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Invision Power Board and SDK

Jul 4 2005

The tri­vial being forums that I and my co-web host run use the “Invi­sion Power Board”. It has ser­ved us well and now accom­mo­da­tes over 50,000 posts and 1200 mem­bers. An aim for all of my web­si­tes is to make them com­mu­nity orien­ta­ted. This has been fairly dif­fi­cult with the mini­mal IPB-site inte­gra­tion I was capa­ble of. Howe­ver, now I have dis­co­ve­red IPB SDK.

IPB SDK is a library of PHP func­tions, which will help you deve­lop advan­ced appli­ca­tions on your site. Inte­gra­tion bet­ween your forum and site is essen­tial in the web­si­tes of today. IPB already has a great mem­ber sys­tem, why re-write another one if you can use one mem­ber data­base for both?

I can now use the exten­sive and gro­wing forums as the cen­tral hub to mul­ti­ple user ser­vi­ces, new sites and much much more. Addi­tio­nally it is free and open source! I have already began incor­po­ra­ting it into my current sites, pri­ma­rily my Evan­ge­lion Live Action site which I have recently rede­sig­ned. This new dis­co­very will greatly enhance my future sites and pro­vide highly valua­ble user inte­rac­tion and mem­ber only sections.

As afo­re­men­tio­ned, I deci­ded to rede­sign the live action web­site. I really des­pi­sed the old design, it loo­ked hideous, con­su­med band­width and it was messy, inc­re­dibly messy, not only the look but the code run­ning it. I have since com­ple­tely revam­ped the site basing it around IPB SDK and a CSS style sheet to replace all the anno­ying font tags. This is ver­sion 4.0 of the site and peo­ple have been quer­ying as to what v1-v3 loo­ked like. I only have memo­ries of them myself and I feel some­ti­mes I would like to just glance at them again, for old times sake or something. So, if I ever change the current design (v4), here’s an archi­ved pic­ture ver­sion of how it looks now:

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