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Archives
September 2008: Arobase Skin
August 2008: Aqua Essence v1.0.2
July 2008: ipbWiki v2.0.4
June 2008: (FSY23) Universal Mod Installer v2.6
Featured Resource Of The Month: July 2008
ipbWiki v2.0.4
Resource Info
- Resource Name:
- ipbWiki
- Version:
- v2.0.4
- Author:
- Peter
- IP.Board Version:
- v2.x.x
- Downloads*
- 312
- Views*
- 3501
IpbWiki is best described as an integration module which bridges two popular products: Invision Power Board and MediaWiki (MediaWiki is the engine used on Wikipedia). Because of this IpbWiki's main feature is a login bridge between MediaWiki and Invision Power Board, linking two of the best applications in their own field together while making it appear as you are working with just one single application.
What are the benefits of using it?
Integration
This script integrates into MediaWiki with no additional hassle, the modification is a great bridge from day one.
Convenience
There’s no need to have two separate user account systems for one site, why not just have the convenience of one login throughout your whole website? IpbWiki is a great bridge between your existing IP.Board and MediaWiki installation, two products, one website, one login.
What can it do?
IpbWiki is distributed under two licenses, a free version which is sufficient for most users, and a paid version for webmasters who want that bit extra. Both versions can handle the following:
- Login with your forum username from within the wiki
- Define group permissions from within your Admin CP Control Panel
- Easy Installation: no manual file-edits required, the installer does all the edits
- Free links: Article names can contain spaces and/or other special characters
- Namespaces: Namespaces are prefixes before a page title (like "User:" or "Talk:") which allow a page to exist under multiple names, but serving different purposes depending on their prefix
- Subpages: In addition to namespaces, pages can be structured using subpages. This simple feature provides automatic back-links from a page of the pattern [[Page title/Subpage title]] to the component before the slash (in this case, "Page title")
- Categories: the wiki supports user-created categories. These are similar to tags used in many web applications, but hierarchical and descriptive
- Templates: Templates are text blocks which can be dynamically loaded inside another page whenever that page is requested. Templates support parameters, so that parts of the text can be substituted for each specific use case
- Media Content: the software is very powerful at dealing with a wide variety of uploaded media files. Its richest functionality is in the area of images, where image galleries and thumbnails can be generated with relative ease
- Easy article editing: The editing toolbar makes you don't have to remember any wiki codes
- Sections: support for editing a small section of a page so that managing/editing long articles is easier
- Rich Content: supports rich content generated through specialized syntax. For example, the software comes with support for rendering mathematical formulas using LaTeX and a special parser written in OCaml. Similar functionality for other content is available in the form of extensions
- Editable Interface: The entire MediaWiki user interface can be edited through the wiki itself by users with the necessary permissions (typically so-called "administrators"). This is done through a special namespace with the prefix "MediaWiki:", where each page title identifies a particular user interface message
- Easily extendable with extensions
- Multilingual: the user interface has been translated in more than 70 languages
- Scalability: MediaWiki is used by some of the largest websites on the internet such as Wikipedia, scalability is important, this is achieved by multiple layers of caching and database replication
- Customizable Interface: users can customize their style-sheets and configure client-side JavaScript to be executed with every page view. On Wikipedia, this has led to a large number of additional tools and helpers developed through the wiki and shared among users
The full version extends the base and adds more features, to name a few
- Out of the box skin integration, two skin styles are provided:
- The first type of skin is named IpbWiki IP.Board look, the skin should make an IP.Board user feel right at home as the skin style is based on the IP.Board control panel causing the wiki to look exactly the same as the IP.Board forum
- The second type of skin is named IpbWiki MediaWiki look, this skin is a blend between the look used on Wikipedia and prominent features of the IP.Board look such as the board header, of course skin colours used on the IP.Board forum are being applied to the wiki skin.
- Create new user accounts from within the wiki or from within the forum
- BBCode and emoticons parsing inside wiki pages
- Forum discussion threads: automatically generated forum topics to discuss the wiki article, the first post in the discussion thread provides a link back to the wiki article, the other posts in the topic contain the actual discussion about the article
- Search Engine Optimization: A small module to allow search engines to better index the wiki pages
- Topic Lists and Forum Posts: Inside the wiki pages you can show actual post content of a forum post and topic lists showing for instance the recent news topics of your forum
Screenshots
Interview with Peter
Please could you describe your modification, highlighting what it does?
IpbWiki is best described as an integration module which bridges two popular products: Invision Power Board and MediaWiki (MediaWiki is the engine used on Wikipedia). Because of this IpbWiki's main feature is a login bridge between MediaWiki and Invision Power Board, linking two of the best applications in their own field together while making it appear as you are working with just one single application.
IpbWiki is distributed under 2 licenses: there's a free version (which should be sufficient for what most people need really) and there's a paying version with more features for webmasters who want just that bit more.
Please explain why you decided to come up with this modification, and why you think it has benefited the modification community. Also, please share a few examples of how it could be used?
I'm the owner of a small game community forum, on the main website there's a tutorial and general tips section. In the pre-IpbWiki stage all articles had to be written by myself, this worked somewhat ok but was far from ideal as this posed 2 major problems: first problem being that I had to write all content myself and the second problem being and the second problem being that the tutorials could not be corrected by members who spotted mistakes.
I looked around for a solution for the problem and as I couldn't find what I was looking for I decided to wrap something together myself. Being at this stage I could do 2 things: write something completely from scratch or start from a third party product which almost did what I want and fill in the missing gaps. I decided to go for the latter because of 2 reasons:
• MediaWiki is actively developed and is a wiki engine with great features, new versions of the MediaWiki engine are automatically enjoyed by the IpbWiki component.
• I thought it would be easier and less time consuming to bridge the gap than to start something from scratch (Being 2 years later after the initial version of IpbWiki it looks that I underestimated this somewhat as there are still so much things that I want to add to the IpbWiki product. Having said that I don't regret starting from the MediaWiki product as it is a well written solid product that has proved to be a good basis for IpbWiki)
Now with IpbWiki in place on my game website it has turned out better than I hoped for: Members of the community write new articles, correct mistakes in other people’s articles, there are more articles on the wiki than what I ever would have written myself and the best of all I don't have to write all the articles anymore.
Please give us a few details about yourself, and why you decided to start writing modifications for IP.Board
Before I chose to go for Invision Power Board, a few years back I compared a lot of forum software systems (to name a few: vBulletin, phpBB, smf, ubb.threads, ...) and at the time I did this comparison I found that the IP.Board PHP files were written the best. While IP.Board was not the most popular forum package, I decided to go for this software as IP.Board was already using classes while other products were just one PHP file calling another causing a real code maze. Generally classes (in any programming language) generate a well defined program structure and also allow for inheritance, just great, it may not be the most common selling point for IP.Board but it certainly sold me.
As to the why I write modifications: Before I start writing a modification I always first look around whether someone else has not already done the same effort, if there isn't available what I want/need then I write it myself.
My real name is Peter De Decker, I'm 31 years old and employed in a Belgian company called Financial Architects as a Microsoft SQL Server Database Administrator/Developer. My hobbies are: running, biking, playing snooker and collecting Dutch comics. Currently unfortunately single again, so if you're a nice girl between 18 and 30 feel free to contact me...
Have you any tips for people that are interested in coding for IP.Board, but don't know where to start?
Everybody's need is different, while Invision Power Board software provides a great starting point it cannot cover all needs, think about what be cool to have on your forum, put on paper how you would like it to behave and create it. Don't be afraid of the PHP programming language, it's real easy to learn... Some ways to learn it: browse through the Invision Power Board classes and enjoy Matt/Brandon's funny comments, use php.net as a reference or read a good PHP tutorial if you prefer the conservative approach.
Once you have finished your first modification you will really enjoy seeing other people use it, at least for me it is.
As a bonus people using your mod will also come up with suggestions on how to make the product even better with new features, so a win-win situation if you release your mod to the public.
