A few days ago Photopost announced that vbgallery’s price has been changed to $99.

Oh well, at least I got one back a few months so i am not affected and I am pretty happy about it.

We are proud to announce an upcoming release of a installation system for IPB 2.2.x. This piece of system will allow you to easily deploy your script without worrying about writing another installation script ever!

This tool is basically an installer which allows you to install any component or modules you ever make.

The features of this tool are stated below:

• Run install queries
• Run uninstall queries
• Run upgrades
• Import component settings xml
• Import settings xml
• Import skin xml to all of the clients skin by making it a root skin
• Rebuild all the skins
• Only edit 5 files and those files
• Super cool Ajax Interface
• Warn users with errors on installation by shaking the screen
• No page reload
• Language files for installer
• Customise the installation steps to include more functions to run
• and many more….

Don’t stand there imagining what it would be like watch it!

This system will be released as soon as I finalise a few things and write a documentation for this, if you have any comments please post em.

A lot of people have purchased a gallery system for their forum but has it really met their needs? In this small article we will analyse some of the features that might be useful to users and what would be useless.

Before writing this article I have asked a couple of friends of mine what they use the gallery for and the most common answer was to upload images to show to friends. I gave upload, show & friends emphasis because the main aim of a gallery system is to allow users to upload images which can be viewable to friends.

At the moment all the galleries perform those well but from my point of view they aren’t. Lets take for example IP.Gallery; ipg allows users to upload images but it took me 2-3 more minutes to upload an image because I had to create an album to allow me to upload images to. Also the page in which I had to use to upload a single item required me to input some information aswell as uploading an image. Not only that it took me a while as a first time user to go find the upload button it also denied the image as it couldn’t upload it as it was too big.

I am not saying that IP.G is bad but just not well designed for its users.

My idea of a gallery which would suite most people would be to allow users to upload images first and then input the information later. Also as there user didn’t put any information it would be best to motivate them to input or confirm some information later so that the image can be descriptive and searchable. An idea to motivate them would be to remind them to update their undescribed images so that they can be viewable by other members of the board and be displayed in the category/global list. The next ability that it should have when uploading would be to allow multiple upload of files easily and quickly.

Now with the display of images, having images with whacky wide and tall images when listing hurts the eyes. It should be all symetric, maybe a squared image list. Now also you want to allow some usergroups to have the ability to choose who can view their images as some users might not want certain people view certain images. The next point is to allow users to download the images easily and in different size for them to use in general. Also sorting of images should be done by tags and no more by categories as nowadays it is much easier to see images that relates to each other with the tag system. Also categorising images would be too limited and could be frustrating when uploading as you would be asked in which category to upload (vbgallery).

Finally there should be a system in which users can create groups and/or interact with a friend list to share images and discuss them. This is what most of flickr is based on and I find that the flickr design and structre should be partially implemented in Gallery systems for forums.

My aims of this is to experiment on ipb’s template is to see how far can the ipb template stretch before it breaks. *sounds like stretch amstrong doll *. We are going to look at my forth coming website icelabz and see what we can customise and what we can’t. *to tell you the truth it will be sort of leihu’s forum anatomy but totally a real experiment on IPB’s template system*

Currently from browsing several skin sites for ipb a lot of the customisation is just a css+image, header & footer edits. Which when combined makes a beautiful template. But  customisation to me means editing the forums template so much that it doesn’t look like ipb from far.

why try to remake ipb’s template?
Simple reason is that I am fed up with following what other people are doing. I want something fresh, hip and well design. Also it angers me that a lot of big companies who invest a lot of money into their site don’t bother to customise IPB to suit into their main sites theme.
In this entry I will be starting on reconstruction of ipb’s template. This will be the first part of many while I log my development on rebuilding the template from scratch.

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A lot of skin makers for ipb offers unique skins but to what extent are they unique?

Yes, they are unique as they are the only one providing them but isn’t that a bit misleading to the customers? Even though that they are the only one offering this unique skin, you can bet that 100+ more people have purchased that skin. Thus making it not too unique as there would be a 100 sites that would look just like yours.  So defining that a skin is unique to someone is quite misleading in that way.

There is also another thing that you might consider if you were to purchase a skin that is unique. Most skin these days are just css+image edits and sometimes just a html change in the header or the footer to make it look different. But this is just a cheap change of the default skin template. If you are looking for unique skin you might want to get a designer to completely redesign the template you are using as the pre-made and most customised skin templates that you buy these days are just a mere copy of the ipb’s default template.

If anyone were to offer a unique skin they would have to make it available to 1-2 people and fully customised from scratch.

How to make a skin on Invision Power Board for ipb 2.2.x?

This guide shows you an indepth information on how to make a skin in invision power board 2.2.x and a few other tips on designing. This method that I am teaching is for fast development and the most efficient way of editing css for the skin. This guide is an improved and modified version of my old skinning guide for ipb 2.1.x which can be found on TAZ. Skinning is another way of saying designing a template, people just got used to the word skin because ipb refers to skin as the design template.

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