004.

The final, stable version of 2.0 launched on 21st September, 2005 has brought Invision Power Board to the forefront of the bulletin-board software market.

In an interview in April 2004, Matt Mecham provided a deep insight into exactly what has gone into IPB2’s development. Although he is the CEO and co-founder of Invision Power Services, Matt focuses mainly on the product development side, and is the sole developer of Invision Power Board. He does all the coding and is backed up by outsourced template designers and support team employed by Invision Power Services.

Based in the UK, Matt works with Charles (in the US) to discuss business management, but works alone when it comes to writing the PHP source code for the application. Using an Apple Mac development environment, Matt works in nine-hour blocks, stopping only for coffee-breaks!

You can read the full interview at www.olate.com/articles/199 to find out more about the development process.

Invision Power Board 2 is the latest version and has many feature enhancements and improvements to make your life as an administrator much easier.

The major feature highlights include:

These additions, plus all the other features, are covered in the relevant chapters of this book.

There are many different forum software packages available either for free, or to purchase. Why should you use IPB2?

Many busy websites use live versions of Invision Power Board 2. At the time of writing, the second biggest IPB-powered forum was S2KI (www.s2ki.com/forums/)—a Honda S2000 owners’ community. This had over 4.5 million posts and over 32,000 members. The largest forum was idolforums.com—a point of discussion for the American Idol TV Series. At over 6.3 million posts and with over 34,000 members, it certainly shows off how IPB can scale to any size!

One of the best examples of this is the Invision Power Services Company Forums themselves. At http://forums.invisionpower.com, they use the very latest version on a live site with 700,000 posts and 50,000 members!

My own website uses IPB and takes advantage of the Converge member system to integrate into my own products. This means customers only need to register once to get access to all resources. This is very easy to achieve using the PHP classes and documentation built directly into the IPB source code. You can see my company forums at www.olate.co.uk/forums.

Other websites using IPB include:

This demonstrates how scalable IPB can be—from the very smallest of member bases to millions of posts and thousands of members.

As of the stable version 2.0 release (21st September 2004), the full version of IPB cannot be downloaded for free. You have the option of purchasing a full license (of which there are two varieties) or obtaining a restricted version, which is limited to five thousand posts, one thousand topics, and two hundred members.

In addition, you can purchase a hosting account that includes a full lifetime license (for the duration of the hosting), although the forum is encoded to work only on the IPS servers.