IP.Board 3

IP.Board is an amazing piece of software. I’ve used it ever since version 2.1 back in 2005, and it powers the forum I run – thewinforums.com. IPS just last month released version 3 of this powerful package, which brings a whole host of new features. Some useful, some not so much. I’m not going to go into detail about it, as I’ll probably end up explaining it for two hours, so instead, I’m going to do the usual internet thing, and complain about it. There aren’t all that many things that I don’t like (that I’ve found, so far), so this should be a pretty short post.

The sidebar. It’s a great addition to IP.Board, and works well. However, two things are annoying me about it. Why not, out of the box, provide the option to add a blank text box that you can customise with your own text (similar to how I can edit the Community Rules)? And let me create multiple boxes and change the order around too. At the moment, the only way I can do this is by downloading a 3rd party hook. The problem is, it only allows three extra boxes, and I can’t put one of those at the top of the sidebar, and another at the bottom. And as far as I can tell, it doesn’t like Javascript (eg, for ads). If IPS could build this into IPB3, it would be great. However, they haven’t done so. Fail. The other issue is that the sidebar can only appear on the homepage. Why not allow it to appear on the homepage, forum view, and topic view? Is that too much to ask?

Facebook intergration. IP.Board 3 allows you to – once it’s setup properly – login to your board using a Facebook account. Sweet, right? Well, yeah, it’s great. It can also grab your photo and a few other things from your Facebook account. Very cool. But…that’s it. It would be nice if it could do a few other things, like maybe send status update from within IP.Board TO Facebook, instead of only taking them FROM Facebook. It could also maybe offer the ability to invite your Facebook contacts onto the forum. In fact, there are other things that could be done. As it is, the Facebook integration is pretty much only useful for logging in. Boring!

Documentation. The documentation for IP.Board itself is…okay. There’s a basic piece of documentation on how to install or upgrade your board, however it leaves some stuff out. For example, the upgrade documentation doesn’t tell you that you should move your smilies or custom avatars into the NEW location in IP.Board 3. Now, the documentation in both IP.Blog and CCS is even worse. It actually DOESN’T EXIST. AT ALL. WTF IPS?! Paid software not having instructions isn’t a very good plan, if you ask me. I realise that they’ve just worked for a whole year coding all this stuff, but writing even basic instructions isn’t hard. I’d label myself as pretty damn good finding my way around IPS applications, but even I struggled for a bit trying to work out how to upgrade the blog software, and install CCS. I eventually gave up, went onto the IPS forums, and poked around, and eventually I did find a way to install both packages, but that’s still a pretty dismal attempt. IPS, if you need documentation written, ask me. I’ll happily throw up a basic page with instructions for all your software packages.

Admin CP Help. The ACP itself has a fairly useful built in help feature. It shows a little box at the top which loads the help files off the IPS website, and it works fine. It also means that IPS don’t really need a dedicated help section on their website – the help boxes should be perfect. The problem is, they seem to have articles for all the really stupidly obvious stuff (like the ACP homepage, oh DUH, I don’t need help for that), yet for the complex pages, which I DO want help for, it simply gives me an error message saying it doesn’t exist yet. Well thanks. How the hell am I supposed to work out how to, hmm, install and setup Sphinx? Even some kind of basic tutorial for that would be useful.

Actually, the one thing I still have no idea what on earth it’s for is the “XML-RPC API”…and yes, it doesn’t have a help file available. See:

I’m guessing it’s something to do with external access to the forum – similar to how I can use Windows Live Writer or a similar package to write blog posts in WordPress, right? A help file with information on what that does would be useful. But there isn’t one. So, I’m left puzzled, because I’ve never known what this feature does, and probably never will’ leaving my life incomplete, annoyed, and unhappy. Oh well.

So, that pretty much sums up the few annoyances that I have with IP.Board. It’s still an awesome piece of software that’s way better then the other stuff around (haha, in your face vBulletin, you ugly pile of……..!), and I’ll keep using it for a long time to come. I just wish IPS could do something about these annoyances.