[MA23] Statistics Tab

Interview with m4rtin

It's a modification that adds a new tab to each members profile. It show a bit more in-depth statistical information about that members posting behaviour, such as what time of the day they post most, what forums they are most active in, and some other stats too such as the number of topics they have started, number of votes they've given in polls, how many polls they've started, and the real number of posts.

The standard post counter will not decrease when posts are deleted, and wont count posts in forums where post count have been disabled. The counter in this tab will count the number of posts that currently are available on the board.

A year ago or so I was surfing at a SMF (Simple Machines) forum, and then saw that there were a stats section in each profile. I kind of like statistics, numbers and things like that, and I thought it could be kind of cool to have that on my own (now: previous) forum.

Luckily SMF is free, and open-source, so I downloaded it and dove into the nasty code that is SMF, and figured out how they did it. Then it was a few days of work to rewrite it to work with IP.Board, do some optimization (was dreadfully slow if the user had over 5.000 posts), and then it was done.

This modification don't really do anything too exciting, few board owners will say that this is "needed". Similar to AJAX fast reply, it just give the users the "wow" feeling. Lots of numbers and bars stacked up in a completely useless way.

My name is Martin (as you may have figured from my screen name). I am 21 years old, living in Hammerfest, Norway. Working in the newsprint at the local newspaper. I'm also the new owner of Invision Modding.

As with many other modders, I first started with this to improve my own board. Luckily, I already had the basic PHP and HTML knowledge, which made the ride a lot easier.

At that time I was already active at Invision Modding and IZE, so I knew what people requested, and that's pretty much where the career as an IP.Board developer began. I made modification per request, and also made things that I felt a forum needed.

Thanks for having me, I really appreciate it!

This is probably going to be a boring answer, and probably similar to what all the other guys have said. For starters, you do need to know at least the basics of PHP (or at least basic programming) before you can even start. Otherwise, the source code wont make much sense.

Then you can look at existing modifications, see how they work, understand why this gives that result, etc. After that you can start with your own modification (they do not have to be a huge things), and as you go you'll learn new things about the framework, and rapidly improve your PHP knowledge. Once you get it out to the people, people will comment it, give advice, and suggest new features.