Invision Power Board 2: A User Guide
David Mytton
BIRMINGHAM MUMBAI
Invision Power Board 2: 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. 32 Lincoln Road Olton Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK. ISBN 1-904811-38-8 www.packtpub.com
Cover Design by www.visionwt.com
Credits Author David Mytton Technical Reviewer Rikki Tissier
Commissioning Editor Douglas Paterson Technical Editors Paramita Chakrabarti Niranjan Jahagirdar
Layout Paramita Chakrabarti
Proofreader Chris Smith
Indexer Niranjan Jahagirdar
Cover Designer Helen Wood
Illustrator Dinesh Kandalgaonkar
Foreword 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.
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.
Table of Contents Introduction Chapter 1: Invision Power Board
1 5
What Is Invision Power Board? History Development What is New in IPB2? The IPB Advantage Performance Customizability Maintenance Ease Versatility Example Websites
6 6 7 7 8 8 8 9 9 10
Chapter 2: Installation and Configuration Minimum Requirements Licenses Purchasing and the Client Area Installation Step 1: Uploading and Setting Permissions Step 2: Web-Based Installer Your Server Environment Your Database Environment Your Administrator Account
Step 3: Post-Installation Conversion Other Downloads Summary
13 13 13 14 16 16 18 19 19 20
21 21 22 23
Table of Contents
Chapter 3: Tour: User Front End The Index Page The Member Bar Forums and Categories The Footer Bar Lo-Fi Version
Viewing Forums Topics Creating a New Topic BBCode and Smilies Post Options Attachments Post New Topic/Preview Post Add Reply Fast Reply User Control Panel/My Controls Control Panel Index Messenger Subscriptions Personal Profile Edit Profile Info Edit Signature Edit Avatar Settings Change Personal Photo
Options Manage Your Attachments Manage Ignored Users E-Mail Settings Board Settings Change E-Mail Address/Password
Moderator Tools Searching Private Messaging Compose New Message Message Folders (Inbox, Sent Items, and Saved) Edit Storage Folders ii
25 26 27 27 28 28
28 31 34 34 36 36 37 37 37 38 38 40 40 41 41 42 42 44
44 45 45 45 46 46
46 47 49 49 50 50
Table of Contents
Empty PM Folders
50
PM Buddies/Block List Message Tracker Calendar Moderation Summary
51 51 51 52 52
Chapter 4: Administration Panel Tour: Settings Admin CP The Menu ACP Home System Settings Important Settings Settings: Board Guidelines Settings: Board Offline/Online Settings: Calendar and Birthdays Settings: Converge Set Up Settings: Cookies Settings: COPPA Setup Settings: CPU Saving and Optimization Settings: Date and Time Formats Settings: E-Mail Setup Settings: Full Text Search Setup Settings: General Configuration Settings: News Setup Settings: Personal Message Setup Settings: Search Engine Spiders Settings: Security and Privacy Settings: Topics, Posts and Polls Settings: The Trashcan Setup Settings: User Profiles Settings: Warn Setup Summary
53 53 55 56 56 58 59 59 60 60 61 61 62 64 66 67 67 68 68 68 69 71 72 72 72 74
iii
Table of Contents
Chapter 5: Admin Panel Tour: Forum Control New Forum Quick Setup Basic Settings Forum Redirect Options Permission Settings Postable Forum Settings Allow HTML to be Posted? Allow BBCode to be Posted? Turn on the Quick Reply Box? Allow Polls and Vote Bumping? Posts in this Forum Increase Member's Cumulative Post Count? Moderation Password Protection Sorting
Permission Access Levels Create this Forum Manage Forums Categories New Forum Permissions, Edit, and Delete Ordering
Forums Settings Permissions Forum Rules Skin Options Resynchronize Delete and Empty Forum Ordering
Permission Masks Create New Mask Edit Preview Moderators Add Moderator
Multi-Moderation Summary iv
75 75 76 76 77 77 77 77 78 78 79 79 79 79 80
80 82 82 82 82 82 82
83 83 83 83 83 84 84 84
84 85 86 87 87 88
90 90
Table of Contents
Chapter 6: Admin Panel Tour: Users, Groups & Other Features Users and Groups Manage Members Edit Member's Profile Change Member's Name Change/Reset Password Suspend Member Delete Member
Add New Member Manage Ranks Add a Member Rank Edit/Delete Rank
Manage Usergroups Add a New Member Group Edit Group Delete
Manage Validating Custom Profile Fields
91 91 92 93 96 96 96 97
97 97 97 98
98 99 102 104
104 104
Add New Field Editing Deleting
105 106 106
IP Member Tools Member Settings The Post Office Creating an E-Mail
106 107 107 108
Filters Sending
Manage Bulk Mail View E-Mail/Error Logs Subscriptions Payment Gateways Gateway Configuration
Subscription Packages Add New Subscription Package Currency Setup
Transaction Searching Languages
109 109
110 110 110 111 111
112 112 113
113 114 v
Table of Contents
BBCode Add New BBCode Filters Bad Word Filters Ban Filters Statistics Summary
114 115 116 116 116 117 117
Chapter 7: Forum Maintenance and Administration 115 Hints and Tips Your Forum/Website Members Moderation and Problems IPB Moderation Tools Inline Moderation Multi-Moderation Add a New Multi-Moderation Action Using the Multi-Moderation Edit/Remove
Prune/Mass Move Maintenance Backups Summary
Chapter 8: Skins and Templates Common Tasks Changing the Logo Change the Default Font Type, Font Size, and Font Color Skin Manager Skin Menu The Board Wrapper Templates Template Bits Editing a Template Bit
CSS Editing in Easy Mode CSS Editing in Advanced Mode vi
116 116 118 120 122 123 124 125 126 126
126 127 128 128
129 130 130 131 132 134 135 137 139 140
141 143
Table of Contents
Replacement Macros
144
Adding/Editing
144
Edit Skin Settings
145
Basics CSS Options Image Options Set Author
146 147 147 147
Skin Tools Rebuild Master Templates Rebuild Skin Set Cache Update Members Skin Choice Search and Replace Skin Import/Export Export Import Summary
147 148 148 148 149 149 149 150 151
Chapter 9: First Steps—A Guide
151
Initial Configuration Licensing User Groups Adding a Moderator User Group
151 152 152 153
Adding a Member to the New Moderators Group
Forums Tweaks Ranks Profile Fields Bad Word Filters Skins and Templates Modifications Robots.txt Bot List Securing Uploads Other Modifications Promotion Managing Your Forum
155
155 156 157 157 158 158 159 159 160 160 161 161 162 vii
Table of Contents
Summary
Appendix A: Files and Directories Directories Files
Appendix B: Further Resources PHP/MySQL Resources
Index
viii
162
163 163 165
167 169
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 everything works.
Introduction
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).
2
Introduction
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: "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: <% NAVIGATION %> <% BOARD %> <% BOARD FOOTER %> <% STATS %>
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". Tips, suggestions, or important notes appear in a box like this. Any command-line input and output is written as follows: >\. mydump.sql Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
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Introduction
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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 moderation, template design, and hints and tips from Invision Power Services team members.
Invision Power Board
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 such as an events calendar, improved skin support, private messaging additions, and various other changes.
6
Chapter 1
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.
7
Invision Power Board
The major feature highlights include: •
Inline moderation
•
Lo-fi content version
•
Custom BBCode
•
Improved calendar
•
Attachments Manager
•
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 does not disappoint. It provides an extremely flexible template system and even includes web-based CSS editing, template revision reverts, macros, and replacement variables. 8
Chapter 1
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 colorcoded 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.
9
Invision Power Board
•
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.
10
Chapter 1
Other websites using IPB include: •
acne.org/messageboard
•
blackadderhall.com/forum
•
creditboards.com
•
drunkfoundation.com/forum
•
forums.amd.com
•
forums.nvidia.com
•
forums.revora.net
•
gmailforums.com
•
invisionize.com
•
square-enix-forums.com
•
thirdwatch.net/forum
This demonstrates how scalable IPB can be—from the very smallest of member bases to millions of posts and thousands of members. You can view the latest statistics for the biggest IPB-powered forums at www.big-boards.com/index.php?type=Invision.
11
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 A PHP/MySQL-compatible web server e.g. Apache (www.apache.org)
Installation and Configuration
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. Free support is provided for the first year with an annual renewal fee of $30.00. Your purchase does not just include a license to use the software and upgrades—several extra services are included with all licenses: 14
Chapter 2
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:
15
Installation and Configuration
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 listing of upload/.
16
Chapter 2
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/.
17
Installation and Configuration
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 errors) Directory style_emoticons/ to 0755 Directory style_images/ to 0755 Directory uploads/ to 0755 (or 0777 if you get permission errors) •
File conf_global.php to 0666 (or 0777 if you get permission errors)
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. chmod
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 The database and initial configuration must be set up using a simple automated process through your web browser before using the board.
18
Chapter 2
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 IPB index.php URL 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_.
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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 admin account so a strong password is recommended.
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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
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Ikonboard 3.1.x DBM and MYSQL vBulletin 2.2.x vBulletin 3.x phpBB 2.x XMB 1.x YaBB SE YaBB Gold UBB 5.x & 6.x OpenBB 1.x Burning Board 1.x BlazeBoard 0.x tForum •
DCForum
More information about paid for and free conversion can be found at www.invisionboard.com/?convertors.
Other Downloads 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.
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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.
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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.
Tour: User Front End
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 only fair that it's as easy as possible to get to and read the content. An Invision Power Board forum doesn't disappoint; using the tried and tested method of forums and threads, all available content is conveniently organized into relevant categories. 26
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During installation, your board is automatically created with some sample data. This consists of a forum (named A Test Forum), and a thread within that forum (entitled Welcome!) posted by IPB Team. As you can see, there is quite a lot of information to take in, so we will now go over the major parts.
The Member Bar This bar is shown at the top of the page. If a user not logged in, this bar is red and asks the guest user to either log in or register. When the user logs in, this bar will show links to the Admin Control Panel (if you are an administrator) and the User Control Panel, a link to view any new posts since your last visit, a help tool called My Assistant, and a count of your private messages.
Forums and Categories On a freshly installed copy of Invision Power Board, you can see a category called 'A Test Root', with a forum and thread. Categories are the main sections of your community. For example, in a site that discusses methods of travel, a category could encompass the major methods of travel: land, sea, or air. Within these, you would have forums for each of the specific ways to travel. These would then hold discussion relevant to that particular method of travel. For each forum, you will see the name, the description, the number of topics and replies within that forum, along with the details of the last post within that forum. The topic and the name of the user are shown as clickable links so that you can go to that topic or the user's profile. Beneath the forum listing you will see the board statistics. These include the users active within the last 15 minutes, birthdays of members who have entered their birthdates into their profile, forthcoming calendar events, and a set of general statistics (total posts, total users, newest members, and the most users ever online at one time).
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The Footer Bar At the bottom of the forum, on every page, you will notice a (by default) blue bar with several options:
On the left is a skin selector that lets members choose a forum skin (if you have several installed); this is followed by the quick language selector, which allows users to switch between the languages you may have installed. On the far right, you will see some debugging information. Enabled by default, you (if you are the administrator) can see how long it took to generate the page (in seconds), and the number of database queries executed. Clicking on queries will take you to a page listing all of them. At the bottom of the page, you can see which version of IPB you are running.
Lo-Fi Version The lo-fi pages are cut-down versions of the main areas of the forums. They provide a very simple interface displaying the categories and forums as well as topics and threads. This is useful for users on very slow connections but more importantly, for search-engine spiders. It is much easier for search engines to spider your forums if there is a simplified section that provides the main content and nothing else.
Viewing Forums Clicking on the name of a forum will take you to the 'showforum' page. It shows a list of all the topics posted by members within that forum, along with its subcategories. On the right-hand side, you will see two buttons: NEW TOPIC and NEW POLL. These do exactly what they say! Clicking on NEW TOPIC will allow you to create a new topic within the forum you are currently viewing, and likewise, the NEW POLL button will take you to a form that enables you to create a new poll. These buttons also appear underneath the topic listing: 28
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You can see two links below the buttons: Mark this forum as read and Subscribe to this forum. The first will mark all the posts and topics within the forum as read even if you haven't read them, and the second will subscribe you to a list that will e-mail you when there are new topics and posts within this forum. The topic listing shows all the topics created in the forum, along with the following extra snippets of information: •
Topic icon (system generated): This is one of eight icons that give users the status of the forum, mainly regarding new replies, hot topics (topics that have above a certain number of replies; a number you can define in the Admin Control Panel), polls, locked topics, or moved topics:
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•
Topic icon (user selected): a post icon selected by the user when they start the new topic. These are predefined, but you can alter those shown through the Admin Control Panel:
Topic title. Number of replies. Topic starter (the user who created the topic and therefore made the first post). Number of views: This counter will be incremented by one every time a user views the topic. Last action: The last post made, along with the date and the user who posted. •
Moderation selector: A checkbox that allows you to select topics on which to perform moderation actions such as mass deletion, topic renaming, merging, or locking.
Beneath the topic list, if enabled, you will see a box to search just this forum, as well as a drop-down menu (on its right) to perform various moderation actions on the topics selected with the moderation selector. Under this is a list of members currently browsing the forum (if enabled in the Administration Panel) along with a key describing the meaning of the eight post icons. To its right is a set of options that can be used to sort and filter the topics according to your own viewing preferences. These options include changing the ordering of posts (e.g. ordering by number of views, by number of replies, and by their ascending or descending numbers), showing topics less than a certain number of days old (e.g. from last five days), and finally certain topics (e.g. topics you have replied to).
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Topics Every post is contained within a topic (sometimes known as a thread). A topic is common to a group of posts about the same subject, in the forum, within the subject of the category (e.g. Category: Transport; Forum: Cars; Topic: What car do you have?). A user starts a topic with an initial post, to which other members can reply with their own comments:
As with the forum view, you have a set of buttons in the top right allowing you to perform several key actions: ADD REPLY, NEW TOPIC, NEW POLL, ADD POLL (you have similar buttons at the bottom of the topic, except that they are FAST REPLY (if enabled), ADD REPLY, OPTIONS, and NEW TOPIC).
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Under this is the main body of the post. The body is split into two sections, with the left-hand side being much smaller than the right. Some details about the user who posted are shown on the left—their username, their avatar, their rank (and rank image), their member group, the number of posts they have made, their join date, their member number, and finally, the warning tools (if enabled). Clicking on their username will take you to their profile page. You can add extra fields to this display either by manually editing the templates or by adding a new profile field. All this can be done through the Administration Control Panel, and is explained in Chapter 6. On the right is the main body of the post. This is what has been typed when replying and it may include images or other formatted text:
To the top right of the post are three additional options that allow you to subscribe to the topic (you will be e-mailed when there are new posts), e-mail the topic to a friend, or display a printer-friendly view. Just below these are the user's IP address, the post number (which when clicked will provide a direct link to the post), and a moderation selector. Clicking on the moderation selector for this post (and any others) will select it for mass-moderation options listed at the bottom of the topic page:
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The bottom of each post gives you eight buttons to perform several actions. From left to right, they are: OFF/ON: Shows if that user is online or offline CARD: View a small business-card type window about
this user PM: Send the user a private message REPORT: Report a post to all the moderators and administrators TOP: Go to the top of the page EDIT: Edit this post QUOTE: Quote this post when you add a reply (turns red when
selected) •
REPLY: Reply immediately to this post and include the full
post as a quote Below this, you have the moderation tools. On the right are post moderation tools, which become active when you select one or more posts within the topic:
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On the left are topic moderation options, which are performed on the entire topic:
These moderation options are covered in depth in Chapter 7, Forum Maintenance and Administration.
Creating a New Topic Topics are at the centre of your forum, and so creating new ones is a common activity. You can do this by clicking on the New Topic icon. The page that loads then asks you to provide a title for the topic and a description. The post box beneath this is where you will type the first post of your new topic. Topic titles should be concise and to the point. It is the first thing that users will read before deciding whether to read the whole topic. If you are asking for help, a brief summary of the problem is usually the standard way of titling the topic. Otherwise, a very short summary limited to a few words will suffice.
BBCode and Smilies Instead of using HTML to format the post (which could be potentially unsafe), BBCode is often used. It provides the main options for formatting posts: bold, italics, underline, font color, size, and font face.
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You can also use it to enter web addresses, code snippets, and quotes. The IPB BBCode formatting options appear just above the post box and can be added to in the Administration Control Panel:
An example of BBCode usage would be to make some text bold and then add a URL, as shown below: [b]this will be bold[/b] [url=http://www.olate.co.uk]this goes to Olate[/url]
URLs starting with http:// are automatically converted if you do not add the BBCode tags. Note that if the URL does not begin with http:// (e.g. www.example.com) it will not be converted to a URL. A common way of showing personal expression and feelings is by using emoticons or smilies. Some default smilies are included in IPB as standard and are shown at the side of the post box:
Each one is clickable; so you can easily enter it into your post. By default, only a small number of smilies are shown here; the full list of smilies can be accessed by clicking the Show All link beneath the group of smilies. You can also add your own smilies through the Administration Control Panel.
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Post Options Under the post box are several extra options you can specify when making a new post. As the administrator you can enable HTML on a case-by-case basis from the drop-down menu. The three checkboxes enable or disable emoticons, the displaying of your signature, and whether you wish to subscribe to the topic. Post icons appear next to the topic in the topic list explained above. They can be used to highlight or draw attention to specific topics and take the (default) form of several smilie-type icons. As with the BBCode and smilies, you can add your own from the Administration Control Panel. As an administrator, after posting you can choose to pin and/or lock a topic immediately. This is done by selecting the appropriate action from the drop-down menu below the attachments box.
Attachments You can attach files to a post just as when sending an e-mail. They will be uploaded to the forum and will be displayed within the post for other members to download. You may set a limit for the total size of files that members are allowed to upload to save disk space. To upload a file, click on the Browse button to find the file on your PC, and then click on Add This Attachment. Once the attachment is uploaded, it will be listed below the upload box along with the file size. You can choose to delete the file or insert it into a certain place within your post. If you wish to do this, click on Add into Post and it will be displayed in the post where you put the placeholder. Otherwise, the attachments will just be listed at the end of the post. Attachments and uploads can be disabled on a per-forum and per-usergroup basis. You will find these options in the Admin Control Panel.
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Post New Topic/Preview Post Before you finalize the new topic and post it, you can click on Preview Post to see what the post will look like. If you are happy with what you see, click on Post New Topic and it will be added to the topic view and members can start to view it and make replies.
Add Reply Adding a reply to an existing topic is almost exactly the same as creating a new one. Clicking on the Add Reply button will take you to a page that is more less the same as when you were creating a new topic, but with two major differences. Firstly, you cannot choose a topic title or a description, and secondly, the bottom of the page has a list of the posts within that topic to help remember what you are responding to. If you chose to quote a reply by clicking on the Quote button next to the post, it will appear within BBCode tags when you reply.
Fast Reply A very handy tool for your members is the Fast Reply. Once enabled (when adding a new forum) it allows members to show a small box where they can type their reply and then post it immediately without having to load another page:
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User Control Panel/My Controls The User Control Panel provides a large number of options to allow complete customization of many forum features, which all users have access to. The main functions include: Private messaging Forum and topic subscription management Profile, signature, and avatar setting •
E-mail and board settings (skin selection, customized topic viewing preferences, and time zones)
Control Panel Index When you first click on the My Controls link in the member bar, you are taken to the control panel index. In the center/right is a summary of the member account showing recent attachments, the number of posts, average posts, and a list of recently read topics:
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On the left side, you have a menu with a list of all the options:
A personal notepad allows members to save notes and other information for access at a later time:
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Messenger Private messaging is covered later in this chapter, but the User Control Panel provides extensive controls for sending private messages to other members. You can create your own message folders, add members to buddylists and blocklists, and track messages that you have sent to see if they have been read or not.
Subscriptions You may only wish to visit a forum when something changes or is updated. Or you may wish to be notified as soon as there is a reply to a certain topic you are interested in (by subscribing to a topic or forum you can do just that). When a notification is e-mailed, only one message will be sent per topic until the next time the user visits. This is the case even if there is more than one new post to help prevent the members' inboxes being spammed by busy topics. The Subscriptions options allow you to review any topics or forums you are subscribed to, delete the subscription, or change how the subscription is working. There are four types of subscriptions you can use: Immediate e-mail notification: You will be sent an e-mail as soon as a new topic is posted or a reply is made.
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Delayed e-mail notification: E-mail notifications are sent out a short period after the new post or topic is created. Daily e-mail digest: You are sent an e-mail every day with a summary of new topics and posts that you subscribe to. •
Weekly e-mail digest: Like daily digests, but sent weekly.
Personal Profile Your personal profile comprises your publicly viewable information.
Edit Profile Info Clicking on the Edit Profile info link will take you to a page where you can fill in as much information about you as you wish (everything is optional). You can add the following: Your date of birth: use the drop-down menu to select the day, month, and year. Website URL: if you have a website, fill in the URL here and it'll appear in your profile (useful for self-promotion!). Your ICQ UIN: If you use the ICQ instant-messaging service (www.icq.com), fill in your ID number here. Your AOL identity: as with ICQ, you can provide your AOL instant-messaging screen name. Your Yahoo identity. Your MSN Messenger identity. Your Location: If you wish to enter where you are in the world, you can do so in this field. This has a character limit (1000 characters by default), and you can click on Check Length to check whether you have exceeded it. •
Your interests: Tell other members what your interests and hobbies are. This field too has a 1000-character limit.
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When you are happy with the details, click on Amend my profile, and the information you have provided will be entered into the database.
Edit Signature A signature is displayed underneath every post you make in the forums. Signatures are typically used to advertise your own website, display your favorite quotes, or just as a personal signature. You can create your own signature by clicking the Edit Signature link from the menu in My Controls. This will take you to a page with a box similar to the one you see when replying to a post or adding a new topic. It includes the BBCode formatting tools since you can include formatting in the signature. Your current signature (if any) is shown above this box. In the following screenshot you can see how my signature is shown underneath any post that I make. In this case, I have also used an image here:
Once you have created your signature, click on Update my Signature. You can also check the length as it can be restricted (10,000 characters by default).
Edit Avatar Settings An avatar is a small picture that you can associate with your account. It appears next to every post you make, and also in your profile:
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You can edit your avatar by clicking on Edit Avatar Settings:
You can either create your own avatar or use one of the default ones available in IPB 2. The pre-installed avatars can be viewed by selecting the name of the gallery from the drop-down list. You then click the radio button next to the image you wish to use to assign it to your account.
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You can even create your own avatar. Once you have done so, you can add it to your website through one of two methods: link from your own website, or upload it to the forums. The upload option can be enabled and disabled in the Administration Control Panel. If you decide to link to it, you will need to upload it to your own website and then enter the full URL in the box on the page. Otherwise, you can click the Browse button to browse your PC to find the image and upload it. There is a limit to the file size and image dimensions for avatars. By default, it is set to 90 pixels by 90 pixels and a maximum size of 50Kb. Also, you can only use .gif, .jpg, .jpeg, and .png file formats. You can change this limit in the Admin Control Panel to suit your requirements. If the image is too large, the forum will usually resize it to the maximum dimensions, which is an option in the Admin Control Panel. When you are done, click on Update Avatar to apply it to your account.
Change Personal Photo A personal photo is similar to an avatar except that it can be much larger, and is only viewable when someone views your personal profile. Typically, it will be your photo. As with editing your avatar, you can either upload the photo or submit a link to your website. The photo's maximum file size is 50Kb but the file dimensions can be anything up to 150 pixels by 150 pixels (by default). You can edit these values in the Admin Control Panel.
Options The six sections under the Options header allow you to customize how the forum functions, to change it to suit your requirements.
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Manage Your Attachments If enabled in the Admin Control Panel, when a file is uploaded and attached to a private message or post it is listed in this section of the control panel. From here, you can see which files you've uploaded, and delete any that are no longer needed. Note that deleting an attachment from a post or private message will remove it completely—it cannot be recovered. Every user has an upload quota, and once you have reached that limit, you cannot upload any more files. Therefore, you will need to delete some before continuing, which can be done from this section. Every file has a checkbox on the right. To delete it, check the box and then click on the Delete Selected button at the bottom.
Manage Ignored Users Some members can become annoying! If you do not wish to view any posts that they make, you can add them to your ignore list, after which any posts they make will be masked until you decide to read them. To add a user to the list, enter their username into the box. You can search for users by clicking the Find User button. Once you are done adding, click on Update Ignored Users.
E-Mail Settings The forum uses e-mail to send out notifications as well as let other members contact each other directly. You can modify several options to control how e-mails are sent to you: Hide my email address from other members: This will stop your e-mail address from being seen by other members. They will not be able to contact you via e-mail. Send me any updates sent by the board administrator: From the control panel, the administrator can send out mass e-mails to all members. If you do not wish to receive these mailings, you can uncheck this box. However, the administrator can choose to ignore this preference.
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Include a copy of the post when emailing me from a subscribed topic:
Ticking this box will include a copy of the new message in the email when you receive notification for new replies to a particular topic. Send a confirmation email when I receive a new private message:
If this option is enabled, you will receive a "new message" e-mail notification if someone sends you a private message. •
Enable 'Email Notification' by default?:
You can specify whether you wish to receive e-mail notifications for a topic after you have replied to it. You can also choose the type of topic subscription you wish to have.
Board Settings You can further customize the way the forum works by altering the settings in this section. This includes time-zone settings (and compensation for when daylight saving time, DST, is in effect) and viewing of different features in posts.
Change E-Mail Address/Password You can change your e-mail address or password any time by clicking on the relevant option from the menu. You will be asked to provide your current password and security information to make sure that you (and not an automated system) are making the request!
Moderator Tools As an administrator or moderator, you get access to three extra options in your User Control Panel: IP Address Look-up Tool: This allows you to find out which IP address members are using and who owns a specific IP address. This can be useful for troubleshooting and problem member resolution.
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Member Look-up Tool:
Finding a specific member is made much easier by using this tool. Enter part of a username or the entire username, and you will be able to find out more about a specific user and alter some of their profile and account. To alter all the options for a member, you need to use the member-search option in the Admin Control Panel. •
Manage Announcements: You can publish announcements on any or all of the forums, and these can be set to appear and expire on a specific date. From the Manage Announcements screen, you can see existing announcements and add new ones.
Searching Searching the forums is a very common task, especially if you have a lot of useful posts containing information or help. IPB2 includes very advanced search functions that (if using MySQL 4.0.2+) utilize the high performance MySQL FULLTEXT search capabilities. For most users, the normal search accessed by clicking on the Search link will suffice. All you have to do is enter your search terms into the field and choose the forum(s) you wish to search:
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Users can click on More Options for detailed search options:
Along with keywords, you can search by member or date, specify search location (entire post or just the title), sort results, and choose how they are displayed. Apart from using the dedicated search page, you can also use the search box that appears by default on the homepage. This is located just above the start of the forum/category list:
A similar box appears when viewing forums as well. This search box searches only the forum that you are currently in, and is located at the bottom of the topic list.
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The search feature accepts Boolean search terms. This means you can narrow your search down using specific language constructs. For example, you could perform a search forums and forum and fora, and it would search for all three terms. Likewise, you could search for olate.com not olate.co.uk and only look for the first option. For more information on Boolean searching, see http://searchenginewatch.com/facts/article.php/2155991.
Private Messaging Private messaging allows you to send e-mail type messages to other members of the forum. You can PM any member using the IPB Private Messaging system. From within the control panel, you have six menu items to manage your messages.
Compose New Message Very similar to the new post screen, the Compose New Message window allows you to write a new message to send to another member. If you have members added to your buddy list, you can select them from the address book or can otherwise enter the member's name into the box. On the next line, you can choose to send the messages to (by default) up to six additional users. The "send to other members" option is equivalent to the CC option for a normal e-mail. If you wish to use it like a BCC option, check the Hide CC recipients from others? option. The rest of the page is exactly the same as when you create a new topic. You must specify a title (subject) for the message and then write the message body. You can include BBCode and smilies in the body, and also attach files to the message.
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The two final options allow you to put a copy of the message in your Sent Items folder for future reference and track the message (see the Message Tracker section for information).
Message Folders (Inbox, Sent Items, and Saved) Just as with normal e-mail, private messages are stored in folders. New messages are placed in your inbox and are shown in a list. Clicking on the message displays it for you to read it. Each message has a checkbox on the right to allow you to move it to another folder or delete it. The message-list screen also includes a bar to show you how full your inbox is (the administrator sets this limit). Sent messages are placed in the Sent Items folder only if you choose to save them when sending, and not otherwise.
Edit Storage Folders You can rename any of your existing folders (you cannot delete the three default folders) and create your own new storage folders. Clicking on Edit Storage Folders will show you a list of current directories. You can add a new folder by typing the name into the empty boxes at the bottom of the page. Renaming is the same—change the text in the boxes already filled out at the top. To delete a folder, delete the text from the text box at the top and it will be removed when you click on Submit Changes.
Empty PM Folders To quickly remove all messages from a folder, click on the Empty PM Folders link. This will display a list of your folders and a total message count. Check the box next to the folder name and then click on Continue. All the messages will be deleted. You can keep any unread messages by having the Keep Unread PMs? box checked when you click Continue. Having this unchecked deletes every message irrespective of its 'read' status.
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PM Buddies/Block List This serves as an address book and block list. If you add your friends to your buddies list, you can quickly select them from the address book when composing a new message. If you are receiving annoying messages from a certain member, you can add them in a way similar to adding a buddy, except you'd select No from the drop-down menu labeled Allow this member to message you?.
Message Tracker When you send a message or reply to a message, you can choose to track it. This will add it to the list of messages in your Message Tracker, where you can see if the recipient has read the message. Once you have checked if a message has been read, tick the box next to it, and then click on Delete or End tracking to remove it from the list. You can even delete the message before it has been read.
Calendar IPB2 includes a fully functional calendar that allows events to be added. Possibly an under-utilized feature of any forum software, it does have some useful features! The main use is to record members' birthdays. Members who add their birthday to their profile have it added to the calendar. On their birthday, a note appears on the forum index (unless that feature has been disabled in the Administration Control Panel). The calendar shows the current month when you view it. On the left are small versions of the calendar for three months: the current, the previous, and the next. Today is highlighted with a red box. At the bottom of the page is a drop-down menu where you can select the month and year you wish to view.
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Finally, the Add New Event button is located at the bottom right of the page. Clicking this takes you a page very similar to the "add new topic" or "reply to post" page. After you have entered the event title, you are asked to provide the range of dates for the event. This can be a one-day event or can stretch over several days. You can even change the color of the text and background that shows it is a ranged event. The last option is to set up a recurring event, which happens at regular intervals. You can make this new event public or decide that it is only relevant to you—your own personal calendar. To make it public, you can choose to only allow users within specific member groups to access it. Once you are done, click the Add Calendar Event link.
Moderation The moderator tools will be covered in Chapter 7, Forum Maintenance and Administration.
Summary This chapter has taken you through the front end of Invision Power Board. The pages that your members use are very important, and you should have gathered enough information to know how to use each feature to its full potential. We have covered forums, threads, posting, the User Control Panel, and various other features of the user front end, including search and the calendar. The next stage is to learn how to manage all of these in the Administration Control Panel.
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4 Administration Panel Tour: Settings The Administration Control Panel is where you can control all aspects of your board; users, forums, and word filters, to skins, templates, and maintenance, all can be taken care of via the web-based control panel. This and the forthcoming chapters will guide you through the options available, how to use them, and also the optimum settings. This includes: •
System settings
•
Defining forums and their settings
•
User and usergroup management
•
Other features such as: o
The Post Office
o
Subscriptions
o
Languages
o
Filters and BBCode
o
Statistics
Admin CP The first user created when you initially installed your forum in Chapter 2 has admin permissions. Once you are logged in as this user, you will see an extra link, Admin CP, along the Member Bar in front of My Controls:
Administration Panel Tour: Settings
Clicking on Admin CP will launch the Administration Control Panel. Another way to access the control panel would be using a direct URL such as http://www.example.com/forums/admin.php, where example.com is your domain name, and forums/ is the directory name of your forums (for example, http://www.olate .co.uk/forums/admin.php). If you have not already logged in to the control panel this session, you will be asked for your username and password. This is the same as your main user account created during the setup process. Once you click Login, you will be taken to a two-pane layout. This is your control panel. On the left you will see a menu (clipped here):
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... and on the right you will see the main content of the menu section that you are currently viewing:
The Menu The menu on the left is your navigation tool for the control panel. Initially, you will see various blocks, color-coded for ease of use. These are collapsible and will expand to reveal further options when clicked. This method of navigation allows you to hide all the options you do not wish to work with. Directly underneath the Invision Board logo in the left menu are two options that allow you to expand and collapse all the menu categories in one go, as well as quickly access the administrator and board index pages. You will also find direct links to the IPB documentation and a PHP information page in the same place.
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The menu frame is scrollable because there are lots of different menu options that you can choose. Since different frames are used, the left menu remains static while you browse the Administration Control Panel, providing you with access at all times.
ACP Home As soon as you have logged in, you will see the ACP Home. This gives you useful information at a glance. You can quickly locate and edit member's profiles, leave notes for other administrators, check whether you have the latest version of IPB, view statistical data about your forum, and so on. A log is kept of all administrative actions to leave an audit trail for you. This is especially useful when you have multiple administrators. The version information only shows 'point' releases where the version number has been increased. For security updates, the version number is not increased because that would allow would-be hackers to identify vulnerable systems. Therefore, it is advisable to regularly check the Invision Power Services forums for updates—http://forums.invisionpower.com.
System Settings Every configurable option can be altered to fit your requirements from the System Settings option. Expanding the menu will reveal several options including shortcuts to common settings (Turn Board On/Off, Board Guidelines, General Settings, and CPU Saving). To view all the settings, click on View All General Settings (see the following screenshot). 21 groups will be listed in the main frame, along with a short description of what each one includes. Three icons on the far right enable you to edit the group settings, delete a group, and recount the settings within each group:
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IPB settings are contained within groups. These collate similar setting types to allow easy editing. For example, all the settings related to dates and times are contained within the group called Date & Time Formats. You can also add your own custom settings, which can be used in custom modifications and skins (which are explained later in this book).
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A handy search tool makes finding one specific setting very easy. This is extremely useful if you cannot remember where a setting is grouped! All search results will be displayed for you to alter. Make your changes and then click on Update Settings to update all those settings. Most settings are changed by selecting different radio buttons (Yes or No), checking boxes, or altering values. At any time you can click on the Revert button and the original settings will be restored. In addition, any settings you change from the default value will be highlighted in red. This helps if you make a mistake because it allows you to see what you have changed:
Important Settings The following pages describe all of the setting options in detail. However, it is important to change some settings before others. You need to perform initial configuration of your board to get it up and running. You should configure two main sections first: 1. General Configuration: This is the very first thing you should configure. You should change the Board Name, Website Name, and Website Address to match your site. For example, the Board Name could be Olate Community Forums, the Website Name could be Olate, and the Website Address could be http://www.olate.co.uk. In addition, if you wish to allow user uploads—file, avatar, and picture uploads—as explained in Chapter 3, then you need to change the values in Upload URL and Path to 'upload' directory. You may need to ask your web host for help in filling out these values. 2. E-mail Set-up: Your forum will send out e-mails to new users, notifications for new private messages, topic reply notifications, and so on. It is therefore important to 58
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make sure you have the e-mail set up correctly and that you have a valid From address that members can reply to, if they have any problems. The two most important values in this section are Board incoming email address and Board outgoing email address. The incoming address will be used as the Reply-To address and the outgoing e-mail used as the From address. Once you are happy with these settings, you can move on to the other setting groups at your own leisure.
Settings: Board Guidelines You will want to define your own rules and regulations that members must agree to abide by, when posting in your forums. In this group, you can specify where your guidelines are created and have a link posted within the forum header. You can either specify an external link or write the guidelines (using HTML) into the If not using external link; guidelines/rules text box. IPB will then create a page containing the rules for you. Enabling the Show link in header to guidelines? option will display a link at the top of the board to the guidelines you set up. As well as the guidelines, you can edit the registration terms that are displayed before a user can register. Agreement must be indicated before the user can proceed with the registration of an account. Many guides can help you create guidelines for your own forum so as to define how you want your members to behave. A good example is the guidelines set out at the Invision Power Services forums at http://www.invisionboard.com/?guide. Two other articles that can help you with this are http://www. theadminzone.com/forums/articles.php?do=viewarticle&a id=845 and http://www.theadminzone.com/forums/articles .php?do=viewarticle&aid=3572. You will also find some useful tips in Chapter 6.
Settings: Board Offline/Online If you are performing maintenance or changing settings and you wish to prevent members from using your forums and display a message to them, 59
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you can disable your board. Members cannot access any part of your forum unless you grant access to them (Users & Groups | Manage User Groups | Edit | Global Permissions | Can view OFFLINE board will grant this access). Those that do not have access are presented with a customizable message. The message you specify in the box will be displayed to the users for the duration that the board is disabled. This is especially useful if you are making major changes to your database or upgrading IPB to the latest version. During this time, you don't want any new registrations or posts. Setting your board offline will prevent this. Administrators can view the forums by default even if they are offline. Although normal users see a clear message that the forum is offline, the only indication for administrators is that the browser title will show OFFLINE. Remember to switch your board back online when you have finished!
Settings: Calendar and Birthdays Two related features of the user front end are the calendar and birthdays. The settings group allows you to configure the options for these. Members can add their birthday to their profile and it will be displayed in the calendar and on the homepage. Forthcoming events are also shown on the index. You can edit this to enable or disable display of upcoming events and birthdays. Additionally, it is possible to change the range of the calendar and relevant drop-down menus. The Calendar & Birthdays settings mainly allow you to choose what is shown on the calendar and on your forums. These options include whether you wish to show birthdays at all, show the birthdays on the board index, show upcoming calendar events, and change the start and end dates for the calendar year options.
Settings: Converge Set Up Converge is the centralized user authentication system of IPS. This allows you to integrate all your other IPS software under one user database resulting in a single login for all your users.
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At time of writing, Converge is still being developed along with additional IPS applications—Gallery, Blog Tools, File Manager, CMS, and other to-be-announced tools. IPB provides the Converge API in the ips_kernel/class_converge.php file. This file contains various functions that allow you to add and edit users in the IPB member system. Doing this requires quite a bit of PHP knowledge, however.
Settings: Cookies Cookies are text files stored on your PC by a website containing data specific to that site. IPB stores login data if you choose the Remember Me option when logging in. Unless you are using more than one instance of IPB, you do not generally need to alter the cookie settings. However, if you have multiple installations, you will need to define a different cookie name prefix to prevent clashes between the cookies of one board and the cookies of another. The prefix is added to the beginning of the name of any cookie created and identifies it when other cookies also set by IPB are present. The Cookie Domain sets how the cookie will relate to your domain name. For example, if it were set to .example.com the cookie would be used with all pages on the domain, but if it were set to .forums.example.com the cookie would only be sent on pages in the .forum subdomain.
Settings: COPPA Setup COPPA (http://www.ftc.gov/ogc/coppa1.htm) is designed for USbased forums to protect children under the age of 13. It requires confirmation of the registration on your forums by the parent/guardian of the registering child before the account can be activated. COPPA is relevant for any website that is hosted in the USA, even if the owners are not based there. It applies to any kind of website where registration is an option, whatever the content focus may be.
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This setting group allows you to enable COPPA support. When enabled, the birth date of the user will be checked when they register. If it is calculated that they are underage, the account will be disabled until the registration form is signed and returned by the adult. The administrator will then have to manually activate the account for the user after receiving the signed form. COPPA does not apply to every site. If you are unsure, consult a legal advisor. You can also find out more at http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/ conline/pubs/buspubs/coppa.htm.
Settings: CPU Saving and Optimization Unless you are lucky enough to have your own dedicated server, you will be sharing your web-hosting server with many other websites. All the users on that server therefore share the CPU time and memory allocation. An active community can generate a lot of CPU load and memory usage (depending upon the number of visitors at one time, post counts, etc.). To help keep the server healthy (and keep your web-hosting company happy), IPB offers various options to optimize the way IPB works. Turning features off reduces the number of database queries and pages that need to be accessed by the server. This will have an effect on the server load, reducing it significantly on popular boards. You can even set the system to Disable when a certain CPU load is reached. The board will monitor the server and when the load reaches the specified level you set, a message will be displayed to users warning them of the situation. This means the server has time to catch up and once the load level decreases, the board will automatically enable itself. This option can be set in the Server Load Limit section. The MySQL server sets the minimum search word length to 4 if you are using FULLTEXT. Any value you enter will be ignored if FULLTEXT is enabled. T
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Active users are tracked for up to fifteen minutes and displayed on the forum index by default. You can modify the time they appear for and even determine whether they will appear on the index at all. This can be useful if you have many thousands of users active at any one time:
Each topic can also display the users browsing it. As with the active users on the index, this can be disabled to reduce the number of queries on the database. Birthdays, calendar events, and board total statistics are also displayed in the index. These, though not entirely necessary, are interesting for users to see. Disabling them will reduce the number of queries required and therefore reduce server load:
If you have a board with a large number of forums, you can set the Show short forum jump list? to no: instead of displaying all forums and their sub categories, it will only show the root forums. This prevents the dropdown from becoming very long. This drop-down menu appears when you are in the topic list screen viewing the different topics within a specific forum:
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Settings: Date and Time Formats The Time Zone option should be set to the time zone of the server. Users can then adjust their personal time zone from their profile. This customizes the time and date output to the user's specific time zone so the date and time is correct for them. IPB also accounts for daylight saving time. You can fine-tune the time using the Server Time Adjustment option. If you have set the correct time zone but the forum is still an hour out, the most likely cause of the problem is daylight saving time. You and your members need to set the Daylight Savings option in your profile to show the correct time. IPB uses the standard PHP time formatting throughout the application. This uses symbols to define how the date and time will be displayed to the user. You can find out what each symbol means by using Table 1 in the PHP manual at www.php.net/date, which is summarized here:
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Character
Description
Example
a
Lowercase ante meridiem and post meridiem
am or pm
A
Uppercase Ante Meridiem and Post Meridiem
AM or PM
d
Day of the month, 2 digits with leading zeros
01 to 31
D
Textual representation of the day, three letters
Mon to Sun
F
A full textual representation of the month
January
g
12-hour format of an hour, without leading zero
1 to 12
G
24-hour format of an hour, without leading zero
0 to 23
h
12-hour format of an hour, with leading zero
01 to 12
H
24-hour format of an hour, with leading zero
00 to 23
i
Minutes with leading zero
01 to 59
j
Day of the month, without leading zero
1 to 31
l
A full textual representation of the day
Monday
m
Numeric representation of a month, with leading zeros
01 to 12
M
Short textual representation of the month, three letters
Jan
n
Numeric representation of a month, without leading zero
1 to 12
s
Seconds, with leading zero
00 to 59
S
English ordinal suffix for the day of the month, 2 characters
st, nd, rd, th
Y
A full numeric representation of the year, 4 digits
2004
y
2 digit representation of the year
04
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Enter the character into one of the boxes Short time format, Join date time format, or Long time format to display the date/time in that format. For example, l dS of F Y h:i:s A would display as Sunday 10th of October 2004 17:30:15 PM. As you can see, you can add your own characters or words within the formatting: •
d/m/Y uses / as the separator
•
d-m-Y uses - as the separator
If you want to place a character in the date format but the character also appears in the table, you need to prefix that character with a backslash \. For example, if you wanted to display Wednesday the 15th you would enter it as l \\t\h\e jS. The t is double slashed here because in PHP, \t represents a tab. The h and e are backslashed because they also appear in the table for formatting the date. This system is quite complex so if you get stuck, you can contact Invision Power Services for help. This can be done via their website at http://www.invisionpower.com/?contact.
Settings: E-Mail Setup The forum software uses E-mail to communicate with your members. E-mails are sent out to existing members when a new member registers, when they have private messages, when a new reply is added to a topic they are subscribed to, or when they wish to send messages to the entire user base. Several settings allow you to customize the way e-mail is sent. When messages are sent, they appear to originate from the address you specify in Board outgoing email address. If a user tries to reply, their message will be addressed to the e-mail address you specify in Board incoming email address. You can also choose to send e-mail via the built in PHP mail () method or by using the SMTP server. Usually, the default option of the built-in PHP option will suffice. However, you should check with your web-hosting company if you are unsure. It is important that your forum can send out mail. E-mail is sent out in many circumstances including when a new user registers, when a user receives a private message, and when someone has subscribed to be notified of topic replies. 66
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Settings: Full Text Search Setup If you are using MySQL version 3.2.2+ you can take advantage of the MySQL FULLTEXT capabilities (www.mysql.com/fulltext). This is an advanced database-searching functionality that increases search result accuracy and speed. T
This setting group contains two settings to enable or disable FULLTEXT and to decide if you wish to use the simple or advanced interface if you are using it. The simple interface displays a single-line textbox similar to Google or Yahoo! The advanced option displays many extra options including searching within specific forums, by member name, or date. T
Settings: General Configuration Other settings that do not fall into the other groups are located in the General Configuration group. These include the ability to change the board and website names, alter paths, and tweak other options. The Board Name is shown in the navigation bar on all the pages and links back to your forum index. The Website Name is the name of your main website. This is a useful place to put a link back to your main website homepage using the Website Address field. All URLs and paths entered should not contain a trailing slash unless otherwise stated. (In the case of the Caching PATH and Image URL, trailing slashes should be added.) You may wish to alter the debug level to 0: None – Don't show any debug information by selecting it from the drop-down menu. This removes certain statistics from the bottom of the pages including database query counts, page generation times, and server load information. Enabling MySQL debug displays MySQL query information in depth if you append &debug=1 to the end of any board URL. It is, however, unwise for you to enable this on a live board. If your board is running on a Windows server the Type of Auto-Redirect should be set to Refresh.
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Settings: News Setup If you have a news and/or announcements forum, you can display a Latest News link on your board index. This will show the title of the latest post in the forum you specify in the drop-down menu:
Settings: Personal Message Setup Private Messages are the equivalent of e-mails, contained within your forums. Members can send messages to each other using the PM system. You can configure the global options for the PM system in this group. You should allow BBCode but disallow HTML within messages. Whilst BBCode allows formatting of messages, HTML can be dangerous—it allows scripts to be embedded and annoying elements to be added.
Settings: Search Engine Spiders You can set up your forum to recognize search engine spiders and then display their name on the Who's Online list. This is purely for information purposes and does not make any difference to the way your board operates. Nevertheless, you can force spiders to use a specific template. This can be used to force them to use a low graphic design, which is preferable for search engines—they can gather the data much more easily resulting in better search engine listings. The default identification values are not very extensive. http://forums.invisionpower.com/index.php?showtopic =149681 has a long list of different spiders you can freely add. It is important to note that sometimes, you may see spiders listed in the Who's Online list viewing restricted topics or even using the Private Messaging system. Although it looks like they are using these features, they are actually just being shown an error message. 68
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Spiders can be placed in a specific group. You should remember that they will be bound by the permissions of whichever group they are placed in. For example, if Guests are not allowed to view topics then spiders will not be able to either. This will prevent your forum from being indexed in search engines. On the other hand, if you place the spider in a group with access to staff forums (for example), they will list all the topics in the search engine and these will be available for searching across the Internet.
Settings: Security and Privacy It is important to maintain the security and privacy of your users. IPB provides a lot of flexibility to allow your users to perform certain actions. A common method of auto registration protection is to use a dynamically generated random image. When registering, members must enter the text in the image. This is almost impossible for a computer to do and so you can guarantee that it is a manual registration. This can be enabled from the Enable Script/Bot Flood Control? drop-down menu. You need the GD library enabled on your server in order to take advantage of this feature—contact your web host for more information. The GD version installed can be set in the General Configuration setting group—GD2 (if it is available) is always preferable over GD1:
You can prevent duplicate e-mail addresses being used for registration by setting Allow duplicate emails when a user registers? to No. This helps protect against rogue users. You should also enable e-mail validation. Setting the New registration email validation? option to User email validation will require users to follow a link in an e-mail sent to them in order to activate their account. Once this is clicked, their account will become active. Alternatively, you can set Admin validation where you as the administrator will validate each new account. If you would like to have the user validate and get an e-mail notifications when someone registers, enable the Get notified when a new user registers? option. 69
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Further options include allowing users to include dynamic images in their posts, image and flash movie posting permissions, session length (default one hour, 3600 seconds), new registration e-mail validation, moderator report links, and flood control. It is best to disable the dynamic images (images that are created by the system for a specific use with specific features and which can change depending on user input) as such scripts can be used with malicious intent. It is also recommended to disable the ability to include flash movies in posts. With both of these, a user could post images that change depending on certain values. For example, they could show one image to the administrators, but another image to the normal users.
Settings: Topics, Posts and Polls There are many settings you can tweak to change how the topics, posts, and polls features operate: . Hot topics are popular A hot topic is denoted by a certain icon topics with more than a certain number of replies. You can change the number of posts before a topic becomes hot from this setting group. Next to the New Post page, there is a list of emoticons the user can add. You can alter the number of smilies shown per row. Defaulted to three, you can change this to whatever value you wish:
Other settings include rewriting topic titles if they contain excessive punctuation or capital letters, changing topic prefixes (e.g. Pinned, Poll), altering the posts' and topics' order, maximum emoticons and images in a post, enabling attachment thumbnails, guest usernames, and poll options. 70
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Settings: The Trashcan Setup The trashcan acts in a way similar to the Microsoft Windows Recycle Bin. Once enabled, a topic or post deleted is moved to a specified forum. Administrators can then review the post and undelete it or delete it permanently. If disabled, anything deleted will be permanently removed. The trashcan is enabled by default so you will not need to change the values here unless you wish to turn it off. If you have not yet created any forums, you will need to do so first. Once you have, you can select which forum you would like to use as the trashcan from the drop-down menu. All deleted topics will then be moved to this forum. You can also specify certain member groups not to use the trashcan system so they can delete topics immediately.
Settings: User Profiles Altering options for user profiles can be done using the User Profiles settings group. Configurable items include allowing members to choose skins, allowing member title changing (after a specific number of posts), allowing HTML and BBCode within signatures, specifying signature length, and changing avatar settings. It is important to note that enabling HTML can be very dangerous and should only be done if every member of your board can be implicitly trusted. Enabling HTML would allow any member to insert his or her own code into your board. The maximum length settings are measured in bytes. An English character (including space) is equal to 1 byte. Other character sets may contain 2-byte characters.
Settings: Warn Setup You may at some point need to enforce your rules and regulations and give members warnings. IPB includes a built-in Warn System (which you can configure to change the number of times users can be warned) and other permission settings for your staff. You can deal with problem members in different ways. IPB provides several options for you to control how the members can post and use the forums as punishment. These include requiring all posts by the member to be moderated before they are displayed, restricting the user from 71
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posting for a certain time period, and even completely suspending their account for a certain time (suspension prevents them from using their account at all). There are two types of visual indicators: graphical:
... and text based:
These indicators are shown in the member profiles and next to each user beside every post. The permissions options affect what the moderators can see when they use the warning control panel:
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Used in conjunction with the moderation tools (refer to the section Moderation Tools in Chapter 7) and effective moderation techniques, you can ensure your forum remains a fun environment for discussion.
Summary You have now looked at almost every setting available to you in Invision Power Board. The majority of board functions have options so that they can be customized and this is done by using the settings section of the Administration Control Panel. The next chapter will take a closer look at controlling the forums, which make up the majority of the front end of your board.
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5 Admin Panel Tour: Forum Control The core part of your community is the forums and categories that make up the board. These house the topics that your members create, and categorize the discussion. In IPB2, you create a root forum/category with child forums beneath it. The child forums can have sub-forums, which in turn can have child forums themselves. You can have an infinite number of forums and sub-forums. The terms root forum and category mean the same, and are interchangeable.
New Forum As soon as you have installed the software, you will probably want to create forums relevant to your site and organize your board. Clicking on the Forum Control category and then the New Forum link will take you to the form to allow you to add a new forum to your board:
Admin Panel Tour: Forum Control
You will be presented with a selection of form fields that you can use to configure your new forum.
Quick Setup You can quickly set up a new forum by following these steps: 1. From the Admin Control Panel, select the Forum Control category from the left menu and then click on New Forum. 2. Under the Basic settings heading, enter a name and a description for the new forum. You can then select a parent for the forum (usually a category or another forum if you wish this new forum to be a sub-forum). 3. Ensure that all the Postable Forum Settings are as you want them to be. They remember the last settings when you created your last forum. 4. Choose your access permissions defining which member groups can perform which actions within the forum. 5. Click the Create this forum button.
Basic Settings The forum name is what will appear on the index to tell the users the topic or subject of the discussions within that forum. You could have a forum to discuss nothing specific, just general topics. In this case, you might name the forum General Discussion. The forum description allows you to expand upon the name and describe what you want posted in that forum. You can include HTML tags to spice up the text. Common tags are <strong>text to make text bold, <em>text to italicize text, and
text to underline text. If you select a parent forum, this new forum will appear beneath the parent. As explained earlier, a forum can have unlimited children. You would commonly create a new category and then assign a forum to it. Forum State allows you to close a forum to all posting, but leave the old posts in as an archive. Most new forums will be set to Active.
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Creating a new category can be achieved by choosing No for Act as a normal forum not as a category? This will make the new forum a category and the options beneath Basic Settings do not apply.
Forum Redirect Options Instead of a forum being a place to create new posts, you can make it a link to a specific URL. In Forum Redirect Options, you can specify a URL in the URL to redirect this forum to field. You must also select Yes for the Switch on the URL redirect? in order to enable the redirect. All the other options below Forum Redirect Options are now irrelevant. Every time users click the forum, they will be redirected to the URL you specify and increment the count by one. If you wish, you can specify a count in the Redirect clicks to date field.
Permission Settings Further down the form, you can customize group permission settings. An extra option is Allow members who can see the forum but cannot read topics to see the topic list?. If you set this to Yes, members will be able to see the topics even if permissions are set to only allow viewing but not reading of topics. However, they will be shown a permission denied error if they try to read any. You could use this as a teaser to show members those topics that they must subscribe to view! At this stage you can customize the behavior of the permission-denied screen. If permission is denied and the setting Allow members who can see the forum but cannot read topics to see the topic list? is set, you can customize the message shown for this specific forum by altering the Custom 'Permission Denied' Message field. You can include HTML tags in this field to change the formatting of the message.
Postable Forum Settings This section allows you to fine-tune what you want members to be able to do within the forum.
Allow HTML to be Posted? This allows members to add HTML to their posts to format their text. While this allows members to use familiar HTML code tags, it leaves your forum open to security abuse. Members could post formatting that 77
Admin Panel Tour: Forum Control
damages your layout or include code—such as JavaScript code or execute scripts—that would present problems to your visitors. So, it is recommended you set this option to No.
Allow BBCode to be Posted? BBCode is a method created specifically for posting messages in forums or comment systems, and allows posters to format their text. Tags exist just like those in HTML to allow formatting, adding links, and posting code snippets. These tags are then converted to their respective HTML tags by the software, so members never need to use HTML. This is a much safer and the most common way of allowing users to format their posts. You should set this option to Yes:
Turn on the Quick Reply Box? Quick reply gives members the option of being able to quickly post a response to any topic rather than viewing the complete "post reply" page. This is very convenient, and is therefore highly recommended! The quick reply box appears at the bottom of the post once the user clicks on the FAST REPLY button:
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Allow Polls and Vote Bumping? You can enable or disable polls within specific forums. If you wish that members should not to be able to create a new poll, set Allow Polls in this forum (when allowed)? to No. The second option, Allow votes to bump a topic?, means that when a vote is made in a poll, that poll will return to the top of the forum as if a new reply had been posted. Otherwise, it will retain its current position—the position it is placed in is due to the last post (by default, topics are ordered in post-date order, with the newest post at the top).
Posts in this Forum Increase Member's Cumulative Post Count? If you don't want any posts made in this forum to add to the member's post count, set this option to No. This is useful if you would like to set up a test forum for members to test posting. Usually, you wouldn't want any posts within this kind of forum to add to their total post count.
Moderation By setting the Moderate Postings option, you can have each post and/or topic entered into a queue for you and your moderators to review before it's shown publicly. This might be useful if you were using IPB to manage bug reports for your software—you could approve each bug before it's displayed. To aid the moderation process, you can specify e-mail addresses to receive notifications of new posts pending moderation in the Email addresses to send new topic awaiting approval notification? field. You can enter multiple addresses by separating each pair with a comma; for example,
[email protected],
[email protected].
Password Protection Along with (or "apart from") the permissions system, you can also password-protect a forum. If you wish to not have a password, leave this field blank; otherwise enter your chosen password. Passwords are case sensitive. PASSWORD is not the same as password, which is not the same as PASsWoRD. 79
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Good passwords should be at least six characters long and should contain no words from the dictionary. They should be a mixture of upper- and lower-case characters and numbers.
Sorting The three sorting drop-down menus allow you to change how the threads within your new forum are ordered, how old threads are to be cut off, what basis they are ordered on, and in which order they are displayed.
Permission Access Levels Permission masks will be covered later on in this chapter; however, you can set permissions when you create a forum. You will see a grid with different options and checkboxes:
Along the top you see five different actions:
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Show Forum: Will the user be able to see the forum on the forum index page?
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Read Topics: Can users read the posts in a topic?
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Reply Topics: Can users post replies to the topic?
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Start Topics: Can users create a new topic in the forum?
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Upload: Can users upload files to their posts within the
forum? This has an effect only if the group is able to upload files, as set in the group-management options. You can set user permissions for these five actions. Along the left column, you will see five standard usergroups: Admin, Banned, Guest, Member, and Validating. You can even see any custom usergroups you created yourself. You will use these to define what you want the members of these groups to be able to do. The best way to illustrate this is to use an example of your standard members, and then compare it to the settings for guest users (users not logged in). You will most likely want your registered and logged-in members to be able to perform all the listed actions. This is achieved by simply checking the boxes for all the actions along the row that is named Member Forum Mask. You can either do this manually or by clicking the + icon next to the name:
In the case illustrated by the above screenshot, all users within the Member usergroup will be able to perform all those actions. However, you may not want guest users to be able to reply, or start topics, or upload files. If you want to disallow an action, keep the box unchecked:
You can also use the + icon at the bottom of the column for a specific action to allow it for all usergroups. The final option is All current and future permission masks. You define the permissions in exactly the same way as with the usergroups. However, the permissions will be reflected across all the forums—those that already exist, and those that you might create in the future. 81
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Create this Forum Once you are happy with all your settings, click on Create this forum. The forum will appear for users once it has at least one topic that their permission settings allow them to view.
Manage Forums Now you have created several forums and categories, you are all set. But what if you need to make changes to the settings, ordering, or permissions of the forums? All this can be done through the Manage Forums link. You will be shown a list of all your forums and categories along with various options to change settings, permissions, rules, skin settings, and ordering.
Categories Any categories you have can be edited from this screen. They are displayed in the long blue bars above their child forums:
New Forum Instead of using the New Forum link on the left navigation menu, you can click on the New Forum link for a specific category. The new forum will then be a child of that category by default (although you can change this if you so wish).
Permissions, Edit, and Delete In the same way as you added a new forum earlier, you can view the permissions grid and edit the permissions for the category by clicking on Permissions. You can also edit the settings for the category (e.g. rename it) or delete it entirely.
Ordering You can change the ordering of the categories by choosing the position you wish the category to be in (from the drop-down menu on the far right). For example, if you wish to move the forum in the image from its 82
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current position (first) to the third place, you would select 3 from the drop-down menu. If you have two categories with the same position value, they will be ordered by name.
Forums Beneath the category blue bar are the forums belonging to that category.
Settings The Settings link takes you to a page to edit all the options you specified when creating the forum, with the exception of the permission masks.
Permissions The same permissions grid is shown when you click on the Permissions link. This works in the same way as when you added the forum.
Forum Rules Clicking on Forum Rules, denoted by the forum rules icon , takes you to a page so you can display rules specific to the forum. You can use HTML to write the text out and then click Edit forum rules to return and save the rules. The display method defines how the rules will be displayed on your forum. When a user clicks to view the topics within the forum, the rules can either be presented with a link (at the top of the listing) to click on so as to view them, or can be wholly displayed on-screen at the top. How this is done is up to you.
Skin Options IPB allows you to assign different skins to different forums, separate from the one assigned to your main forum. This can be useful if you want to have a style as the subject of your forum demands. Clicking on the skin options icon will take you to the options page. From here, you can select two options: which skin you would like to apply to the forum, and whether you wish to apply it to any of its 83
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children. Clicking on Edit forum skin options will save the settings and return you to the Manage Forums screen.
Resynchronize Resynchronizing the forum recounts all the posts and makes sure the total statistics, post counts, and the posts themselves are correct. This is only necessary if you delete and move a lot of topics and posts.
Delete and Empty Forum You can delete a forum at any time. Clicking on Delete will take you to a confirmation page and will allow you to move all topics and child forums beneath the forum to another one. You cannot delete all topics from this page. You must choose the Empty Forum option, which will delete all the topics within the forum.
Ordering As with the categories, you can reorder your forums. However, this is done from a separate option. Scroll down to the bottom of the Manage Forums page and then select the category your forums are under from the drop-down menu on the left. Then click on Reorder Children. You will then see a list of the forums in that category and a drop-down menu next to each one to allow you to change the order:
Permission Masks The permissions system in IPB allows you to precisely control who has access to which forum and what they can do within that forum. As explained earlier, you can create permissions for a specific forum when you create it. However, you can also set up new permission masks, which you can then apply to individual users and groups. You can assign more than one mask to a user or a group. For example, a normal member may be part of the Members group, but if you wish to allow him or her access to a hidden forum, you can create a new mask with the relevant permissions and assign the new mask to the user. The new mask will be added as a layer on top of the Members group, but 84
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where the member's permissions disallow access to the hidden forum, the new mask will allow it. Only the members assigned this new permission mask—and not others within the Members group—will be able to access the hidden forum! 'Allow' takes precedence. If one mask disallows access and another allows access, the user will have access. You can access the permission-masks tool from the left menu: Forum Control | Permission Masks. This brings up a list of existing masks and the option to create a new mask:
You can see various options along the Forum Permission Masks table. This includes the name of the mask, the groups that are using this mask, the number of members who have this mask set in their options (shown in the next chapter), the ability to preview the mask, an edit link, and the option to delete the mask (if it's not in use).
Create New Mask At the bottom of the page, you will see the option to create a new mask. Enter a name for the new mask into the box. You can then choose if you would like the default settings to be the same as those for any of the existing masks, from the drop-down menu. The settings you choose will be applied to this new mask (you can, of course, edit them). Click on Create to continue. The mask will be added to the list. You then need to click Edit to alter the permission settings. 85
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Edit Once you have clicked on Edit, you will be taken to a familiar screen—it looks similar to the one you used when creating a new forum. However, not only can you rename the mask here, you can also see a list of all your forums and categories. You can see the actions along the top (discussed in the following list), and the forum names down the left side: •
Show: Can the user see the forum on the forum index page?
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Read: Can users read the posts in a topic?
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Reply: Can users post replies to the topic?
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Start: Can users create a new topic in the forum?
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Upload: Can users upload files to their posts within the
forum? (This only has an effect if the group is able to upload files, as set in the Group Management options.)
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As with the options when creating a new forum, you can allow (with a check) or disallow (no check). If you chose to have the mask inherit permissions, boxes will already be checked to match the inherited permission mask. They will all be empty otherwise, and you can edit the mask as you wish. If an action is marked Global, this indicates that you set the permissions as global when you created the forum. As such, you cannot edit the action with this permission mask. You need to go back and edit the forum permissions, setting it as non-global before you can alter the action in this mask. Click Update Forum Permissions to save your changes.
Preview Using the Preview link, you can quickly see how the permissions influence your forums. Once you click the link, a pop-up window will list all your forums. It will show whether the currently selected action can be performed within each forum for that permission mask. The legend beneath the forum listing shows how the forums are highlighted to represent this. You can change the action that is being tested by selecting a different one from the Test with... drop-down menu.
Moderators Moderators are members with extra powers who uphold the rules and regulations of your forums. It is up to you who you choose as a moderator but often, they are chosen because they are active members and post good comments. IPB allows you to set up forum moderators and global moderators. Moderators should be chosen after careful thought because they have access to some powerful forum functions. Forum moderators have moderator access on a specific forum only. They can only use the moderator tools within this forum and no other. Global moderators have full moderator access to every forum they have access to. The Forum Control | Moderators screen allows you to specify forum moderators.
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Creating global moderators is covered in the next chapter and can be done through the Users and Groups category. Clicking on Moderators will show you a list of your forums and any current forum moderators that are already set:
Add Moderator The box at the bottom allows you to add either a single member or an entire usergroup as moderators. Before doing this, you must choose the forums that you would want the user (or group) to be able to moderate.
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Check the box next to the forum you want the user to be able to moderate, and click the Add a moderator to the selected forums button. Depending on whether you select Single Member or Member Group from the drop-down menu, you will be asked to specify the member or the group. Once you have chosen, click on Find Member, select the member, and click on Choose Member or Add This Group. The following page will ask you to choose what you would like this member or usergroup to be able to do as a moderator. IPB allows you to fine-tune all the allowed moderator actions from this screen:
Once you have finished, click on Add this moderator. Your new moderator will be added immediately and appears on the Moderators page. You can edit or remove the moderator at any time by clicking on the Remove or Edit links.
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If you allow the moderator access to the multi-moderation tools, they will be able to perform all moderator actions whether or not you select them as being able to from the General Settings section when adding/editing the moderator.
Multi-Moderation The multi-moderation functions are covered in Chapter 7 on forum administration.
Summary After reading this chapter, you now know how to effectively manage the categories and forums that are central to the functionality of IPB. In addition, you have learned how to manage the content within the forums, specifically the topics and posts with particular focus upon moderation and member permissions. The next chapter will follow on from the member permissions to look at individual members, groups, ranks, and further permission options in greater detail. It will also take you through the other features of IPB including the Post Office and Subscriptions.
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6 Admin Panel Tour: Users, Groups & Other Features Obviously, the members of your board are crucial—without them you would have no activity! But while they are critical to the success of your forum, they can also contribute to its failure. However, with the features that IPB provides, 'failure' need not be the case! With many options to manage individual users, groups, and permissions, IPB makes it easy to ensure that your members are kept under control. Managing a board is not limited to forums and members; there are several other features that add to the overall forum experience. These include the Post Office (e-mails for members) and subscriptions (offer unique content, for example), and smaller features like filters and ranks.
Users and Groups The Users and Groups category on the left Administration Control Panel navigation frame expands to show seven options and one settings shortcut. You can use this section to manage all your board members and set up the usergroups (for which the permissions you were working with earlier are set):
Admin Panel Tour: Users, Groups & Other Features
Manage Members Clicking on the Manage Members link will take you to a search screen. From here you can search for any of the members who are registered on your forums. You can search by any of the following: •
Member name
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Member ID
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E-mail address
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Whether the member is suspended
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IP address
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AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) screen name
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ICQ number
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Yahoo! identity
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Signature
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Less than a certain number of posts
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Register date
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Last-post date
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Last-active date
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Member group
Once you have entered your search terms, click on Find Member, and any members matching your terms will be displayed. A small box contains some vital statistics about the member, along with five links to perform different actions: edit member profile, change member name, reset password, suspend member, and delete member. You can also click on the member's name at the top of the box to view his/her public profile on your forum front end:
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If you choose to select Find Members to Prune (Mass Delete) from the Type of Search drop-down menu, you will be given a list of members matching your terms. You can then mass delete these members. This is useful if you want to clear up your database and remove members who have never posted. Most likely, you'd use the register, last-post, and lastactive dates, as well as the total post count for the pruning search.
Edit Member's Profile You can edit many of the options that apply to each member by clicking this option. You will be taken to a page where you can alter that member.
Member Security Settings In this section, at the top of the page, is the IP address used by the user to register (and a link to view all the IP addresses used by the member), and options to delete the user's member photo (which appears only on their profile page), or alter the warn level and member title. You can set a custom title such as Moderator or Developer rather than use the standard ranking system that is defaulted to the forums.
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Member Group Options The two menus displayed in this section allow you to choose the primary member group that this user belongs to, and a secondary usergroup. The user will inherit permissions from both groups, but the primary group is the one that will appear in the member's profile. To select multiple usergroups, hold down the Ctrl key (Windows users), or the Apple key (Mac users), and select the groups.
Posting and Access Restrictions From this section, you can choose a permission mask override. If you've created your own mask earlier in this chapter, this is where you can apply it to the user. The default permissions for the primary and secondary member groups selected above will be ignored, and only those set for this mask will apply. You can apply more than one mask if you wish to. Restriction options are useful for 'problem' members. You can cause all their posts to be entered into a moderation queue for a set time period (or indefinitely) as well as restrict them from posting at all.
Board Settings Specific board settings, which are set by the user in their profile via the My Controls links on the main forum, are defined here. This includes the language and skin choice, and options to let their e-mail address appear publicly on their profile and set whether they will be e-mailed if they received a private message.
Contact Information Various methods of contact can be added by the member and edited from this section. These include e-mail addresses and various instant messaging client IDs.
Other Information This is where you can edit the user's avatar settings. An avatar is the small image that appears beneath the username on the left of every post that a user makes. You can alter the avatar or remove it altogether. In addition, you can modify their post count and various extra information fields including signature, location, and interests. When you are happy with the changes you have made, click on Edit this Member in order to submit the changes. 94
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Change Member's Name If you wish to change a member's username, you can do so from this option. You will be shown the current username and a text box to enter what you want to change it to. You also have the option to e-mail the member to tell them that their name has been changed, and what it has been changed to. Clicking on Change this members name will make the changes to the database. At this stage, if the name is already in use, you will be warned and prompted for a different name.
Change/Reset Password A common problem with members is forgetting their passwords. Using this link, you can change it for them. You can also choose to generate a new password salt and login key. These are used when the user logs in and when cookies are set. If you decide to reset the login key, any autologin cookies that they have set will be invalid. These are useful options to choose Yes to if your member is having problems logging in. You cannot see the member's current password because it is hashed in the database using the MD5 one-way hashing algorithm. To protect the privacy of the member, it is not possible to decrypt the password.
Suspend Member Suspending a member will render that user's account inactive for the time period you specify. During this time, the user will not be able to log in and use his/her account and will get an error message on trying to do so. Once the time period expires, the account will be unsuspended automatically. You can optionally choose to have an e-mail sent to the member to tell them that the account has been suspended and when it will be reactivated. Clicking on Suspend This Account will activate the suspension. You will then be taken to the Manage Members section, which can be used to check how much longer a member will stay suspended. There is also a link to unsuspend the member before the expiry time.
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Delete Member If you want to completely remove the account from the system, you can do so by clicking on Delete Member. You will be asked to confirm this before the action is performed. Any posts made by this member will be changed to guest posts.
Add New Member Instead of members registering themselves, you can do it for them. Once you have chosen to add a new member, you will be asked to supply four bits of information about this new user: their user (member) name, password, e-mail address, and the admin group to which you would like to add them to. Once you have clicked on Register Member, the member will be created and you will be taken to the overview screen as if you had just searched for this new member (as we did earlier). You can then edit the member's options.
Manage Ranks Ranks are used to encourage members to post. As their post count increases, they will rise up the ranks, and gain status within your community. Used well, they encourage more posting and therefore greater activity. You can define your own member ranks from the Manage Ranks option. From a fresh installation, you will see three already defined: •
Newbie (0 posts)
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Member (10 posts)
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Advanced Member (30 posts)
Once a member reaches the Min Posts value, their rank will be automatically changed. 'Pips' (or a custom image you can create) will appear beneath the member's name in their profile and in their posts, at this point.
Add a Member Rank Adding a new rank is very simple. The add box is already on the page, and you just need to define the name for the rank, the minimum post count required, and the number of pips you wish to display. 96
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If you prefer to use your own images, you can type in the image URL instead of typing a number of pips and that image will be displayed instead. Click on Add this Rank to do so!
Edit/Delete Rank Editing a rank is just as easy as adding one. Click on Edit next to the rank and you will see exactly the same form as when adding. Alter the options in the text boxes and then click on Complete Edit. If you do not want to use a rank any more, you can delete it by clicking on Delete next to the rank name. The rank will be removed immediately.
Manage Usergroups Usergroups, also called member groups, organize your members into categories. As you have seen earlier, this is mainly to assign permissions and thus control what your members are able to do on your forums. A set of default groups are created, and these cannot be removed: •
Admin: Administrator users who can access the Admin Control Panel and change every setting and access all functions.
•
Banned: Users who you have decided to ban from your forums. Generally, they have no access to do anything.
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Guests: Users who have not logged in to the forums.
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Members: The generic group that all users will belong to immediately after they have completed registration.
•
Validating: If you enable admin or user validation in the settings, users will be placed in this group while they are being validated.
You can actually delete the Banned usergroup. However, it is recommended that you keep it. When you click on Manage User Groups on the left menu, you will be shown the User Group Management table. This lists all your current usergroups along with some information—whether members of the group have access to the admin or moderator control panels, how many members belong to the group, etc. 97
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You can also see the links to Edit and Delete the groups. Clicking on the name of the group will take you to the user front end and display the list of the members within that group.
Add a New Member Group The first step to adding a new member group is to choose an existing group on which you would like to base the new group. The new group will have all its options set on the basis of the settings group you select. This is useful if you wish to alter only a few options. Once you have selected the group you wish to base the new member group on from the drop-down menu, click on Set up New Group.
Global Settings This section requires you to choose some base settings for the new group. This includes the group name and the permission mask you want applied to the group. You can also choose an icon for the group that will be displayed in the group members' profile. As the image, you can use either a full link (http://www.example.com/example.gif) or a path. If you choose to use a path, you must upload the image to style_images/{image_dir}/ 98
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folder_team_icons/{image}. The path to enter into the box is the same, with {image_dir} being the directory created for the forum skin.
Apart from an image, you can also choose to format the name of the group's members when they are shown on the Who's Online list on the board index. This can be used to differentiate your site staff members from normal members. The Online List Format [Prefix] and [Suffix] accept HTML tags. To make the username appear bold, you would enter <strong> into the [Prefix] box and into the [Suffix] box. You can also completely hide the group from the member list. This might be useful if you are going to add members to the group and wish to provide added privacy. For example, if you have a member group for customers, you might not want a visitor to be able to find out a list of your customers.
Upload Permissions If enabled, members can upload files to your board and attach them to forum posts and private messages. This section allows you to set quotas for users to prevent them from attaching large files and using up your disk space. You can set a global and per-post limit (in KB), set maximum sizes for profile photos, and choose if you wish to allow avatar uploads. Enter -1 into the quota boxes to disable uploads totally, and choose No to prevent private-message attachments. You can also set an unlimited quota by putting a 0 in the quota boxes.
Global Permissions This section contains options that allow you to change which features the members of this group have access to. You can decide whether you want them to be able to view the board at all; whether they can view the board when you set it to offline; whether they can see member profiles and the member list; whether they can view topics other than their own; if they can use the search, how long they have to wait before they can use it again; whether they can use the e-mail features of the software to mail other members, and if so, how many messages they can send (and how often can they send messages); whether they can edit their own profile or use the PM system, and how many messages they can store in the PM folders. 99
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Posting Permissions You can further fine-tune what members can do when they post a new topic or reply to an existing one. Options include choosing whether they can post, reply to their own (or any other member's) topics, add events to the calendar, or even bypass the word filter.
Moderation Permissions If the group you are creating is going to contain moderators or administrators, you can add three extra options to give them more control. You can define all members as super, global moderators. If this is set to Yes, these members have access to every forum they can see and the moderation controls within that forum. You can also allow users within the group to access to the Admin Control Panel. They will see all the options and settings that you can see. Finally, you can allow members to post in closed topics. Double-check the settings before submitting the changes to ensure that you do not inadvertently grant access to the Admin Control Panel!
Group Promotion The final option is to enable promotions. You could operate a system where members obtain extra features on the forum as they get more posts added to their total count. You could create multiple groups with the features enabled/disabled, and then choose a total post value at which the member will be promoted to another group. For example, you could upgrade a member to the next group after 25 posts. You would select the new group from the drop-down menu and then type 25 into the box. Once you are done with all the options, click on Add Group. If you have added permissions to set members as super moderators or have allowed them to access the Admin Control Panel, you will be warned before you can continue. You can now add new members to this group by editing their profile, as explained earlier.
Edit Group Clicking on Edit Group will show the same screen as the one shown during group-creation. You can then edit each option if you need to change something. 100
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Delete If groups are not core to the system, you will see a link: Delete. Click on this to permanently delete the usergroup. If you have any members in the group, you will be first asked which group you wish to move them to— members cannot belong to member groups that do not exist!
Manage Validating If you have enabled e-mail or admin validation on your forum, members whose accounts are registered, but not yet validated will appear in this section. This allows you to manually validate accounts. Members pending validation will be listed along with some information about them. This includes their member name, e-mail addresses, the date the validation e-mail was sent, the number of posts they have, their registration date, and the length of time the validation has been pending. The Where? column shows the type of validation. Registration means that the user has just registered and is yet to click the e-mail link or is waiting for you, the administrator, to validate the account. Members are also set to validating if they change their e-mail address in their profile. In such a case, E-Mail Change (rather than Registration) will appear. To enable or delete accounts, check the box on the far right and then select the action that you would like to perform from the drop-down menu at the bottom of the page. Click on Go! to perform the action.
Custom Profile Fields Why not add to the default registration fields to get more information about your members? You can do so by creating your own custom fields! Not only do the text fields, drop-down menus, and text areas let you gather additional data, but they are also automatically integrated into the design of your forum (or customized by you) and can even be searched! Clicking on Custom Profile Fields will take you to a screen that lists all your current fields:
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Add New Field Click on Add New Field. The next page shows thirteen options that you will use to define the new custom field. The first options you need to set are the Field Title and Description. These have maximum values of 200 and 250 characters respectively, and are shown to the user; the Field Title shows up in the User Control Panel, public profile, and next to the username in the post view, and the Description shows up in the User Control Panel only. Next you choose the type of field you require. You can choose from a small text box, drop-down menu, or the larger version of a text box (the text area). You should also define how many characters the member can enter into the field and how it will be ordered with the other custom fields you create. The Expected Input Format field allows you to define an input mask. If you know you want to have a date entered in the format dd/mm/yy, you would put nn/nn/nn into the box because n represents a number. Equally, if you wanted a day of the week entered in the three-letter abbreviated format, you would put aaa into the box because a represents an alphabetic character. In the Field Type box, if you choose a drop-down menu, the Option Content field needs to be filled out with the options for the dropdown. Drop-down items need two things specified: their value, and what is shown to the user. In IPB, this is done in the following format: value1=shown1 value2=shown2
Each option is on a new line and is of the format value=shown. value will be stored in the database, and shown will be displayed to the user when they click the drop-down menu. shown will also appear in the profile view and on the post page. The next five options define how the field will be shown to the user, and what can be done with it. If you would like the field to be shown on the registration page so that users can enter the data when they create their account, set the Include on registration page? option to Yes. You should also set the Field can be edited by the member? option to Yes, otherwise members will not be able to edit the field; only the administrators and super moderators would be able to edit it. You could, however, set the 102
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field to Private so that only the member, moderators, and administrators may see what has been entered. Finally, you can choose how the field is displayed underneath the name of the member on the left when they make a post. The default is to simply show the Field Title and then the value the user enters. But you can add your own formatting to show it as you'd like it. The variables you enter to show the title and content are {title} and {content}. These will be replaced with the actual data when it is shown. You can also use {key}, which is the drop-down menu value as explained above. To give an example, you could insert the following into the field so as to make the field title appear bold and then show the user-submitted value: <strong>{title}: {content}
The
at the end causes the next profile field to appear on a new line. If you do not include this, the next line will appear directly after this field without any line break. To save the options and add the new field, click on Add Field.
Editing When editing a field, you will see exactly the same options as when you added it. Follow the same process through the fields as explained, and then click on Complete Edit once you are done. Note that if you change the field type, some data might be lost. For example, if you changed a drop-down menu to a text box, the key will be the content of the text box, and will be displayed.
Deleting Clicking on the Delete link next to the custom profile field will delete the field and all user data added to it.
IP Member Tools Every machine and server on the Internet has its own unique IP address, which identifies it for the duration of its Internet session. This can be used to track down the ISP (Internet Service Provider) that the member is using, and its country. It can also be used by the ISP to track it down to an individual customer. 103
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IPB contains tools to allow you to find out which IP addresses your users have been using and to look up information about that IP. You can then use the IP to place a ban if it belongs to a troublemaker, or use it for troubleshooting purposes. Clicking on IP Member Tools will show you a screen with two boxes. The first allows you to see all the IP addresses that a specific member has used. Typing their name into the box will list all the IP addresses. You can then see how many times each IP has been used, the last time it was used, how many users have been registered with the same IP, and a link to find out more. The second box does the same as the Learn about this IP link. Type the IP address into the box, and the following information will be returned: •
The hostname that the IP address resolves to (if any)
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Members using the same IP address when they registered
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Members using the IP address when they post
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Members using the IP address when they vote
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Members using the IP address when they are e-mailing other members
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Members using the IP address when they are validating their accounts
Member Settings The final link in the Users and Groups category is the Member Settings shortcut. This takes you to the settings page related to members. This is covered at the beginning of this chapter.
The Post Office Suppose you've just launched a new product and wish to tell all your members about it; how can you go about doing that? Invision Power Board version 2.0 comes with a new feature called the "Post Office", which allows you to send out e-mails to some (or all) members in your forum. The Post Office section of the menu has two main options:
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Manage Bulk Email
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Create New Email
The first option allows you to monitor current batches, re-send previous jobs, or modify their settings. However, this isn't much use without an email to send, so we will cover that option first.
Creating an E-Mail The Create New Email page presents you with two sections: the form to enter the message, and a selection of various filters to control the batch. I will take you through each of the steps required to configure and send a batch of e-mails:
•
Email Subject: This will appear in the Subject field of the e-
mail when it is received. 105
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•
Email Content: This is the actual message that your members will receive. Several special tags are allowed for inserting dynamic data into the message; these can be seen in the following screenshot:
•
Honor 'Allow admin to email' member setting: Let's come
back to the e-mail settings. This setting allows you to choose to send the e-mail to all members, or just members who have opted to receive admin e-mails. I would recommend leaving this checked if you are sending an unimportant message; uncheck it only if you want to send crucial messages (such as planned downtime) to all members. •
Send email in HTML format: Most modern e-mail clients and
web-mail services (since they use HTML to function) can receive HTML messages. This gives you extra flexibility in terms of formatting options, but can increase e-mail file sizes dramatically. This is up to you, and can be influenced by the type of site you run, and what you wish to include in e-mails.
Filters The second section allows you to control the filters for the e-mail. These give you complete control over who you want to send the message to. You can choose to send the message only to members of a specific member group, to members with a certain number of posts, those who 106
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joined a certain number of days ago, and members who last visited a certain number of days ago.
Sending When you are happy with your message, click on Proceed… to place the message into the sending queue. Click on the Preview button to preview the e-mail before sending it. Once you have clicked on Proceed…, your message will be sent in batches. This reduces the load on the server and sends the messages out over a period of time; this is particularly useful if you have many hundreds or thousands of users. The user sending the message (you) will not receive the e-mail.
Manage Bulk Mail While sending is in progress (and afterwards), you can manage all your e-mail messages. During the sending process, you can see how long the process has taken, and the number of members to whom the message has been sent. You can also choose to Re-Send, Edit, or Delete the mail.
View E-Mail/Error Logs Any e-mails that are sent by members through the e-mail member function on your board are logged. This helps immensely when combating spam. You can see who is sending e-mails to which members, and can also view the content of the message sent. The error logs assist with any troubleshooting when sending e-mails out from the board, along with the error message. All messages within the logs can be searched to help you find any message.
Subscriptions The Subscription Manager allows you to set up paid-for packages that members must subscribe to. This can be used to offer unique content, enable specific features, or take donations, among other things.
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The Subscription Manager is only available if you download the customized package from your download manager after logging in to the IPS client area. A tutorial for the use of the Manager is available at http://www.invisionboard.com/?ipbtutorials. Clicking on Subscriptions and then Subscription Manager will display the overview screen. This shows your payment gateways and subscription packages, and allows you to search transactions.
Payment Gateways In order to use your subscriptions, you must be able to take payments (although you could set up a package that has a cost of 0)—usually via credit card. This is generally done through a third-party payment processor. You register with them (sometimes for a fee and/or ongoing fees), and they take care of accepting credit cards, taking the payment, and any resulting issues (e.g. fraud protection, refunds, etc.). By default, IPB has built-in gateways for the following processing options: •
PayPal (www.paypal.com)
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NOCHEX (www.nochex.com)
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2CheckOut (www.2checkout.com)
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Safshop (www.safshop.net)
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Protx (www.protx.com)
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Post Service (check or postal order)
Each of these gateways has configuration options that can be set by clicking on Set Up next to each of them in the table. The table shows information about how many transactions have been processed through each of your gateways, and the total amount paid (including any pending or failed transactions). You can also see your cumulative revenue and see all the transactions if you click on the value.
Gateway Configuration The configuration options are the same for every gateway, but the values that you should enter depend on the requirements of each gateway. You are asked to provide a name and description (which is already set for the default gateways), as well as your account ID or e-mail address. 108
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You can then set up auto-return and the default currency (see your gateway support documentation for more information), and finally decide if you wish to activate the gateway (you may only have a PayPal account, for example, and so would disable all the other gateways).
Subscription Packages The subscription packages are what your members will buy. The table lists all the packages that you have, along with the cost, members active and expired, and several options. To add a new package, click on Add New Subscription Package.
Add New Subscription Package You will be presented with several configuration options about the new package. However, if you are going to allow members access to special forums or forum features, you will want to create a new usergroup. Therefore, I suggest you go back and create the new member group with the various options you want, and then come back to this form; you need to select the member group that you want subscribers to be entered into. The package name and description will appear to the users when they are looking at the available packages, so it is recommended that you choose a descriptive name and explain the advantages of the subscription package. You can also require a monthly fee to subscribe to the package. This can be defined in the Subscription Duration box, where you can choose the duration or select never expire. The subscription cost is the amount you will be charging for the package. You should only use numbers and decimal points here; currency will automatically be applied. The member group is the group that all subscribers will be moved to. As explained earlier, this allows you to set up special permissions and enable various functions for subscribers only. Finally, you can choose to have a custom module running. This allows you to execute your own PHP code when a new subscriber is added. You can ignore this option if you are unsure about what to set. Advanced users can create their own module.
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An example module is included with IPB to demonstrate the basics of creating your own module. You will find this file in modules/mod_example.php. Click on Add Package to add it to the database for members to subscribe.
Currency Setup You can add as many currencies as you can accept, by clicking on the Currency Set-Up link on the left navigation menu. The default currencies are US Dollar, UK Pound, Canadian Dollar, and European Euro. You should choose a default currency as the exchange rate is worked out in relation to the default currency. If you choose UK Pound as the default currency, its Conv. Rate setting must be 1.00. All other currencies will be based on this. For example, 1 US Dollar is approximately 0.542880 UK Pounds. Therefore, in the US Dollar Conv. Rate box, you would enter 0.542880. You can find out the correct exchange rate from http://www.xe.com.
Transaction Searching The Subscription Manager comes with powerful transaction searching tools to help you look up existing transactions and manage them. From the Subscription Manager page, you can use the Find/Edit Transactions box to search by payment status, package, member name, transaction ID, the amount paid, subscription ID, or by date when the subscription is set to expire. You can also view transactions from the Transactions link on the left navigation menu. You can add a manual transaction from the Find/Edit Transactions box by clicking on Manually Add New Transaction. This would allow you, for example, to add a free subscription period for a user. Finally, you can also search the transaction logs from the bottom of the page or by clicking on Logs on the left navigation menu.
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Languages IPB has built-in language support to allow you to apply different languages to your forum. All languages can be edited so you can change the text as you wish. Clicking on the Languages category and then Manage Languages from the left menu allows you to see the installed languages and the number of members using each language, to create a new language set, swap member's language choices, and edit the language packs. Clicking on Edit next to the name of a language will let you to edit the package. You can rename it or alter the language 'files' themselves. Each section of the board uses a different file; all the sections are listed in the drop-down menu. Clicking Edit will display all the 'elements' of that file. There are many language files available for download; you can import these into your forum so that you do not need to translate everything yourself. You will find a list of approved websites where you can download language files at www.invisionboard.com/?resources. Once you have downloaded the language file, click on Import a Language. You can then upload the file from your computer and install it onto the forums. Your members will then be able to choose the language they are most familiar with from their User Control Panel.
BBCode As mentioned before, allowing members to use HTML in their posts can be dangerous, but disabling HTML also removes the ability to format posts. BBCode works as a compromise. This allows members to format their posts without having to use HTML. The most common formatting types are already included in IPB—bold, italic, underline, color, font, etc.—but you may wish to add your own. BBCode works by using a tag that is later replaced by the relevant HTML code. For example, the tag for bold is: [b]bold text here[/b]
… which is then turned into: <strong>bold text here
… which appears on the page as bold text here. 111
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This applies to all the default tags. You can define your own tags and what HTML code replaces them, by clicking on Custom BBCode | Custom BBCode Manager. You will notice that there are already some BBCode tags defined. You can see how the tags are used and can edit them to see what HTML they are replaced with.
Add New BBCode Click on Add New BBCode. You will be taken to the form to add your own code. Here you can define the name and description of your new tag. You should also include an example that will aid users when they are using your tag. In the Custom BBCode Tag box, you must enter the tag that members will use. If we use the example of bold text, you would enter b in this box. The Use Option in tag box allows you to have options in your tag; for example, the [url] tag has the option to enter a URL ([url=http://www.olate.co.uk]Olate[/url]), which will link the text Olate to http://www.olate.co.uk. The final box is the actual HTML code that will be used. In the case of the bold tag we are using, this would be:
{content}
... where {content} is what the user enters in between the [b] and [/b] tags. If you were using the option as given in the URL example above, you would use:
{content}
... with {option} being replaced with the URL. Click on Add BBCode and the new tag will be added for your members to start using. You can test out the BBCode in the box on the Custom BB Code Manager page. You can also import and export your BBCode to use, or allow others to use custom tags.
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Filters There are two types of filters you can set up in IPB2: bad-word filters, and ban filters. The former acts as a word-censoring system, and the latter prevents certain usernames, e-mail IDs, and IP addresses being used to register by members.
Bad Word Filters Clicking on Manage Badword Filters shows you any existing filters set up and allows you to create new filters and import lists of already created filters. Bad-word filters will globally replace words in posts, signatures, and topic titles. You can add a new filter in the Add a new filter box by entering the word to censor and the replacement word (you could choose **** or h**l, as a replacement for hell). You can also choose the type of filtering: •
Loose: If you entered hell as the bad word, it would replace any word with hell in it, e.g. hello, hell, and shell.
•
Exact: If you entered hell as the bad word, it would only replace instances of hell.
Ban Filters Any usernames, e-mail IDs, and IP addresses that you don't want used when registering can be entered into the ban filters list. Simply enter the username, e-mail ID, or IP address into the box at the bottom of the table, and select what type it is from the drop-down menu. You can enter wildcards such as *@hotmail.com (which would block any e-mail addresses ending in @hotmail.com) or 192.* (which would block any IP address beginning with 192). The e-mail and name filters will prevent new members registering with those details, whereas the IP filter will affect every member, including existing members.
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Statistics It is quite interesting to find out trends and patterns being set on your forum, using the forum's statistics. You can do this using the IPB Statistics Center, which allows you to view statistics for a certain time period for: •
User registrations
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New topics
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User posts
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Private messages
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Topic views
Each of these can be chosen from the Statistics Center section on the left navigation menu.
Summary In this chapter, we continued from the previous chapter looking specifically at the management of users and groups along with their permissions. We also examined other options including how to use the Post Office, subscriptions, filters, and statistics. By now, you should know your way around the Admin Panel and be able to use it successfully to manage your forum!
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7 Forum Maintenance and Administration Setting up your forum is relatively straightforward; however it is a full time job when it comes to encouraging members to register and post. Anyone can download and set up their own forum, but it takes a lot of hard work to create a community. Not only do you have to stimulate activity, but also manage the users and make sure that your forums remain a friendly place for discussions. This chapter will take you through the various aspects of user management for creating a successful community, with some hints and tips from administrators of large communities. You will learn: How to manage the forums to maximize use How to drive activity in the forum How to encourage users to register and then stay •
How the large forums deal with problem members
In addition, you will find out: How to use the IPB moderation tools to deal with problems and enforce your rules •
How to perform maintenance tasks
Forum Maintenance and Administration
Hints and Tips A forum can't exist without members and topics. Yet it often proves quite difficult to get a forum up and running. Several administrators of some large community forums powered by Invision Power Board have provided their top hints and tips to help you create a successful board. They have been categorized into different sections for easy reference. The questions asked were: In your opinion, what makes your forum successful? Do you have any hints or tips for other forum administrators? If you're stuck, try answering any of these questions: 1. How did you start off and what tactics did you employ to encourage activity in your forums—get people to register and post? 2. How do you manage the vast number of users? Do you have a large moderation team and how do you make sure that the rules (if any) are upheld? 3. How do you utilize the features of IPB (i.e. moderation tools) to assist with the management and moderation of the forum? 4. How do you get members to come back to visit and post messages on your forum? The majority of the following tips were gathered from a topic started specifically for this book on the Invision Power Services forums:
Your Forum/Website In order to encourage people to register and post in your forum: Find a niche; offer something to your visitors: "We started off by providing media clips of performances on American Idol on our forums. Compared to other sites/forums in our category, our media clips were generally higher quality (which also meant much larger filesizes) and we had a better infrastructure in place to ensure its continuity.
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Finding that niche at the beginning and attracting members through it is very important when starting a community,"—Lee Liu "All you need is something that will get people to keep coming back. Games are a good example. Uniqueness is the key to a popular forum. If IPB functioned exactly the same as other forum software, would you buy it? Probably not. You're a customer because IPB offers features you can't get elsewhere."—LionHeart (square-enixforums.com) "Keep your forums as unique as possible. It's important to make your forums appear and feel as if nothing else can match it, and the modifications and skins make it even cooler. Make the subjects of your forums even more unique by giving people a chance to express themselves without the major effects of rules. Expand your forums without limits and try to keep people interested in the subjects and let others give their opinions."—priestx Be different: customize the design of your forums: "Nothing is more boring when I see a forum that looks like 1000 other forums online. All this shows me is that the owner couldn't be bothered with their board's presentation. I appreciate a site more when I see something unique rather than some site that has gone and downloaded or paid for a skin that's over-used."—LionHeart (square-enix-forums.com) But do not overdo it: "Mods and skins will only make your forum better when done in moderation. Installing 50 different modifications and 10 different skins is more work for the admin of the forum in terms of any upgrading, or installing of new modifications. Going overboard in modifications or skins is a bad idea."—outlaw (invisionize.com) Use the languages features of IPB to target more users: "Not even half of the world's population speaks English, so if you don't offer other language packs such as Spanish, you're kissing goodbye many, many registrations."—LionHeart (square-enix-forums.com)
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Use the forums as an extension to your existing products and services: "In terms of attracting members we have to do very little, the products and services we provide do the recruiting for us. Our job is to run a welcoming community."—Rikki Tissier (forums.invisionpower.com) Stay up-to-date—keep your content fresh: "We keep the information fresh. We keep it friendly. And we keep it helpful. The board is now a first stop for many people who are looking for information on the TV show Third Watch—and I try my best to keep up to date with any information and happenings as they pertain to the show, actors, and powers that be involved."—MonaCK (thirdwatch.net) •
Don't give up: "Once you get your first 500 members, from then on in, it's fairly easy to build a popular forum. The hard part is starting out. Once you get your first members and get that endless chain of referrals going, you won't have any trouble building your forum. One thing people need to realise is things don't happen overnight. So many people buy an IPB expecting to be hosting a big community in a couple of months. They eventually give up after a few months because they only have 30 members. Don't let this be you; things take time, maybe even years."—LionHeart (squareenix-forums.com)
Members In order to effectively manage a vast number of existing users and encourage new members to register: Tell people why they should register: "We encourage registration by listing member benefits. We didn't completely just close the site to guests either, which often seems like a good solution to encourage registration but in most cases, it has the opposite effect and tends to turn people away."—Lee Liu Don't distance yourself from your members just because you are staff, or are running a 'corporate forum': "Our community spirit is one thing we're famous for. Many of our staff interact with members in the community forums.
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This is done on both a friendship level and staff level, and this is especially the case for me as a community administrator. We share jokes and so on constantly. I think the secret to a great community is not to act as a member of staff until a situation deems it necessary. I think of myself as a member of the community, just with a different pip and additional responsibility."—Rikki Tissier (forums.invisionpower.com) "In terms of encouraging activity, I can only say that it's the administrators' responsibility to act quickly and make sure posts are answered. If they're conversation posts, be polite and welcoming. People joined because they felt your community might offer them something so be sure not to let yourself and your site down."— jamble (drunkfoundation.com/forum) Make new members feel welcome: "The most difficult thing involved in making that first post on a forum is the high fear of nonacceptance by the community. Like many other forums, we reduce this fear by creating a welcome forum for new members to introduce themselves. Once that initial fear is reduced, many members feel more confident when posting and expressing their ideas in other forums."—Lee Liu Establish a community rather than just a forum: "Making members feel at home and ensuring they're enjoying themselves are always important. Making them feel accepted by the community and establishing bonds and friendships with other members will ensure they stay with the community for that much longer."—Lee Liu •
Your members are a vital part of encouraging new members to join and stay: "A great community is of course made by the members. I honestly don't know whether it was by luck or by judgment, but we have some amazing people form the heart of ours. It's these members that keep others coming back for more!"—Rikki Tissier (forums.invisionpower.com)
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Moderation and Problems In order to utilize the features of IPB (i.e. moderation tools) for management and moderation of the forum: Get rid of problems before they escalate: "Removing problem members is also important in maintaining a positive atmosphere. Many early forum administrators tend to shy away from this because they feel they're losing a member. The fact of the matter is that they'll most likely lose other positively-contributing members, as a result of not removing the problem members."—Lee Liu Be strong: "One of the things you need is to show you're not messing around when it comes to breaking rules. Unbanning a member after you've permanently banned them shows weak adminship. You have to be nice to the members, but at the same time fulfill your job of keeping the forums clean."—KevinMills. Define rules to govern what your members are allowed to do, but don't create a dictatorship: "We try to give users as much freedom as possible without overstepping the mark of what should be acceptable on our boards. We have a list of 'golden rules' that act as our forum guidelines. Most are common sense, with others being written for our specific environment. I like to think we enforce them fairly and use discretion in every case, rather than treating them as a black and white list of rules. As long as our members don't overstep the bounds too far, we're happy."—Rikki Tissier (forums.invisionpower.com) "I've seen some forums with vast lists of rules. Saying how many warning points you get for each. Even a forum for converse about the rules and who has been banned. All this when they only have 10 members, very silly."—Details (forums.revora.net)
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Keep your forum clean and friendly. Use the word filters: "Consider your target market, if your forum is based around a kid's video game and you don't have the word filter in place, you might have some angry parents disallowing their kids ever visiting your site again. There is even software that blocks websites that use foul language, so if you allow it on your site, there's a chance some people may be blocked from visiting your website."—LionHeart (square-enixforums.com)
As explained in previous chapters, forums are extremely important. They categorize the posts and topics in your forum site and make sure that discussion is organized. They make sure your forum site works correctly. Equally, they can make sure that nobody posts in your forum site! In order to cater to the needs of your users, you will need to create several forums covering the topics of your site/forum. You should create a generalized category and then create a couple of forums within it for handling the majority of posts. You can then direct all other topics to a General forum. One of the common mistakes made by new forum owners is to create too many forums to cover every possible topic. All this does is create a vast list of forums, all of which are almost empty. This does not look good for guest visitors who are much more likely to sign up to a forum that is active and has lots of posts. Even if you don't have lots of posts, spreading out those that you do have over many forums and categories seems a bad idea. "Time after time I see forums that have only 50 members but over 100 forums to talk in. This just isn't going to work; it also makes your forum look empty; which is not good if you're trying to get new members."—LionHeart (square-enix-forums.com) •
Once you have an active user base, you can expand your forums to cover more topics. As you have more members posting, the forums will be filled up quickly and won't make your forum site look empty.
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IPB Moderation Tools Invision Power Board 2 provides a number of new or improved tools to help with the moderation of your forum. Inline moderation and multimoderation improve your efficiency when needing to perform mass actions on many posts or topics, as Rikki, one of the administrators from Invision Power Service's Corporate Forums explains: From a moderator/administrators point of view, one of the biggest leaps forward in IPB and indeed bulletin boards is inline-moderation. It's one of those features that makes you say: "Why didn't we think of that before!". Essentially it merges the moderator functions with the standard use of the forums, so that moderation tasks can be performed without needing to access a special area of the board as was needed previously. All moderator functions pertinent to a particular page of the board are shown on that page! It's now so simple to moderate a topic, and it really does make a moderator's life easier. Inline moderation also adds the ability to view posts awaiting approval as part of the topic flow. Moderators will see an icon in the topic title showing that there are unapproved posts waiting, and these posts will be shaded red when they view the topic. It's then a simple case of selecting a post—or several posts—and approving or deleting in one action. This is another huge improvement over previous versions of IPB and other software. This system also works for posts that require different functions to be performed. Often a topic will veer offtopic quite fast, so one of our moderating tasks is to select several posts in one go, and move them to our 'trash can' forum en masse, in one action. For boards that receive several thousand posts per day, this is another huge timesaver. Just as useful as inline moderation is a new feature unique to IPB2 called topic multi-moderation. The concept is similar to that of macros in applications such as Microsoft Word: it is a pre-defined execution of several functions at once, accessible through a single menu. Using this new feature, moderators are able to move a topic, pin it, close it, and reply—all by selecting a single menu item from their moderator menu! We use this feature extensively on our company board. 122
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The benefits of this feature are obvious, and after using it moderators will scream if they have to go back to using a board without it!
Inline Moderation The standard moderation actions are now much easier to perform especially on multiple posts and topics due to the inline moderation feature provided in IPB2. This allows you to select one or more posts or topics to perform the action on directly from the topic or post views. This means you do not need to access a new control panel or go through each one and perform the action individually. This is a great time saver for larger forums. On the topic list view, each topic has a small tick box icon to its right . Clicking the icon selects that topic—the icon image turns red. At the bottom of the list is a drop-down list with all the moderator actions you can perform: close/open topics, pin/unpin topics, move topics, merge topics, delete topics, and approve/disapprove topics:
The same applies when viewing the posts within a topic. The same icon appears on the right for every post. You can use it to select that post, and as many other posts as you like, to perform the moderation actions from the list on the right at the bottom of the page—merge posts, move posts, split topic, and set invisible/visible:
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Still on the post view, you can perform all of the moderation actions as you can on the topic list from the drop-down menu on the bottom left of the page. In addition to the normal options, you can also view a topic history and unsubscribe all members from e-mail notifications for this topic. The topic history gives you some statistics for the topic and lists all the moderator log entries—these are automatically generated when posts are edited, deleted, or any of the other moderator actions are performed:
Multi-Moderation This feature allows you to perform multiple actions on a topic at once: Reply to the topic Open/Close the topic Move the topic Change the topic title •
Pin/Unpin the topic
This means you can define new moderator actions to quickly perform certain actions. For example, you could use this to manage a software bug-reporting system. You could define a multi-moderation action that renamed the title to [Confirmed] user named bug, added a reply to the topic saying Bug confirmed and then moved the topic to the Confirmed Bugs forum. All at once, instantly! Your current multi-moderation actions can be found by clicking on the Topic Multi-Moderation link from the Forum Control category of the Administrator Control Panel. Once you have created the new multimoderation action, it will appear at the bottom of the page when viewing a topic: 124
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Add a New Multi-Moderation Action Click the Add New button. You will then see various options for you to set. The first task is to set a name for the multi-moderation action. This will appear on the forum user front end so should be descriptive. I shall use the example explained above and set the Title for this MultiModeration Suite? as Bugs: Confirm. Actions configured in the multimoderation action will override any moderator permissions. Next, choose which forum(s) you would like this multi-moderation to apply to. For my example, I will choose my Bug Reports forum. You can select multiple forums by holding down the Ctrl key (Windows users) or the Apple key (Apple Mac users) and then clicking on the forums. As I described above, I want to add to the topic title [Confirmed], so under the Moderation Options and in the Add to START of topic title? box, I add [Confirmed]. If I wanted to add something to the end of the topic title, I could add it to the Add to END of topic title? box. The text will be added exactly as you enter it. If you want to have a space between the user entered topic title and your addition, you need to enter that space into the box. Next, you can choose if you want to open or close the topic in Alter topic state, pin or unpin the topic in Alter pinned state, or move the topic to the moderation queue by setting the approved state to Unapprove. With any of these, you can leave the default option as (Leave) and the existing state will be kept. Finally, I wanted to move my topic to the Confirmed Bugs forum. I can select this from the Move Topic? drop-down menu. I could also add a Moved: link to the forum so users can click it and be redirected to the new location by checking the Leave a link to the source topic? box. 125
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Finally, I wanted to add an auto reply to the topic just to say that the bug had been confirmed. Under the Post Options category, there is an Add a reply to the topic? box. After adding the response to the box, be sure to set the Enable this reply? option to Yes. You can also choose if you would like this reply to contribute to the overall post count of the user who uses the multi-moderation action. Note that you can add HTML to the auto reply to format it when it is displayed. When you are happy with your settings, click on Add New MultiModeration to save the action and return to the multi-moderation listing.
Using the Multi-Moderation The newly created multi-moderation action will appear in the drop-down menu at the bottom of the page when you are viewing a topic. Select it from the menu and then click Go to perform the action:
Edit/Remove You can edit and remove the multi-moderation action at any time by clicking on the Edit or Remove links on the multi-moderation page.
Prune/Mass Move At the bottom of the topic view page are four options. The Prune/Mass Move link is the last of these. Using this tool, you can move or prune many topics according to certain criteria. You must first select the action you wish to perform—Prune or Move. If you wish to move the topics to a different forum, you select the destination from the drop-down menu. It is important to note that these two options perform different actions. Pruning topics completely removes them from the forum whereas moving topics will just move them to a different forum. Pruned topics cannot be recovered.
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You can then choose how you wish to choose topics for pruning/moving. This can be done based on: Topics with no new posts over a specified period of time Topic types (open, locked, moved topic links, or any topics) Topics with less than a specified number of replies •
Topics started by a certain member
When you are happy with your criteria, click on Check Form Submission. You will be told how many will be pruned/moved and then you must click to confirm.
Maintenance Regular maintenance of your forum is essential to keep everything running at optimum levels. Although IPB performs the most important tasks at regular intervals through the Task Manager tool, you can perform many clean up actions manually. You are most likely to use the maintenance functions explained below when you perform a large mass move or prune of members, topics, or posts, or when you want to change any of the forum settings. From the Administrator Control Panel, select the Recount & Rebuild option. From this page, you will see eleven options to rebuild or recount various aspects of the forum. You are asked to choose how many you wish to rebuild/recount per cycle. The default is usually fine, but if you have a particularly slow (or fast) server, you may wish to increase or decrease this value. Choose which action you wish to perform and then click on the button to perform that action. Over time, your database tables will generate an overhead. This is because they are in constant use. You can use IPB to perform the OPTIMIZE command on your database tables (for MySQL) which reclaims any unused space and defragments the data files. 127
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This can be performed via the SQL Toolbox option under SQL Maintenance in the Administrator Control Panel. You will see a list of all the forum tables in your database. Click the checkbox on the far right and then scroll down to select Optimize Selected Tables from the drop-down menu. Clicking on Go will perform the command.
Backups Making regular backups should be routine. You can either set up an automated backup system on your server, or use the tool built into IPB. Ideally, you should use both! By clicking on SQL Management and then SQL Backup in the Administrator Control Panel, you can download a full backup of your forum database, which can be used if you ever need to restore your forum to the state it was in when you made the backup.
Summary Now you have completed this chapter, you should have a greater insight into the role of a forum administrator. The tips provided by the owners of successful forums will allow you to target your efforts and make the daunting task of creating an active community less difficult. Taking on board the hints suggested and utilizing the tools explained in this section should be a good start for your own forum. And when it is active, you can employ the moderation tools to manage your members to ensure that your forums remain popular and friendly.
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8 Skins and Templates In many web applications, a 'skin' and a 'template' are effectively the same thing. However, in Invision Power Board, they are quite different. The look and feel of a forum is very important to give the intended impression to your visitors. The content, topics, or subject of the forums will influence the look of the site, whether it is the choice of color scheme of the site, or graphics that decorate the page. You may be starting from scratch or you may be integrating your forums with an existing website. Whatever the requirement, the look is made up of several components such as: Graphics CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) Templates •
The component that pulls it all together—the wrapper
When these four components are put together, you have a skin. By editing all, some, or just one of these components, you can change the way your forum looks. This chapter will take you through each of the four components and explain how to modify them for your own site. It is important that you have a sound grasp of CSS and HTML to make your own skin, but simple modifications can be made with little prior knowledge. Many sites offer skins you can download for free or pay to download. The first section of this chapter will examine several common tasks performed by forum owners to get the forum customized. The last section of this chapter looks at all the options available in more detail.
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Common Tasks Once you have your forum set up, it is likely that you will want to change the look: the design and layout to make it more personal. The next few pages will take you through making these changes.
Changing the Logo Often the first thing you will want to change is the logo: IPB provides an Easy Logo Changer tool to do just this without the need to modify any of the templates or HTML. From the Admin Control Panel, expand the Skins & Templates category box (about halfway down the menu) and click on Easy Logo Changer. This will load a new page with just three fields:
The first option is to choose the skin set to change the logo on. If this is your first board and is newly installed, this will be set to the IPB Default Skin. Otherwise, you can choose which skin to change the logo on if you have multiple skins installed. Usually, you would skip to the last option and upload an image from your hard disk. It is recommended that you use a .gif, .jpg, .jpeg, or .png image—the most commonly supported formats around the Internet. 130
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Clicking on the Browse button will launch a dialog box so you can browse your local PC to find the logo you wish to upload. When you have found it, select it then click Ok. Finally, click on the Complete Edit button and your new logo will be put in place on the forum index. Your logo will replace the default Invision Power Board logo. Before:
After:
Change the Default Font Type, Font Size, and Font Color Every aspect of the IPB interface is controlled through Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS is used to centralize all design elements so they can be changed and customized from a central location. To make editing the CSS easier, IPB provides an Easy CSS Mode. This uses a visual system to change the options provided by CSS. To change the default font type, size, and color, we will be using this editor. IPB also provides an Advanced Mode for users with more experience of CSS: 1. Enter the Admin Control Panel, expand the Skins & Templates category box (about halfway down the menu) and click on Skin Manager. 2. If this is a new installation, click on IPB Default Skin. Otherwise, click on the name of the skin you wish to edit. 3. From the pop-up menu, click on the Edit Root Skin Colors (Easy CSS Mode). 131
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4. You will now see a large page with many tables and options. This is the easy CSS editor. It lists each CSS element. 5. There are many different elements that use their own fonts, colors, and sizes, but to change the main default font type, size, and color, you need to edit the second element: body. 6. On the left, you will see that the current Font Color is #222, which is almost black. To change this, enter a new HTML color code into the box or click on the small color palette icon to launch a color picker. The color picker makes it easier to choose the color you want to use if you are not familiar with HTML color codes. 7. To the right of the color option, is the Other CSS Attributes box. This contains the font-family and font-size attributes, which can be changed as you wish. (To change the font, replace the Verdana, Tahoma, Arial, Trebuchet MS, Sans-Serif, Georgia, Courier, Times New Roman, Serif
with the name of the font you wish to use, and to change the font size, alter the size set in pixels. To enlarge the font, you might change the size to 16px.) 8. When you are satisfied, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on Edit. Refresh your board index in order to see the changes take effect.
Skin Manager The following pages will take you through each option of the template system in depth looking at each feature and how to use it. The Skin Manager allows you to see all the skins you have installed and manage each one. This can be accessed from the Admin Control Panel by expanding the Skins & Templates menu and then clicking on Skin Manager:
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After your default installation, this page will show you a table with two items—IPB Master Skin Set, and underneath in a hierarchical format, IPB Default Skin. The master skin is the default set of templates, graphics, CSS, and the default wrapper that consists of the default skin. You cannot edit the master skin. The idea is that you create variants of this master skin by editing the default skin, or by creating new skins. On the right are several buttons and icons. The first option is to add a new skin set. This allows you to set up brand new skins using different components from the default skin set. You will then see icons that tell you that the default skin is the actual default skin for the board that members automatically use and guests will also use. You can also see that the skin is not hidden from members. Apart from this, you will also see a link to export the skin, which we will come to later. Each skin has a parent skin on which it is based. The child skins inherit the HTML and other elements from their parent. If you edit the child, only the child will be altered. However, if you edit the parent, all its child skins will be changed accordingly. This could be useful if you were, for example, creating color variations by just editing the CSS. Then if you wanted to make changes to the template content, you could do so in the parent skin and all the children would be affected:
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Skin Menu Clicking on IPB Default Skin will show several options: Edit Root Skin Board Header & Footer Wrapper: This allows you to
edit the wrapper, which is the header and footer of the forum—all the templates appear in between this wrapper. Edit Root Skin Template HTML: Every page (with some pages being broken into more than one template) is a separate editable template. Edit Root Skin Stylesheet (CSS Advanced Mode): Edit the CSS that controls the fonts, and colors of your board using the full advanced mode. Edit Root Skin Stylesheet (CSS Easy Mode): Edit the CSS that controls the fonts and colors of your board using the easy mode. Edit Root Skin Replacement Macros Edit Settings Revert All Skin Customizations: Reset your changes to the skin to
their default values, as set in the parent skin. Add New Child Skin Set: As explained earlier, this option will allow
you to create a new child skin that will inherit the options from this skin. •
Remove Skin Set: Delete the skin.
Although not initially apparent, each of the first five options has a small gray square next to it on the left. When you have edited something within an option (e.g. a template), the square changes to red:
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The Board Wrapper Every page in your forum is composed of templates. These templates sit in the middle of a wrapper providing a header and a footer, generic across the whole board. Certain elements also appear on every page, and these are positioned using the board wrapper. If you click on the Edit Root Skin Board Header & Footer Wrapper link, you will be presented with an edit box showing the following code:
<% TITLE %> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> <% GENERATOR %> <% CSS %> <% JAVASCRIPT %>
<% BOARD HEADER %> <% MEMBER BAR %> <% NAVIGATION %> <% BOARD %> <% BOARD FOOTER %> <% STATS %> <% COPYRIGHT %>
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The first few lines of these are standard HTML header text, which is (or a variant of which is) always included in every HTML page. In this case, it shows that the code is using the XHTML format. For more information about XHTML, see http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/. Throughout the code you will see tags within <% and %>. Where these are is where certain elements will appear. For example, where you see <% MEMBER BAR %> is where the members' quick control bar will appear—this contains links to their profiles and private messaging. One of the most important of these is <% BOARD %> (highlighted in the code previously). This is where all the page templates are inserted with the general site code wrapping around it. To add something that will appear on every page, position it based around this tag. Equally, if you wanted to remove the board header from your forum, just delete the <% BOARD HEADER %> tag, and it will not be shown. Note that you cannot remove the copyright notice. Deleting the tags will remove that section from your board. This will often remove large portions of the board functionality, so it is unlikely that you will ever need to do this. Clicking on Save Wrapper will save the changes you have made, and then return you to the skin manager. Clicking on Save and Reload Wrapper will do the same, but will reload the edit wrapper page rather than the skin manager.
Templates The templates make up every page of your forum. They contain HTML and control how the page is laid out. Clicking on the Edit Root Skin Template HTML link will take you to a list of all the templates for that skin:
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This large table shows quite a bit of information about that template. Firstly, it lists categories that the template's files themselves are grouped into (for example Board Index, Calendar, Help, etc.). Next to the name is the familiar small gray square. This turns red when the category contains templates that have been edited. On the right side against the name are two numbers enclosed by brackets next to a gray box and a red box. The first number on the left of the gray box shows how many template files within the category have not been edited. The number (default 00) on the left of the red box shows how many templates with that category have been modified. On the right of this is a small Internet Explorer icon, either full or slightly dimmed with a red line through it. Clicking this launches the relevant section in your forum; no preview is available otherwise. Finally, at the top of the table is a search box to allow you to search the template names for something specific you are looking for; on the right side is a drop-down menu that lists common templates you may wish to edit (for example, Board Header or Post View & Table).
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Template Bits Every category has several template bits within it. These contain the actual HTML that appears on your site. Clicking on the name of the category will expand a box listing all the template bits within that category. This box has several features:
Starting at the top-left corner of the box, the button with the red X closes the box. Clicking the category name will also have the same effect. Next, the tick-mark button checks/unchecks all the templates within the category. This is useful if you wish to edit all the template bits within that category: you can check the boxes next to the template bit names and then click the Edit Selected button to edit those template bits. The next button floats the box so that you can open multiple categories at the same time and view them more easily on the page. Moving over to the right, the down arrow on the far right increases the size of the box by the size of one template bit. The up arrow on the left decreases the size of the box by the size of one template bit. The button in the middle expands the box fully so you can see all the template bits. Within the box itself, you have the gray boxes next to each template. As before, these change color when the template has been modified. On the far right are two icons—a page and an Internet Explorer icon. The page icon loads the template in your browser as plain text so that you can see the template source code in full. 138
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On clicking this button, the page loads and allows you to view the template either as the source code, as parsed HTML, or as parsed HTML with CSS. This enables you to perform a quick preview of the code. The Internet Explorer icon loads up the same page, but defaults to the parsed HTML with CSS option.
Editing a Template Bit Clicking on the name of a template bit will load up the source HTML for that page into a box so that you can edit it. This page also includes several buttons to modify how you can edit the source code:
You can see several hidden fields in the screenshot. Removing these is possible, but is not recommended—these are required fields, and it will probably break your board if you do so! The Change Editor Preferences menu in the top-left corner of the page drops down to reveal options that allow you to edit the design of the editing page to suit your preferences. This includes changing the code's display font, size, color, and background color. You can also change the height and width of the edit box. The Float button loads the editor into a new browser window without the left menu frame. On the top right are several other buttons.
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If you remember from earlier in the chapter, macros are variables you can enter into the template to be replaced by text or images. The Macro Lookup button allows you to quickly search these macros for the macro you are looking for. The next button compares your code's current version to the last edited version. This is known as a 'diff', and can help you recover from an error if you do not wish to revert to the last saved template, which is what the Restore button does. The View Original button loads up the original template file so you can see the code for this. This is not a revision history system; it only compares the current contents of the textbox with the last saved version of the template, and not the original, default HTML. If you alter the content and save it, the changes become the 'original'. At the bottom of the page is a small drop-down menu, which will show you the HTML code for several common symbols including the copyright © and the dot •. You can then copy the code from the small box to the side of the drop-down menu and paste it into the edit box. Above that are two buttons: Save Template Bit(s), which will save the changes you have made and return you to the previous screen, and Save and Reload Template Bit(s), which will save and then reload this page. This is especially useful if you make a small change and then want to preview it, but also make other changes directly afterwards. If you choose to edit multiple template bits then the page will repeat for each one you can edit. You can make the changes to the multiple bits and then save them all at once.
CSS Editing in Easy Mode HTML tags are designed to define the way that text is laid out on the page. Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, are designed to define the color and styling of the page. In Invision Power Board, CSS is used to change the colors, font type, and font sizes of the template, and in some cases, background images. It also offers two methods of altering these, one of which is the Easy Edit mode.
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In versions up to 2.0.3, the Easy Editor can be unstable. There have been reports of it becoming confused and mangling code up. While this does not cause major problems, it can cause some errors with borders around images and other small problems.
You can find out more information on CSS and read several good tutorials at http://www.w3schools.com/css. You can load the CSS editor by clicking on Edit Root Skin Colors (CSS Easy Mode) from the pop-up menu on the skin manager page. The following page may take a few seconds longer to load than normal, but contains a list of all the CSS elements. CSS is broken down into elements with specific names that are then referenced within the HTML. For example, a link may use a tag such as:
Link
In the CSS, this would then reference an element called link1. The Easy CSS Editor shows all these elements and allows you to change the color of the font and its background, as well as add extra CSS attributes to the element. The color picking is done by entering the HTML color code for the color you wish to use. However, this is made much easier by using a color picker, which, on clicking on a small color grid next to the color box, pops up a larger grid showing a range of colors. Clicking on the color you wish to use will tell you the color code. If you click on Save, it will add that code to the color box for the CSS attribute.
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In the Other CSS Attributes box on the right, you can add your own CSS to change the styling of that element. For example, to make the font Arial, you would enter this into the box: font-family: Arial;
After each attribute, use a semi-colon to show the end of the attribute. You can find out more attributes you can use from the W3C online CSS reference at http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_reference.asp. When you are finished, scroll to the bottom of the page, and click Edit to save the changes.
CSS Editing in Advanced Mode If you know how to use CSS, you can simply use the Edit Root Skin Stylesheet (CSS Advanced Mode) option from the Skin Manager. This loads a large textbox with the raw CSS code in. You can edit it as you would any CSS, and click on Save Stylesheet and return to the skin manager or click on Save and Reload Stylesheet to save and then reload the page. Because of the way the template system works with caching, it is not possible to easily edit the CSS by downloading the files directly from the file system. You need to edit through the IPB interface. As with editing a template bit, the edit box allows you to edit the design of the edit box (font, font color, background color, etc.) from the Change Editor Preferences dropdown at the top. A useful feature hidden at the bottom of the edit page is the option to view where a certain CSS element is used within the templates and to preview the attributes of the element. Select the name of the element from the drop-down menu and then either click on Go! to find its usage within the templates or on Preview CSS Style to see how the style attributes are used.
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Replacement Macros Replacement macros are used in the IPB templates to hold HTML code that is often used in many pages, and provide a copy of the HTML that can be inserted into the relevant templates when needed. This means that multiple pages can be updated by changing the code in the template. These macros include buttons such as the Fast Reply and New Topic buttons and other images. Each macro is given a tag that can be inserted in the HTML and is parsed by the IPB template system and replaced with the relevant code. The Edit Root Skin Replacement Macros option in the Skin Manager will take you to the page to manage these. On the list page, you will see all the current macros. On the left is the tag that is entered into the template HTML, in the middle is the parsed HTML that will be inserted, and on the right is the button that will allow you edit the macro. As is common throughout the template system, a gray square exists on the left for each macro. This square changes to red if the macro has been changed from its default value. An example of a macro is <{A_APOLL}>. Wherever this tag is placed in the template, it is replaced by the following code:
Adding/Editing To add a new macro, simply click the Add Macro button in the right corner of the page. To edit the macro, click the Change button. Adding and editing are mostly the same; adding will be described here. Once you have clicked on Add Macro, a pop-up box will appear:
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The Variable field will contain what you wish your macro tag to be. When used in a template, this appears in a <{tagname}> format. For example, if you enter example_logo into the Variable field, you would use the macro in the HTML by typing <{example_logo}>. The Replacement box will contain the replacement code to be entered into the template. This will usually be HTML. For many of the default macros, this is for an image. For example, the replacement macro A_APOLL has the replacement code:
If you wish to insert an image, you can do so using a direct reference to the actual path (e.g. if it is stored in another part of your website). However, you can also upload the image to the skin images directory (which you might want to do in the case of having multiple images specific to the skin). In this case, you can dynamically insert the path to the image as shown in the code example for the A_APOLL macro. The <#IMG_DIR#> variable can be used to insert the name of the image directory currently in use by the skin. Finally, clicking on Add This Macro will add the macro to the database for you to use in the skin.
Edit Skin Settings Every skin has several settings. These can be customized from the Skin Settings menu link in the Skin Manager:
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Basics When you create a new skin, you can give it a name. The Set Title field allows you to set the name of the skin so that you can easily identify it in the Skin Manager. You also have the option to hide the skin from members so that they cannot select it from the control panel to use it. The skin can be set to the default skin and also given a parent, if applicable. You may remember that the Set as default skin and Hide from members? options can also be toggled from the Skin Manager page itself.
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CSS Options Normally, the CSS is stored in the database and placed into every page as it loads. However, by setting the Cache CSS to text files option to Yes, you can have the CSS placed into a file and then loaded by the page. This reduces the size of the page as it loads, and also means that the browser can cache the CSS file for future use. If you have not set the permissions for the skin_images/ folder correctly, an error will be displayed when selecting the cache option. In this case, you need to set the permissions (using the chmod command on Linux and checking the user permissions on Windows) so that the user has read/write access to the directory.
Image Options As seen in the Replacement Macros section, you can choose the image directory that the skin uses, by selecting from the Use image directory? drop-down menu. You can also choose to use a specific set of emoticons by choosing the directory name from the drop-down menu.
Set Author If you are going to distribute your skin, and even if you're not, you may like to add your personal author details to the skin, which can be done in the Set Author section.
Skin Tools The IPB template system not only stores the templates in the database, but also creates a flat-file version. This caching system means that users load the templates from the files and not from the database, thus reducing the load on the database server. The flat file is updated whenever you change a template. The Skin Tools option from the Admin Control Panel's left frame menu provides you with three maintenance tools.
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Rebuild Master Templates As mentioned earlier in the chapter, templates inherit their template bits from the parent template to save space. Using the Rebuild Master Templates option, you can rebuild the cache store of the master templates used by all your skins. This is helpful if you have made a change that's not showing up when you access the forum. Click the Run Tool… button to do this.
Rebuild Skin Set Cache Even though the IPB template system is very efficient, sometimes it fails to update the flat-file cache; changes you make might not be reflected on the site. You can manually force the rebuilding of the entire cache by selecting the template from the dropdown and clicking Run Tool…. Alternatively, you can click the Rebuild All link to rebuild every skin:
Update Members Skin Choice The final option allows you to change which skin members are using. This is useful if you do not wish members to use one skin and want to change it in one go. This option works by changing the skin of members based on the skin they are currently using. For example, if you have ten members using Skin A and you want them to use Skin B, you would select Skin A from the first drop-down menu and then select Skin B from the second. Clicking on Run Tool… will apply the changes:
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Search and Replace Many web editors include search and replace tools to search your documents. IPB also includes this functionality to search through all the templates and find a certain search term and optionally replace with code that you specify. This can be done from the Skin Search & Replace link from the Admin Control Panel left menu.
Skin Import/Export IPB allows you to import a skin created by someone else (or a backup of your own skin) and export a skin that you have made (for distribution or backup, for example). This can be done from the Skin Import/Export menu option.
Export You can download all your skin customizations into one file for distribution and/or backup. The first option on the import/export page is exporting. To export a template, first select the template you would like to export from the Export Which Template Set? drop-down menu in the Export Skin Templates box. Next, choose what you would like to export—just the customizations you have made to this skin, or the complete skin, including the full parent skin. When you are finished, click on the Export Skin XML button to download the .xml file containing the skin. Exporting the Skin Templates does not include any images—they must be exported separately. This can be done from the Export Skin Images box by selecting the skin set (it tells you which skins use the images) and then clicking on the Export Skin Images button. The images are exported using the XMLarchive format, which may not work correctly for PHP safe-mode users. To find out if this applies you to, try exporting the files. If you encounter any problems, you may have safe mode enabled. You can check with your web-hosting company to double-check this.
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If this is the case, you can download the images manually by FTP-ing to your server. The images are located in the skin_images/ directory and are ordered by skin in a numbered directory. The Image Set dropdown on the Export page includes the ID that this number references. The XMLArchive format was developed by Rick Jelliffe and is a method of storing compressed XML data based upon the ZIP archiving system.
Import Importing a skin is just a case of uploading the skin templates and skin images. In both cases, you can browse your computer for the XML files to upload to the forums. Alternatively, you can upload them to your forum root directory using FTP and then enter the file name into the second field. In both cases, you can also create a new skin or image set with a new name or use the name provided in the XML file:
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Summary This chapter has covered all aspects of the IPB templating system, explaining how to edit the templates to change the actual HTML code of your site; you saw how to edit the CSS to change colors and fonts and how to import and export templates. There are many templates available for download, free and paid for. Appendix B has a list of resources, including sites for downloading templates for use in your forum.
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9 First Steps—A Guide In this chapter, I will take you through the first steps to getting your forum up and running, customizing the settings, creating forums, user groups, and starting to promote your forum. This chapter will help you get your community started and point you in the right direction.
Initial Configuration The first user that was created when you initially installed your forum in Chapter 2 has admin permissions. Log in as this user and click on the link labeled Admin CP. This will launch the Administrator Control Panel. Your username and password will be the same as your main user account. This configuration has been described in detail in Chapter 4. Once you click Login you will be taken to the control panel. From the left menu, select System Settings and click on General Configuration: 1. General Configuration: This is the first thing you should edit. Change the Board Name, Website Name, and Website Address to match your site. In addition, to allow user uploads (file, avatar, and picture uploads), change the values in Upload URL and Path to 'upload' directory. Ask your web host for help in filling out these values. 2. E-mail Set-Up: Your forum will send out e-mails to new users, notifications for new private messages and topic reply notifications, among other things. Make sure you have the email set up correctly and that you have a valid From address which members can reply to if they have any problems. The two most important values in this section are Board incoming email address and Board outgoing email address.
First Steps—A Guide
The incoming address will be used as the reply to address and the outgoing address will be used as the From address. Once you have changed the settings for the general configuration of the board, you should go through each setting group looking up what it does in Chapter 5. This will allow you to configure each option to your liking. Immediately after installation, it may be a good idea to set your board offline so members and guests cannot access any part of your forum unless you grant access to them (Users & Groups | Manage User Groups | Edit | Global Permissions | Can view OFFLINE board will grant access). Those that do not have access are presented with a customizable message. When you are finished with the board configuration, you will want to make the board appear online. To do this, go to the Board Offline/Online section in the Board Offline/Online section of the System Settings menu. From here, you will see an option called Turn the board offline?. Set this to No and then click Update Settings. This will make your board publicly viewable.
Licensing Even though you download IPB from your member area, the board is unlicensed by default. You should register your license key as soon as possible. This can be done by clicking on IPB License from the System Settings category. A box will appear at the bottom of the page asking you to enter your registration key. If you do not know what it is, the page is framed so you can log in to the member area within that window, click on Invision Power Board on the right menu, and then copy your license key into the box.
User Groups Although forums are the core part of your board and without them you wouldn't have a community, they are the third thing you should set up. The second is user groups. User groups allow you to categorize your members and manage the permissions that allow access to forums and features. It is much easier to define the user group first and then create the forum as you can define 152
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the group permission when you create the forum. This saves creating the forum, creating the group, and then going back to the forum to change the permission. Assuming you wish to create a new member group, go to the Users and Groups category and then to Manage User Groups. It might be a good idea to create a Moderators group at this time so you can create your moderators for your forum if you have some already. Alternatively, you can add individual users to the forums as moderators rather than using a user group via the Forum Control | Moderators menu.
Adding a Moderator User Group You can have individual members as moderators. This is useful if you wish to have different members manage specific forums matching their specialist subjects. However, you may wish to have a team of global moderators all contained within a user group. One of the main advantages of this is that you can tweak their settings all at once, give them moderator ranks and images, and allow them access to certain features of the board. The first step to adding a new member group is to choose which existing group you would like to base the new group upon. The new group will have its set of options based on what the group you selected has set. This is useful if you wish to only alter a few options. In our case, we're going to be creating a Moderator group and so it will be best to base the initial options on the Members group. Once you have selected the Members group from the drop-down menu, click on Set up New Group. You will then be required to specify the options for the Global Settings. This section requires you to choose some base settings for the new group. This includes the group name and the permission mask you want the group to have applied to it. You can also choose an icon for the group, which will be displayed in group members' profiles. You can use either a full link (http://www.example.com/example.gif) or a path to the image. If you choose to use a path, you must upload the image to style_images/{image_dir}folder_team_icons/{image}. The path to enter into the box is the same. {image_dir} is the directory created for the forum skin.
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For the purposes of our new group, we're going to call the group Moderators. If you have an image you can use, you can enter the path in the box called Group Icon Image. A common way to distinguish moderators from normal members is to have them appear a different color. This can be achieved by entering in some HTML into the Online List Format [Prefix]/ [Suffix] boxes. For example, if you wanted to make your moderators appear black in the Online List (normal members appear blue) then you would enter <span style='color: black'> into the Prefix box and into the Suffix box. Equally, you could make them appear bold by using the <strong> and HTML tags. The following permission options can generally be left as they are—they will have the same permissions as normal members. However, you may wish to allow moderators to view the board when you mark it offline. This can be done by checking the Yes box of the Can view OFFLINE board? option. The Posting Permissions options allow you to customize the actions the user can perform even further. Many of these default to No, but as a Moderator it is often useful to be able to do most of these. Therefore, it is recommended you allow these. The Moderation Permissions give three options to define special moderator actions. Since the original purpose of this group was to set up global moderators, set Is Super Moderator (can moderate anywhere)? to Yes. It is completely up to you if you want to allow moderators access to your Administration Control Panel or to allow them to post in closed topics. Generally, you will not need access to the Administrator panel as a moderator—everything you need to do can be done from the main interface. Therefore it is advisable not to allow moderators access to the Administration Control Panel. Finally, since you probably want to hand pick your moderators, you do not want to allow users to get promoted the moderator group. Set the Group Promotion to Don't Promote. Next, click on Add Group and you will be taken back to the Manage Groups page.
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Adding a Member to the New Moderators Group You can now edit any member and add them to this new Moderators group. Clicking on the Manage Members link from the left menu will take you to a search screen. From here you can search for any of the members who are registered in your forums. Once you have entered your search terms, click on Find Member, and any members matching your terms will be displayed. A small box contains some vital statistics about the member along with five links to perform different actions: edit member profile, change member name, reset password, suspend member, and delete member. You can also click on the member name at the top of the box to view their public profile on the front end of your forum. You can edit many of the options that apply to each member by clicking Edit Member Profile. You will be taken to a page where you can alter that member's profile. The two menus displayed in the Member Group Options section allow you to choose the primary member group this user belongs to and a secondary user group. The user will inherit permissions from both groups, but the primary group is the one that will appear in the member's profile. From here, you can choose the Moderators group that we just created. Click on Edit this Member to submit the changes.
Forums Now you have your groups in place and the board set up with the configuration options you want, you can go ahead and create the forums. Go to the Forum Control category and then click on Manage Forums. You will probably first want to remove the default forum and category before adding your own. Adding a category and then forums within the category is very simple. Clicking on the New Forum link on the left menu or the Manage Forums screen will take you to the page to do so. You can quickly set up a new forum by following these steps: 1. From the Administration Control Panel, select the Forum Control category from the left menu and then click on New Forum. 155
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2. Under the Basic settings heading, enter a name and a description for the new forum. You can then select which parent the forum will be under (usually a category or under another forum if you wish this new forum to be a subforum). The forum name is what will appear on the index to tell the users the topic or subject of the discussions within that forum. The forum description allows you to expand upon the name and describe what you want posted in that forum. A parent forum can be selected. This new forum will then appear beneath the parent. To create a normal forum, you would set the Forum State option to Active and Act as a Normal Forum not a Category to Yes. The Forum Redirect options can be ignored, as can the Permission Settings. 3. Postable Forum Settings allows you to fine-tune what you want members to be able to do within the forum. The options remember the last settings when you created your last forum. The default options are usually satisfactory for most new forums. However, you will want to ensure that members cannot post HTML (while this allows members to use familiar HTML code tags, it can leave your forum open to abuse), can post BBCode (BBCode is a method created specifically for posting messages in forums or comment systems, which allows posters to format their text), and have the quick reply box enabled (quick reply gives your members the option of being able to quickly post a response to any topic rather than viewing the full post reply page). 4. Permission masks are covered in depth in Chapter 5. However, you can set permissions when you create a forum. You will see a grid with different options and checkboxes. On the top you will see five different actions. These are the five actions you can set user permissions for—you can decide whether you want users to be able to perform these actions. Along the left column, you will see five of the standard user groups—Admin, Banned, Guest, Member, and Validating. You will also see any custom user groups you have created yourself. You will use these to define what you want your members of these groups to do.
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5. Click the Create this forum button and your forum has been created. You can see the forum on the forum index and users will be able to post.
Tweaks Your board is now set up and ready to use. However, there are quite a few options you can change and modify to make your board even better!
Ranks Just like in the military, ranks show the status of your members. As a member increases his or her post count, their rank will increase. By default, IPB comes with three rank levels, but these are not very exciting. Ranks are an important tool in encouraging activity as they show the member's level within the forum. Therefore, they often serve as an incentive to post! To create your own ranks, go to the Users and Groups category in the Administration Control Panel and then click on Manage Ranks. You will see the default three ranks and the option to add your own. Adding a new rank is very simple. The add box is already on the page and you just need to define the name for the rank, the minimum post count required, and how many pips you wish to display. If you prefer to use your own images, you can type in the image URL instead of typing a number of pips and that image will be displayed when you click on Add this Rank.
Profile Fields Depending on the topic of your board, you may wish to create your own profile fields. These appear in the member's profile view and alongside their post, when they post in the forums. They too can encourage activity by providing information to other members. For example, if you run a car forum, you could add a custom field asking the member which car they have and another asking which car they would like to have. If you run a forum about mobile phones, you could do something similar with mobile phone makes and models. To add your own profile fields, go to Users and Groups in the Administration Control Panel and then click on Custom Profile Fields. 157
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Click on Add New Field. The next page shows thirteen options, which you will use to define the new custom field. The first option you need to set is the Field Title and Description. These have a maximum value of 200 and 250 characters respectively and are shown to the user—the Title in the user control panel and the public profile next to the username in the post view, and the Description in the user control panel only. Next you choose which type of field you require. You can choose from a small text box, drop-down menu, or the larger version of a text box—the text area. The next five options define how the field will be shown to the user and what can be done with it. Finally, you can choose how the field is displayed underneath the name of the member on the left when they make a post. The default simply shows the Field Title and then the value the user enters, but you can add your own formatting to change it as you like it. The variables you enter to show the content and title are {title} and {content}. These will be replaced with the actual data when it is shown. To save the options and add the new field, click on Add Field.
Bad Word Filters As suggested in Chapter 6, to keep your forum clean, you should utilize the word filters built into IPB. They will replace any word you define with censor characters. This is usually used to block out swear words. Clicking on Manage Badword Filters shows you any existing filters, and allows you to create new filters and import lists of already created filters. Bad word filters will globally replace words in posts, signatures, and topic titles. You add a new filter in the Add a new filter box by entering the word to censor and what you would like to replace it with. The replacement word you might choose could be **** or h**l, for example.
Skins and Templates Now that you have a working and customized forum, you will want to start getting new members to register. But why should they? It looks 158
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exactly the same as other default IPB installations. An important part of setting up your community is distinguishing it from other boards. You could make some subtle changes such as those on my own board at www.olate.co.uk/forum (changing the colors and images very slightly) or you could make many changes to the way the board is designed such as those on www.forumeye.it/invision. You will find a detailed guide on how to create your own style in Chapter 8 and you will also find a list of websites where you can download free and commercial IPB styles and templates in Appendix B.
Modifications Modifications extend the functionality of your forum to include features that are not included by default. They can be a simple addition to a file or a large update to many files and the database. Note that Invision Power Services does not provide support for modifications or errors caused by modifications. As an IPB license holder, you get access to the IPS Customer Chat forum. Within this forum is a Hints and Tips forum, which contains a number of very useful additions that you can apply in just a few minutes. You will find the forum at http://forums.invisionpower.com/ index.php?showforum=225. You may not have access to the forums by default. You must first register as a new user in the IPS Customer Forums. Once you have done this, you have to associate your Member Area account with your forum account. To do this, login to the Member Area at http://customer.invisionpower.com. You will see IPS Company Forums at the bottom of the page. Follow the instructions to link your accounts. You will then be able to access the forums.
Robots.txt The first mod you should set up is the robots.txt file. The robots.txt file is read by search engine spiders and tells them what they can and cannot do. You can find out more about robots.txt usage at 159
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www.searchengineworld.com/robots/robots_tutorial.htm and www.robotstxt.org.
The modification we are concerned with can be found at http://forums .invisionpower.com/index.php?showtopic=148689. It gives you a sample robots.txt file to use in your forums. This will direct the search engine spiders to the correct pages of the index within your forum. Creating a robots.txt file is very simple. Using an editor such as Notepad, just select the red text from the post above and paste it into the blank file. Then save the file as robots.txt and upload it to your forum root directory (where you see index.php and conf_global.php). That is it!
Bot List Following on from the robots.txt modification, you will want to identify each search engine spider as it visits your forum. That way you can see which search engines are visiting your site and you can even have them displayed on the board index Who's Online list. In order to do this, you need to have a list of the spiders and their identification string. This is provided for you at http://forums .invisionpower.com/index.php?showtopic=149681. You paste this list in the box that can be accessed by going to the Administration Control Panel, clicking on System Settings, View All General Settings, and then on Search Engine Spiders. Paste the list from the forum topic into the box labeled Search Bot User-Agent. You can show the spiders as they visit your site on the Active Users list by checking the option on this page.
Securing Uploads Although the IPB uploads system is very well designed and is quite secure, you can add an extra layer of security to it by following the instructions provided at http://forums.invisionpower.com/ index.php?showtopic=152644. This will prevent the execution of any .php or .pl scripts if they are uploaded to your site by placing some code into an .htaccess file. You can find out all about .htaccess files by reading the tutorial at www.olate.com/articles/24. Note that .htaccess files only work on the Apache web server. 160
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Other Modifications There are many other modifications in the Invision Power Services forums (http://forums.invisionpower.com) as well as on many of the resource sites listed in Appendix B.
Promotion You are now ready to launch your forum to the world. But how do you promote your forum? Here are some tips: •
If you are an active member on other forums, place your link into your signature and create a signature image to advertise your forum. Also include the link in your e-mail signature.
•
Let your customers/friends/business contacts know by sending out e-mails or telling them in person. Let them visit the forum and then promote it themselves.
•
Place links onto your website to allow visitors to browse through your forums easily.
•
Write articles or tutorials for popular websites and include your link in the credit line.
•
Arrange link exchanges with sites of similar interest.
•
Use a tool such as Magpie RSS (www.olate.com/articles /214) to grab the latest topics from your forum using the RSS feed. Put this list on your homepage.
•
If your forum is about a specific product or company, see if you can arrange endorsement with that company or see if it will announce your forum on its own website/mention your forum to its customer base.
There are many different techniques to effective promotion. You could spend a lot of money advertising. If you can afford to do that, it may be effective, but the tips above won't cost you anything except time. This can often be the best way of promotion. It all depends on your audience and forum topic.
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Managing Your Forum Getting users to register and then continuing to post can be a very difficult and time-consuming task. But if you follow the tips above and those in Chapter 7, hopefully, your forum will be a success!
Summary After following through the steps explained in this chapter, you should have a fully working Invision Power Board forum, which you can then further customize using the detailed steps provided in the different chapters in this book.
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A Files and Directories This appendix outlines the Invision Power Board directory structure with a brief description of the contents.
Directories File/Directory
Description
cache/
To be used in the next releases of IPB for caching files, images, and content.
install/
Contains the files used during the installation process.
ips_kernel/
This contains the PHP source files for the classes, core to application functionality. This includes Converge functions in class_converge.php, which allow you to integrate the IPB member system into your own applications on your website. The kernel classes are composed of converge, MySQL, image, template, upload, xml, and xmlarchive functions.
jscripts/
Contains JavaScript source files that are used throughout the templates.
lang/
The language files used throughout the board.
lofiversion/
The files that control the design and functions of the lo-fi version of the forum. This is a cut-down version designed for use by search engines.
Files and Directories
File/Directory
Description
modules/
The base for creating your own IPB modules. This directory contains an example mod file to help you get started, as well as the subscription manager.
retail/
Contains the functionality for the licensing of the software and the chat add-on.
skin_acp/
The skin files (including images) for the Admin Control Panel.
skin_cache/
To enhance performance, the templates system generates static copies of the skin; these are stored in this directory. This improves response times.
sources/
Contains all the key functions and PHP code. Also contains all the functions, with the exception of the seven classes in ips_kernel/.
style_avatars/
Contains the avatar packs.
style_emoticons/
Contains the emoticon packs.
style_images/
Contains all the images for the main user front-end skin.
upgrade/
Contains the files used during the upgrade process.
uploads/
Contains all files, photos, and avatars that are uploaded. Avatars are prefixed with av-[memberid], photos with photo-[memberid], and file uploads to post with post-[postid]-[timestamp].
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Files Here is a list of the main files in the root directory of your Invision Power Board installation: Filename
Description
admin.php
Loads the Admin Control Panel functions
conf_global.php
Contains the information needed to access your database and several other essential configuration options
index.php
Loads all the forum functions when requested by users
ipb_templates.xml
Contains all the template code for the templates used on your forum
ipchat.php
Script used to bridge IPB with the new IP Chat application (www.invisionchat.com)
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B Further Resources Invision Power Services runs its own 'Community Resource Program'— an approved list of resource sites and third-party resource sites. You can obtain modifications, skins, tools, and support from these websites: •
•
•
•
•
Invision Resource Directory—invisionpower.com/ resourcedirectory/: The official Invision Power Services controlled resource directory for IPB and other IPS products. Invision Resource Center—www.invisionresource.com: This site is a full resource and support site providing technical support, skins, and modifications, and lets you upload your own creations as well. IBUnique—www.ibunique.com: This site focuses on providing high-quality skins for all versions of IPB as well as other add-ons and modifications. Invisionize.com—www.invisionize.com: Apart from unofficial member-to-member technical support, you can download modifications, skins, graphics, and add-ons. Invision-It-All—www.invision-it-all.com: IIA focuses on skins and supporting members who create their own skins for IPB. It has a wide range of free and commercial skins for you to download.
Further Resources
•
•
•
•
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Invision Board Essentials—www.ibessentials.com: IBE provides itself on being able to help IPB users get the best support when they need it. Apart from advertising your forum here, you can also download graphics, skins, and modifications, and chat with other IPB users. Invision Board France—www.ibf-french.com: This site aims to offer support, services, and resources for IPB users who speak French. It provides a fully translated IPB version for the French language, and includes support for installation and all aspects of the use of the software. It is an official IPB reseller. Invision in Russia—www.ibresource.ru: Created specifically for Russian/Slavic languages, Invision in Russia is an IPS-approved reseller providing a Russian/Slavic language version of IPB as well as add-ons, graphics, skins and templates, and technical support. IPB SDK—ipbsdk.sourceforge.net: IPB SDK is a library of PHP functions that allow you to maximize the use of the membership system built into IPB without needing to create all the functions yourself. It allows full integration, including the PM, avatars, and login and registration systems.
Appendix B
PHP/MySQL Resources The following resources will help you with PHP/MySQL development: • • • • • • • • •
Codewalkers: www.codewalkers.com DevShet: www.devshed.com MySQL Developer Resource: dev.mysql.com Olate: www.olate.com php.net: www.php.net PHPBuilder: www.phpbuilder.com PHP Freaks: www.phpfreaks.com Sitepoint: www.sitepoint.com Zend: devzone.zend.com
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Index A active users, tracking, 63 admin.php file, 165 Administration Control Panel board statistics, 117 filters, 116 forum control, 75, 124, 155 forum, recount and rebuild, 127 home, 56 launching, 151 Post Office, 107 profile fields, 157 skin tools, 147 SQL management, 128 starting, 151 statistics, 117 subscription manager, 111 system settings, 56 user management, 92 usergroups, 91 See also users and groups, administration, forum control, administration, and system settings, administration Administration Panel navigation, 55 Advanced Mode, 131 announcements, 68 attachments, 36 avatars, 42
B backups, 128 badword filters, 116 ban filters, 116 BBCode about, 34
adding, 115 allowing, 78 working, 114 block list, 51 board statistics, 117 bot list, mod, 160 buddy list, 51
C cache directory, 163 calender, 51 categories, 27, 82, 138 chmod command, 18 class_converge.php file, 163 composing, 49 conf_global.php file, 165 Converge user authentication, 60 cookies, 61 COPPA, 61 CSS, 131, 141, 143, 147
E e-mailing. See Post Office emoticons, 35, 164
F fast-reply option, 37 filters, 116 font, changing default, 131 forum announcements, 68 backups, 128 categories, 27,82,138 creating, 75, 82, 155 deleting, 84 filters, 116 footer bar, 28 jump list, 63
Index
maintenance and administration, 115, 127 management, 162 managing, 82 moderators, 87 modifications, 159 online/offline board, 59 ordering, 84 permission masks, 84 promotion, 161 recount and rebuild, 127 resynchronizing, 84 rules, 83 search, 30 statistics, 117 tips, 116 topics, 31 topic listing, 29 viewing forums, 28 See also forum control, administration IPB moderation tools forum control, administration basic settings, 76 BBCode posting, 78 categories, 82 categories, ordering, 82 creating, 155 deleting, 84 forum rules, 83 forum, ordering, 84 HTML posting, 77 moderators, 87 password protection, 79 permission access levels, 80 permission masks, 84 permission settings, 77 permissions, 82 polls, 79 quick reply, 78 quick setup, 76 redirect options, 77 resynchronizing, 84 settings, 83 skin options, 83 sorting, 80 See also forum control, 172
administration and IPB moderation tools FTP, 17
G global actions, permission masks, 87 global permissions, 100 groups. See users and groups, administration
H hot topic, 71 HTML, posting, 77
I IBUnique, IPB resource website, 167 ignored users, 45 index.php file, 165 inline moderation, 123 install directory, 163 Invision Board Essentials, IPB resource website, 168 Invision Board France, IPB resource website, 168 Invision in Russia, IPB resource website, 168 Invision Resource Center, 167 Invision Resource Directory, 167 Invision-It-All, IPB resource website, 167 Invisionize.com, IPB resource website, 167 IPB Administration Panel tour, 53 Advanced Mode, 131 advantages, 8 components, 5 converting packages to IPB, 21 development, 7 directory structure, 163 history, 6 installation, 13, 16 language support, 114 licensing, 14, 152 purchasing, 14
Index
server environment, 19 support, 14 upgrade, 14 user front end, 25 website examples, 10 IPB installation admin account, 20 database environment, 19 permissions, 18 post-installation, 21 prerequisites, 13 server environment, 19 uploading, 17 web-based installer, 18 IPB moderation tools about, 122 inline moderation, 123 multi-moderation, about 124 multi-moderation, adding, 125 multi-moderation, editing, 126 multi-moderation, removing, 126 multi-moderation, using, 126 topic, moving, 126 .See also forum control, administration IPB SDK, IPB resource website, 168 ipb_templates.xml file, 165 ipchat.php file, 165 ips_kernel directory, 163
J jscripts directory, 163 jump list, 63
L lang directory, 163 language support, 114 licensing, 14 lofiversion directory, 163 logo, 130
M macros, 143-144 master template, 148
member bar, 27 members. See users and groups, administration message tracker, 51 messaging. See private messaging moderation moderator groups, 89 moderator tools, 46 moderators, 87, 153 moderators, adding, 88 post-moderation tools, 33, 79 topic-moderation tools, 34 moderator tools, 46 moderators, 87,153 modifications, 159-161 modules directory, 163 multi-moderation, 124-126 MySQL resources, 169
O optimization, 62 ordering, 84
P payment gateways, 111 permission masks creating, 85 editing, 86 global actions, 87 previewing, 87 personal messaging, See private messaging php resources, 169 PHP time formatting, 64 PM. See private messaging polls, 79 Post Office bulk-mail management, 110 e-mail, creating, 108 e-mail, filters, 109 e-mail, logs, 110 e-mail, options, 108 e-mail, sending, 109 posting about, 31 access restrictions, 94 173
Index
actions, 33 attachments, 36 BBCode, 34 body, 32 fast-reply option, 37 HTML, 77 multiple actions, 124 post icons, 36 post-moderation tools, 33 preview, 37 reply, adding, 37 topic, creating, 34 topic, moving, 126 topic, pruning, 126 tweaking, 71 previewing posts, 37 private messaging about, 49, 68 block list, 51 buddy-list, 51 composing, 49 messenger, 40 message folders, 50 message tracker, 51 storage folders, editing, 50 pruning, 126
R ranks adding, 97 creating, 157 deleting, 98 editing, 98 managing, 97 types, 97 replacement macros, 144 resynchronizing, 84 retail directory, 163 Robots.txt, mod, 159
S searching, 47, 68 signature, 42 Skin Manager, 132 skin_acp directory, 163 skin_cache directory, 164 174
skins board wrapper, 135 CSS, 131, 147 CSS editing, advanced mode, 143 CSS editing, easy mode, 141 editor preferences, 140 exporting, 149 font attributes, changing, 131 images, 147 importing, 150 logo, changing, 130 macros, adding, 144 macros, editing, 144 master templates, 148 search and replace, 149 Skin Manager, 132 skin options, 83 skin set cache, 148 skin settings, 146 skin tools, 147 template, 137 template, categories, 138 template, editing, 137 template bits, 139 template bits, editing, 140 wrapper, 135 smilies, 35 sources directory, 164 SQL management, 128 statistics, 117 style_avatars directory, 164 style_emoticons directory, 164 style_images directory, 164 subscription, 110 subscription packages, 112 supermoderators, 102 suspending, 96 system settings, administration announcements, 68 board guidelines, 59 calender, 60, 63 converge setup, 60 cookies, 61 COPPA setup, 61 date and time formats, 64 e-mail setup, 58, 66 forum jump list, 63 fulltext search, setup, 67 general configuration, 58, 67 online/offline board, 59
Index
optimization, 62 personal messaging, 68 posting, 71 private messaging, 68 search engine spiders, 68 security, 69 trash can, 72 user profiles, 72 users, tracking, 63 warning members, 72
T templates. See skins topic subscription, 40 topics, 31, See also posting tracking users, 63
U upgrade directory, 164 uploads directory, 164 User Control Panel attachments, managing, 45 avatar settings, 42 email settings, 45 index, 38 messenger, 40 moderator tools, 46 personal photo, 44 profile, editing, 41 signature, editing, 42 topic subscription, 40 user profiles, 72 users, ignoring, 45 users and groups, administration
access restrictions, 94 contact information, 94 group options, 94 member settings, 107 password, resetting, 96 profile fields, 157 ranks, 97 security settings, 93 supermoderators, 102 user benefits, 118 user, adding, 97 user, deleting, 97 user, editing profile, 93 user, posting permissions, 102 user, suspending, 96 user, upload permissions, 100 user, warning, 72 usergroups, adding, 99 usergroups, deleting, 104 usergroups, editing, 103 usergroups, global settings, 99 usergroups, moderating, 153 usergroups, promotion, 102 usergroups, types, 98 username, changing, 96 usergroups, 98-104
V validation management, 104
W warning members, 72 wrapper, 135
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