YounGMessiah

Hey there,

I'm considering purchasing IPB in the near future. Having quite a bit of experience coding for clients, adminning boards, etc, I am officially in love with IPB. Even so, I can't help but wonder if its worth the 150 USD.

Question. What exactly in IPB is worth the 150 USD, that I cannot get with any other forum software?

Semantics & tablelessness? Can get that in phpBB too.
Ease of use? phpBB or SMF both provide it too.
Security? Good point, but since I run a reasonably small community & have my own security measures in place (like denying access to ACP using .htaccess against script kiddies, etc)
Easy skinning? Sorry, can do that with or without IPB, got more than sufficient experience.

So, other than it looking very professional (bear in mind I like IPB ), what exactly does it have that I can't (easily) get with other forum softwares and a handful of mods?

Cheers
-Caelum

It would be nice if they allowed us to see the #2 and #3 winners' skins as well!

I'd like the ability to create custom messages to be displayed at the top of the board if the member viewing the board meets certain conditions. Example: If member's posts is equal to 0, display message "You have not yet made a post, we encourage you to get involved, etc...". Show congratulatory posts when they reach a certain post count, show a certain message to users in a specific user groups, happy birthday, message regarding inactivity and encouraging the user to participate more, if user is using default skin let them know other skins are availalbe, etc... I think it would just create a more personalized and friendly experience for the user in some cases if the admin wanted to use it that way.

So by default include a large amount of conditions, posts, join date, last active date, is in user group, date, inactivity time, post count between x and y, currently browsing x forum, etc... and be able to create multiple messages and use multiple conditions. I think it's also important that the user be able to "close" the message then save to DB, and perhaps make that a setting per-message "can the user close this message?". Be good to close if you set a message about other skins being available and they're happy with the default skin, but you wouldn't want it to close if the user has not yet made a post or hasn't been active.

I know this can all be achieved through skin edits and using the html logic, and now just PHP in the templates in IPB 3.0. But the templates start to get messy with all those skin edits, and can be difficult to maintain. Also, a lot of users aren't tech savvy enough to use HTML and PHP to display the messages they want. I think this would be very useful.

Posted blog entry today (and updated with video) in case anyone didn't see it.