3 replies to this topic

[ooberdave]

Hi there,

My first impressions of IPB are very good indeed. I’m building a community site that will centre around the forum, but will need some important extras. So, I have a few questions to understand if my needs are easily achievable, or if I’ll need to get my hands dirty and/or hire a coder.

1) Is there an easy way to cut data in different ways beyond heirarchical? Here’s an example (not the site i am developing, but a clearer example to show my needs!) Imagine a site about the UK with a forum section for each city, restaurant reviews (as articles) and a calendar of events. I will have the usual navigation links of Home – Forum – Reviews – Events etc at the top of the site. But I also want a separate navigation showing the main cities, London – Birmingham – Manchester – Edinburgh etc. Then by clicking on London the user will see a unique template bringing in all the relevant data – e.g. posts from the London forum, restaurant reviews from London only, members from London, you get the idea. I’ve achieved this in Wordpress using custom post types and a template for the city page, is this simple to implement on IPB?

2) Does any functionality exist which automatically adds new registered email addresses to an external email tool such as Aweber? I’m sure this is easily achievable using the Aweber API, but would this be possible using the Hosted IPB Solution where I am unable to touch the source code? I would also consider other mailing software if the functionality already exists within IPB or within a mod.

3) Where are the servers based? My site will be based in Scandinavia and I am concerned about response times if the servers are based in the USA... should I be concerned?

4) Can anyone recommend any IPB templating websites or any independent forums to discuss IPB (aside from this one, obviously!)

5) Is there a “Beginners Guide” to IPB that i can download, official or otherwise? I am on the move a lot without 3G access and it would be incredibly useful to have some documentation to study on my iPad...

Thanks folks!

[bfarber]

ooberdave, on 25 January 2012 - 07:25 AM, said:

Hi there,

My first impressions of IPB are very good indeed. I’m building a community site that will centre around the forum, but will need some important extras. So, I have a few questions to understand if my needs are easily achievable, or if I’ll need to get my hands dirty and/or hire a coder.

1) Is there an easy way to cut data in different ways beyond heirarchical? Here’s an example (not the site i am developing, but a clearer example to show my needs!) Imagine a site about the UK with a forum section for each city, restaurant reviews (as articles) and a calendar of events. I will have the usual navigation links of Home – Forum – Reviews – Events etc at the top of the site. But I also want a separate navigation showing the main cities, London – Birmingham – Manchester – Edinburgh etc. Then by clicking on London the user will see a unique template bringing in all the relevant data – e.g. posts from the London forum, restaurant reviews from London only, members from London, you get the idea. I’ve achieved this in Wordpress using custom post types and a template for the city page, is this simple to implement on IPB?

2) Does any functionality exist which automatically adds new registered email addresses to an external email tool such as Aweber? I’m sure this is easily achievable using the Aweber API, but would this be possible using the Hosted IPB Solution where I am unable to touch the source code? I would also consider other mailing software if the functionality already exists within IPB or within a mod.

3) Where are the servers based? My site will be based in Scandinavia and I am concerned about response times if the servers are based in the USA... should I be concerned?

4) Can anyone recommend any IPB templating websites or any independent forums to discuss IPB (aside from this one, obviously!)

5) Is there a “Beginners Guide” to IPB that i can download, official or otherwise? I am on the move a lot without 3G access and it would be incredibly useful to have some documentation to study on my iPad...

Thanks folks!

1) You will most likely need to do something custom for this.  IP.Content and the tagging system could facilitate achieving this, but I think you might need some assistance from a coder depending on your final setup.

One possibility would be to have a separate forum for 'London', a separate calendar for 'London' and so forth, and then you can make IP.Content feeds from the forum and calendar (for instance) by using the feed filters.  No code would be required for this specific example.

2) IP.Board allows custom hooks which you could use to do this, or you could add a member sync file to accomplish this.

3) USA.  Our company forums here are based in the same data center as the rest of our servers, so you can partly base your speed expectations based on how our site responds.

4) You can find some people offering custom services (they generally have an IPB-centric website) here: http://community.inv...m_services.html

5) I'm afraid not, nothing downloadable.  Our documentation is online here: http://community.inv...tion/index.html

[Alfa1]

If you ever find a solution to this, please let me know. Its an important matter that I (and other webmasters) have been seeking a solution for, for many years. Like you I am also strongly considering  to migrate to IPS. I will certainly need something similar to what you describe. If a website covers certain information topics and has categories for each of these topics, then its optimal to implement such categories in all content types: forum, calendar, reviews, blog, gallery, etc. And then to be able to interconnect those categories and display a main page.

[ooberdave]

OK, thanks for the quick & helpful reply!