BBCode Management

BBCode is short for Bulletin Board Code. It's a special set of brackets that allows you and your members to use custom formatting on your forum without exposing the dangers of allowing HTML in posts. All BBCode tags in IP.Board can be managed and customised - you can set certain BBCodes to be only available in certain areas or to certain users and can supply aliases for BBCodes. You can also add your own BBCode tags and add a button to the editor.


Manage BBCode Tags

You can manage the current BBCode tags for your community by selecting  BBCode Management under the Post Content section of the Look & Feel tab in your ACP.

The table lists all of your available BBCodes along with an example of how to use them. You can edit or delete any tag by clicking on the icons to the right of the tag.

Each tag also has an "Export" icon which allows you to export the BBCode tag for sharing with others.

At the bottom of this page there is an empty text box that you can use to test out the formatting of your BBcode and see how it will render.


Adding / Editing BBCode

When adding or editing a BBCode, you will have a number of options.

You will be asked to supply basic information such as name, description, example of use and the tag which will be used.

You can then enter any optional aliases - an alias is a BBCode tag which makes use of another BBCode tag - for example, to enter a YouTube video, you can use either the [media] or [youtube] tags - this is because youtube is listed as one of the aliases of the media tag.

You can then customise how the tag will be used - such as if it's just a single tag like [hr] and whether or not it will have an option.
Option is used if you want to have a tag like [tag=option]content[/tag] (like the url tag) as opposed to [tag]content[/tag] (like the b or i tags).

You can also configure if other BBCodes should parse within this BBCode (for example, the [code] tag has this set to no) and whether the content should be stripped from search results (useful for spoiler or hidden content tags).

The "Custom BBCode Replacement" setting is where you specify the HTML that your BBCode tag will be replaced with. You can alternatively specify a PHP script to be ran on your BBCode, but this is only for advanced users.

You can also specify which groups can use the BBCode and where the BBCode can be used by selecting the appropriate options in the select box.

The "BBCode Application" setting can be left as-is.

The "BBCode Image" allows you to specify an button image that will be used in the editor. If you do not specify one, user's will be able to select your BBCode from the "Other styles" dropdown in the editor.
The image should be in the public/style_images/(skin_directory)/rte_icons folder.

Finally, you can set the text which is used in the BBCode help page for your tag.





The Media BBCode

The [media] BBCode tag is a special tag - it can be used to represent different kinds of media.
By default, it will understand Flash content, Flickr image sets, GameTrailers videos, Google Video videos, YouTube videos, mp3 files and MySpace videos. You can however, customise these and add your own. You can do this from the Manage Media Tag setting under the Post Content section of the Look & Feel tab in your ACP.

Here you will see a list of services understood by the media tag. You can edit or delete any by choosing the appropriate option from the drowdown, or add your own by clicking the "Add Media Tag" button.

When adding or editing a service, you will be asked to provide a name of the service, the expected input (for example the URL to a video) and the replacement HTML (for example, the embed code for a video).
The expected input field can contain regex code if needed.