I have decided to launch myself in making some skins until I get icelabz running. Some of the skins will be free and some not.
Here is my first in the line:
The above is still in the making, ill probably finish it within the week and pack it with all the psd files to be ready to be released to the public. The skin is mostly CSS than images. It will take on a really dark night theme. Most images that will be on it will be ornated like the background to give it a persian/arab look.
Here is a screenshot of the latest design I have for icelabz.net
Other:
Sorry for being inactive lately, this is because I have exams coming up and I am spending some of my spare times working on Minerva SEO to try get it out to the public to allow them to test it out as soon as possible. And also some time on icelabz to get it up and running.
If you have any questions regarding IPB or anything drop me an email and Ill try help you out.
Here is a screenshot of the new design of icelabz.net which should be live with a few days or weeks. It all depends how much time i got to spend.
don’t mind the white space between the footer and the content, it will be filled when we get to going live.
It seems that the development of the first closed beta release is nearing. In this version it should at least handle most urls and stop the search engine from spidering useless pages which is against their T&C.
At the moment there are just a few urls that needs to be converted into a nice uniformed url and to auto redirect misspelled forum urls.
After that I will add a title seo hack, then a meta generator hack, an acronym hack, and a few other things that needs to be done.
If you have not applied to be a beta tester please do so by emailing me on nitr021@icelabz.net and i should reply with 48hours or so. Just include your board url and the reason why you should join the test and how it could benefit me and you.
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:
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.
Posted by B.Ramburn in