Invision power board 2 a user guide your guide to creating forums with invision power board

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

A User Guide

David Mytton

A User Guide

Copyright © 2005 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews

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

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the

accuracy of this information

First edition: June 2005

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd

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

About the Author

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

Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Invision Power Board 5

What Is Invision Power Board? 6 History 6 Development 7

Performance 8Customizability 8

Step 1: Uploading and Setting Permissions 16

Conversion 21

Summary 23

Chapter 3: Tour: User Front End 25

Topics 31

User Control Panel/My Controls 38

Messenger 40Subscriptions 40

Options 44

Settings: CPU Saving and Optimization 62

Summary 74

Chapter 5: Admin Panel Tour: Forum Control 75

Posts in this Forum Increase Member's Cumulative Post Count? 79 Moderation 79

Sorting 80

Chapter 6: Admin Panel Tour: Users, Groups

Editing 106 Deleting 106

Chapter 7: Forum Maintenance and Administration 115

Members 118

IPB Moderation Tools 122

Multi-Moderation 124

Edit/Remove 126

Maintenance 127 Backups 128 Summary 128

Chapter 8: Skins and Templates 129

Change the Default Font Type, Font Size,

Templates 137

Replacement Macros 144Adding/Editing 144

Export 149Import 150

Adding a Member to the New Moderators Group 155

Forums 155 Tweaks 156

Ranks 157

Summary 162

Appendix A: Files and Directories 163

Directories 163 Files 165

Appendix B: Further Resources 167

PHP/MySQL Resources 169

Index 171

Introduction

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

What This Book Covers

The book starts with an overview of Invision Power Board (IPB), its history, advantages, and some sites that are using IPB

Chapter 2 walks you through an installation of IPB, including the

necessary preparation work and post-installation tasks

Chapter 3 takes you through the user front end of your new forum This

includes a visit to forums, topics, posts, searching, the calendar, and the user control panel This is the section that your visitors will spend all their time using and this chapter ensures that you are familiar with how

Chapters 4 and 5 give you an in-depth tour of the area you will initially

spend your time in, changing settings, creating forums, and later

managing your entire user base Every option has been discussed so that you can effectively manage everything IPB offers

Chapter 6 provides you with details about what running a real forum is

about It includes hints and tips from other forum owners and takes a good look at how to manage topics and posts using the advanced

moderation tools IPB includes

Chapter 7 takes you through the various aspects of user management for

creating a successful community and provides useful tips for running a successful board

Chapter 8 guides you through one of the most important aspects of

creating your own, personalized forum—the skins and templates The look of your site is what distinguishes it from other competing forums so this chapter is important to help you make your copy of IPB unique

Chapter 9 is a step-by-step guide to getting your forum up and running in

the shortest time possible It explains exactly how to get going right after you have installed IPB onto your website It provides sample settings so you can be ready to launch it in almost no time at all

What You Need for Using This Book

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)

Conventions

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:

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1

Invision Power Board

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

The top forum applications today are Invision Power Board,

phpBB (www.phpbb.com), and vBulletin (www.vbulletin.com)

However, many other bulletin-board packages (both paid for and

free) are available

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

What Is Invision Power Board?

A community adds extra value to almost any website One of the many goals of website owners is to keep visitors returning for more content Launching a bulletin board (also known as a forum) can have that effect—members participate in discussion about (but not limited to) topics they are visiting the website for This can provide extra help, answer questions, and introduce another support channel into your website All this adds to the 'stickiness' of your website

But how do you go about creating a community? This is where IPB steps

in Written specifically to allow you to create a discussion forum, IPB provides all the tools, features, and functionality that you need to set up and develop a vibrant community And because it specializes in this one aspect of your website, all its features are geared towards this goal; you can leave the improvement and additions to the Invision Power Services developers, while you manage the rest of your website

History

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

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

Development

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

What is New in IPB2?

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:

• New Emoticons Manager

• Threaded, Outline, and Linear + View Mods

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

The IPB Advantage

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

Performance

Running a successful website or forum with thousands of members and threads can place considerable strain on your web server Yet with IPB2, this is not the case It is designed to scale extremely well, and has demonstrated the ability to do so on massive forums! Using advanced caching for templates and language files to reduce the number of

database queries (and coming in version 2.1, even more caching and

load-reducing features such as Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) to allow instant changes to be made with no page refreshing),

and content caching, IPB will certainly stand up to anything you can throw at it

Customizability

Look is an extremely important aspect of any website, and IPB certainly

In this book, you will learn all about this system including how to

download and import templates created by other people, and how to make your own templates

Maintenance Ease

The unique and intuitive moderation controls present in IPB2 come as a direct result of the developers using their own software For example, the multi-moderation feature allows actions to be defined through the Admin Control Panel, and they can be performed on multiple topics and posts at once (for example, rename the title and post an auto response)

In addition, the Admin Panel itself is extremely well designed to allow access to every option from a left-hand menu Each section is color-coded and includes descriptions for every option to help the maintenance

of the board as it grows Development is based around the experiences of customers and IPS themselves Version 2.1 shows this with refinements

to the moderator controls and the admin panel

Versatility

Not only can IPB be used as a forum, but also as a bug tracker by taking advantage of the features provided by the multi-moderation tools

allowing mass actions to be performed

The fact that all the source code is available to view means that many modifications can be downloaded or bought—especially those created by IPB These include:

• Invision Gallery: The Gallery product plugs directly into

your forum to allow members to upload their own photos

and to create a community photo gallery

• Invision Blog: Take advantage of the massive growth in use

of web logs (blogs) by allowing you and your members to create blogs, through your forum

• Invision Power Chat: Bring your community even closer by

operating a chat room built into the IPB member database

• Invision Top Site List: Create a classified list of websites

and useful links that you and your members can add to using the Top Site List product

• Invision File Manager: A free product to add to your

forum: allow members to manage their own files and

download them directly from within your forum

All the products above are integrated directly into IPB itself to take advantage of the built-in member database This can be coupled with the Converge system, which you can use if you are a developer, to ensure your members need to log in only once at your website

Example Websites

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:

ISBN: 978-1-847196-22-4 Paperback: 340 pages Find the best CMS and start working with it to create web sites, blogs, communities, e-commerce sites, and intranets

1 Understand different types of CMSs and select the one that best fits your needs

2 Install and customize a CMS with themes and plug-ins

3 Learn key concepts of Content Management Systems and how to systematically assess your requirements

4 Introduction to the major CMSs including Joomla!, Drupal, WordPress, Plone, Magento, Alfresco, and more

5 A hands-on, easy-to-read guide that gives you practical tips on hosting, project management, working with specialists and communities, and finding experts

2

Installation and Configuration

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

Invision Power Services is one of the many web-hosting

companies available A simple search on Google will reveal

many other top companies

This chapter will focus upon the purchase, download, installation, and configuration of IPB2 at the end of which you will have a fully licensed and working copy of Invision Power Board 2

Minimum Requirements

In order to use IPB, you need to have the following available to you:

An operating system that supports PHP and MySQL e.g Linux or

Windows

If you are using the restricted version, you will need the ionCube or Zend Loaders, which can be downloaded from www.ioncube.com

and www.zend.com respectively

PHP 4.1.0 (or better) available at www.php.net

• MySQL 3.23 (or better) available at www.mysql.com

Although the Zend-encoded version of IPB requires loaders to be installed, ionCube has a feature to allow run-time loading so that you do not always need to install the loaders If you are unsure, you should contact your web-hosting company

You only need one MySQL database—IPB supports table prefixes You will need your MySQL access details—username, password, and database name You will also need approximately 2MB of free web space and 3 MB of SQL space for installation and a moderately sized community You can obtain advice from your web-hosting

company about this

Licenses

IPB2 is not free software In order to use it, you must purchase a license Once purchased, you have access to the software and the additional services that are offered by Invision Power Services

Two different licenses are available for purchase:

Yearly License at $69.95: This license provides access to IPB for

one year During this time, you can download the latest version and all updates released for use on one installation Installation is also allowed on a private server with no public access or registrations

disabled for testing purposes At the end of the year if the license is not renewed IPB will continue to run, but you cannot download any updates or new versions released

Perpetual License at $185.00: Purchasing the Perpetual License

allows access to all future product upgrades and releases for life

Support Service: You can submit tickets to obtain technical support

from the IPS support team as well as via the Live Chat support

services Free telephone support is also included (US customers use

a toll-free number International customers will have to pay

international dialing rates to call the United States.)

• Installation and Upgrades: You can have the IPS staff

install or upgrade existing versions of the product onto your hosting account within 24 hours

Purchasing and the Client Area

Once you have decided which license you would like to buy, ordering only takes a few moments When you visit www.invisionboard.com/ act.ips/download you are presented with a number of extra options including different database drivers (MySQL included) and copyright output removal

Clicking Continue will then provide you with a summary of your order You are also notified that orders can take up to 24 hours to verify due to fraud prevention checks The following steps collect personal

information about you and allow you to set up an account:

Payment is accepted through Visa, MasterCard, American

Express, Discover, and JCB Diners credit cards, Electronic

Check drawn on US bank accounts, PayPal, United Kingdom Debit Cards (Delta, Maestro/Switch, Solo, Electron), and check

or money order from US or UK banks

Once your order is completed, you can log in to the Client Area at http://customer.invisionpower.com You will be presented with various options Click on Invision Power Board on the right hand side, under Purchased Services This will show you a list of the licenses you have purchased, a form to submit a technical support ticket, and (at the bottom of the page) a link to download the latest version of IPB

Click on the Download IPB Now link and after a few seconds, the ZIP package will be offered as a download Save this to your local computer and get ready for the next step

Installation

The first part of the installation is uploading the IPB files and setting the correct permissions Once that is completed, the automated, web-based installer guides you through the setup of the database Finally, the installer file must be deleted for security reasons The entire process is completed in three steps

Step 1: Uploading and Setting Permissions

Once you have obtained the IPB zip package, you need to extract all the files This can be done using the extraction tool WinZip

(www.winzip.com) or by using any of the many free tools available (see www.snapfiles.com/freeware/downloader/fwzip.html)

Once extracted, you will have three directories—Documentation, Tools_And_Scripts, and upload as well as a readme.html file

See Appendix A: Files and Directories for the full directory structure

Next, you need to upload the upload/ directory to your web-hosting account This can be done using your favorite FTP Client There are many clients available—free, as well as paid for One of the best freely available clients is SmartFTP (www.smartftp.com) You should upload all the files and sub-directories of the upload/ root directory:

FTP, or File Transfer Protocol, is used when you transfer files

from your computer to a remote server These files are

"uploaded" to the server so they can be accessed via the Web FTPing is done via an FTP Client such as the free SmartFTP

mentioned above You will find an introduction to FTP at the

SmartFTP website:

http://www.smartftp.com/support/howto/

Once uploaded, you can freely rename upload/ to something more suitable such as forum/, forums/, or community/

Following that, you must change the file permissions so that IPB can write to certain directories This can be done using the chmod command from Linux or by using your FTP client Most FTP clients build this into their right-click menu Right-click on the files, select Properties, and select the options to change the file permissions You should chmod (or set the permissions) as the following:

Directory cache/ to 0755

Directory lang/ and all contents to 0755

Directory skin_cache/ to 0755 (or 0777 if you get permission

chmod is a Linux command For Windows users, you must

ensure that your web server has access to the files concerned, which is usually done by right-clicking the file on the server (or through your FTP client) and changing the permissions options

to read and write access

This allows the application to write to those directories during the installation and during the normal use of the software If you do not set the correct permissions, a warning will be displayed when you try to run the Web-Based Installer in the next step

Now that all the files have been uploaded and have the correct

permissions, you can use the installer to begin the setup process

Step 2: Web-Based Installer

If you uploaded your files in Step 1 to forums/ and your domain name is http://www.example.com then you would access the installer by going

to http://www.example.com/forums/install To give a real-world example: for a domain name http://www.olate.co.uk with the files uploaded to forums/, the setup URL would be http://www.olate.co uk/forums/install You will then be shown the welcome screen for the installer Click on Proceed

The next step requires input of the information available from your web host This includes the database details and the administrative account login information

Your Server Environment

The IPBindex.phpURL should already be set to the correct address If not, you can set it manually Following the example we used above, if you uploaded your files in Step 1 to forums/ and your domain name is http://www.example.com, then the correct value will be

http://www.example.com/forums:

Your Database Environment

This information—the access details required to connect to your

database— can be obtained from your web-hosting company The table prefix will be added to the beginning of the name of all tables created to avoid confusion This is useful if you have many tables in your database The default is ibf_, but you could change it to something like forums_

This is just a case of adding forums_ (or whatever prefix you would like

to use) into the SQL Table Prefix box:

If any of the information you enter is incorrect, when you click Proceed, you will be shown an error message explaining what went wrong

Your Administrator Account

The first account created on your forums will be your own and will have full administrative access to all functions of the forum You should specify a username and password for this account here Note that it is

important to choose a strong password (i.e not admin for username or

password) If someone guesses or cracks your username and password, they will be able to access everything in your forum

Passwords should be at least six characters long and should

contain no dictionary words They should be a mixture of upper and lower case characters and numbers This is your primary

Once you have clicked on Proceed, you will be told that the board has been installed with the exception of the templates Clicking on the Click here to continue link will continue the setup process You then need to clean up the installer and caches Clicking on the Click here to finish link will complete the installation

Step 3: Post-Installation

Before you can finally use your new Invision Power Board, you must delete the install/index.php file on your server—simply renaming the file will not suffice This prevents any malicious user running the setup process and overwriting your board

Once you have done this, you can login to the Administrator Control Panel of IPB2 using the username and password you specified

during Step 2

Conversion

If you have one of the many rival forum packages, the Invision Power Services team can assist you in the conversion to IPB2 The following applications can be converted to IPB2:

Ikonboard 2.1.x

Ikonboard 3.0.x DBM and MYSQL

Ikonboard 3.1.x DBM and MYSQL

Various other downloads related to IPB are available at

www.invisionboard.com/download These include the latest full release, update packages, development releases, and the Graphics Development Kit for IPB2 The creation of your own skin is covered later in the book

If you access this section after logging in to the Client Area, you will see

a link to your personalized Download Center This includes download history, documentation, further upgrade packages, and a direct URL to download the IPB2 full package Not only this, but downloads of the full package can be customized to your needs

Summary

In this chapter, we have looked at the different licenses available for purchase as well as the free, restricted version We have seen how go through the installation process from downloading IPB to running the installer and completing the installation of the Invision Power Board We will now be able to log in to our Administrator Control Panel and the front end to manage and use our forum

Configure, manage and maintain your own vBulletin discussion forum

1 Get your own forum up and running quickly

2 Extensive coverage of the Administration Control Panel to put you on the right track for managing your board

3 Customize the appearance of your vBulletin forum

4 Change the site’s behavior by developing and installing hacks

Blogger: Beyond the Basics

ISBN: 978-1-847193-17-9 Paperback: 356 pages Customize and promote your blog with original templates, analytics, advertising, and SEO

1 Customize your Blogger templates

2 Grow your blog into a professional, feature-rich site

3 Add social bookmarks to your blog

4 Optimize your blog with SEO

5 Integrate analytics and advertising with your Blogger blog

6 Concise, clear, and easy to follow; rich with examples

3

Tour: User Front End

Now that you have a copy of Invision Power Board installed, configured, and ready to go, you should be itching to actually use it! Most of what you and your visitors will see while browsing the site is the User Front End This is where most of the action takes place: creating and replying

to threads, viewing new posts, updating your profile, and much more This chapter will take you through the main features present in the user front end starting with the forums and postings, and then moving on to other features like the User Control Panel; I will explain each of the

features, which will soon become a major part of your daily routine:

Forums and Threads: The real meat of the board, where the

"community spirit" lies

Posting: How to get involved, and participate in active discussions

User Control Panel: Manage your online profile and control

specific settings relevant to your viewing experience

Miscellaneous features:

o Using the search engine: Find the information you need,

quickly and easily

o Private messaging and subscriptions: Keep up to date

with your contributions to threads and messages to

other members

o Calendar: Manage your time effectively; share important events with other members

The Index Page

On visiting your page, users see the site's index page This presents users

with a list of forums (categories of content), allowing them to find the topic they are interested in, much like a table of contents for a book On successful installation, if you visit your site you will see the following:

A majority of site visitors usually come searching for content Hence, it's