Name of the intellect board entertainment section. New features and improvements

Tours and holidays in Australia

Internet forums are one of the most popular types of Internet resources. This is understandable, since forums are an ideal platform for free communication between visitors. A forum is a great way to organize a community on your site and build a regular audience of visitors.

There are many forum engines. I have long wanted to review forum engines. I will not compare them with each other - this is the topic of a separate article.

When choosing a forum engine, I advise you to determine the following points for yourself:

1. What forum functionality do you need? Most forum engines have extensive capabilities, but some nuances are not implemented in all forum CMSs. I recommend visiting the official websites of the engines and familiarizing yourself with detailed description functionality.

2. Paid or not paid engine- this point must also be taken into account. There are only two paid engines in this review - vBulletin and IPB, the rest are free.

3. Community development - when an engine has a developed community both on the English-speaking and Russian-speaking Internet, this is a big plus. The development of the community is directly related to the number of different modifications, improvements and design templates. If the engine has a small community, then you need to keep in mind that many issues will have to be resolved on your own.

4. Date of the last update of the engine - if the engine has not been updated for a long time, this indicates that the developers are not developing it or have abandoned further development. This is a big disadvantage. Internet technologies are constantly evolving, and a forum with outdated functionality will limit the possibilities for its further development.

Okay, enough big words :) I'll start with the most popular forum engines, based on this CMS rating.

This is my favorite forum engine, and I run my Planet Photoshop forum on this engine. The reason is not only that it free engine forum, but also in the fact that it has wide functionality, has developed communities both on the English-speaking Internet and in RuNet, therefore many mods have been developed for phpBB for every taste, with the help of which you can further expand the functionality.

Logs of user, moderator, administrator actions, precise settings moderator and administrator access rights, identification search robots, creating user groups, polls, attachments in messages and personal messages- this is just part of the functionality of phpBB.

I also really like the direction in which phpBB is developing from version to version. phpBB is convenient for both administrators, moderators and ordinary users.

My opinion after several years of using phpBB is that it is a wonderful forum engine that does not require hosting resources and provides all the necessary potential for running a forum.

Useful phpBB resources:

Invision Power Board is a paid forum engine that is very popular on the Internet. You can find out the cost in RuNet. Many famous forums operate on it. It has developed communities on the English- and Russian-language Internet.

There are additional official applications for IPB (gallery, blog, file archive). In addition, there is a visual message editor, a text version of the forum optimized for search robots, a tool for convenient backup of the forum database, detailed log actions of administrators and moderators, as well as a log of search robot actions.

Useful sites for Invision Power Board:

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vBulletin is a wonderful forum engine. It is paid, the cost can be found out. Along with IPB, vBulletin is the leader among paid engines.

Podcasting support, automatic generation of forum RSS feeds, the ability for visitors to create social groups and interest clubs on the forum, user photo galleries, tags are supported, the ability to add forum topics to social bookmarks by the users themselves - that’s the most interesting opportunities vBulletin, in my opinion.

punBB is a very light and simple forum. The forum control panel is convenient and intuitive. punBB has fewer features, but this is compensated by its speed and low requirements for hosting resources.

The developers of punBB focus on lightness, speed and compactness.

Useful resources on punBB:

YaBB is a free forum engine written in Perl. Unlike most other forum engines, YaBB uses files rather than a database to store data.

Comfortable text editor to write messages, ample opportunities for administrators and moderators, the ability to change settings and templates on the fly, the ability to convert a page into a “printable version” - these are just some of the capabilities of the YaBB forum engine.

Now a small digression. If you are interested in learning about those promotion methods that give good effect to increase target traffic, then I can offer my paid research SEO intelligence http://seorazvedka.ru/, in which I use the example of 10 profitable young sites from different topics showed how they are promoted and described how this can be used to promote their resources.

SMF is another fast and lightweight forum engine. It is undemanding to server resources and is actively gaining popularity.

OpenID support, a user warning system, the ability to pre-moderate topics, messages and attachments if necessary, a WYSIWYG editor for messages - and that’s not all that SMF allows!

Intelligence Board- original free engine. The idea behind the Intellect Board developers is to create a website based on a forum. The functionality of Intellect Board is very wide - a collection of articles, presentation, news, archive of files, photo gallery, IRC chat, encyclopedia. Essentially, the Intellect Board is full-fledged system site management.

Basic Intellect capabilities Board - The ability to set rules for all sections, support for graphic libraries GD and GD2 for creating small copies of pictures and photographs, the ability to issue warnings and rewards by moderators and administrators (and warnings can be both indefinite and time-limited), rating topics, articles , files and photos/

ExBB (Exclusive Bulletin Board))

ExBB is a lightweight and free forum engine. It, like YaBB, does not require a database and stores information in text files.

ExBB has the following advantages: pages are generated very quickly, the load on the server is minimal, a high degree of resistance to hacking, the forum runs on files, no databases are required, for it to work it is enough that the hosting has PHP support.

Vanilla is an original forum engine that is interesting for its modularity. A big plus of this forum CMS is that most modules can be installed in one click

Advantages of Vanilla: its own framework that allows you to write extensions, the ability to build communities (voting, tag clouds, blogs, chat, karma-like add-ons, etc.), ease of installing add-ons (in most cases, upload it, press one button - and that’s it!), extensibility of standard functionality (modularity) due to add-ons, of which about 450 have now been written.

Another one interesting feature Vanilla forum engine - the "Whisper" system - you can simply send a message to someone in a whisper without leaving the topic page or create a "whisper" topic that will a visual story correspondence.

We were involved in the translation, support and development of version Ikonboard 2.1.9, called “Russian Ikonboard”. However, by the summer of 2003, it became clear that Ikonboard 2.x was hopelessly behind in its development and its further development was ineffective, and the idea arose to write my own forum engine, which would be free from the shortcomings of Ikonboard, but would not contain excesses like visual editor or the huge amount of JavaScript code that had appeared in many other engines by that time. Target user of this engine was defined as “an advanced user who does not need hints and can independently study necessary materials(for example, learn emoticon codes and BoardCode), for which saving traffic is more important than ease of use."

The main concept of the new engine was the idea of a “forum-based site with additional sections". Work on the engine began in the fall of 2003. Initially, the engine was written in Perl without using a DBMS, but with special measures taken to prevent performance degradation with a large number of files. In February 2004, the first alpha version and framework for it, called XAPPI (XXXX Pro's Advanced Perl Programming Interface).

The key ideas that were planned to be implemented in the new script were:
1) modular approach: the site consists of sections various types(forum, articles, file archive, photo), each type of section has its own module;
2) integration - a unified system for presenting users, message texts/articles/comments, downloaded files, from the user's point of view - a unified search and registration system;
3) the ability to search for any information (messages, topics, users) according to criteria of any complexity;
4) an extensive system of access rights, which would allow assigning the minimum required levels to perform certain actions at the level individual users, and also dynamically increase levels as the number of messages increases;
5) intelligent system moderation, allowing the administrator/moderator to describe the rules on the basis of which the decision was made to not allow/submit a message for pre-moderation.
Total Board options were considered as project names for the forum (which was supposed to emphasize points 2, 3, 4, which made it possible to feel full control above the forum) and Mega Board (which meant a forum with unlimited possibilities that arose with the help of points 1 and 4). However, in the end, because of points 3 and 5, the name Intellect Board was chosen, since it was assumed that smart functions complex search and moderation rules will distinguish this engine from all others.

However, after some time it became clear that PHP has whole line advantages over Perl, in particular, PHP scripts are easier to install, PHP is much easier to detect and fix errors, PHP is available on almost everything tariff plans paid hosting unlike Perl. It also became clear that using a DBMS would make it possible to implement idea No. 3 - complex multi-criteria search - much more efficiently.
In connection with this, in May 2004, the development of the Perl version of the Intellect Board was stopped, and on June 3, 2004, work began on the PHP version using the MySQL DBMS, which received the number Intellect Board 2.00. The release of this version was supposed to be on August 10 (on this day the United Open Project turned three and a half years old), but due to the unexpected illness of the leading (and only at that time) developer 4X_Pro was delayed by several days, and version 2.00 was eventually released on August 13, 2004. This day is considered the beginning of the existence of the Intellect Board.

The main task of version 2.00 was to create a forum with functionality approximately equal to Ikonboard 2.x (which it was planned to replace) and phpBB, so it had only two types of sections: a standard forum and a container. In reality, the concept of a “forum-based site” was implemented only in version 2.10 (late 2004), where the “Articles”, “File Archive” and “News” sections appeared. Version 2.10, due to a sharp increase in the volume of code, turned out to be very unstable, so soon (in February 2005) version 2.12 was released, the main purpose of which was to fix errors.

In version 2.13, released in June 2005, two more types of sections were added: photo gallery and encyclopedia. In addition, in this version, a significant revision of all SQL queries was carried out due to the abandonment of the concept “all statistics should be generated on the fly”, which led to a catastrophic drop in performance with large volumes of data. Versions 2.14 (September 2005) and 2.15 (December 2005) added various minor features and fixed bugs.

The next major step in the development of the Intellect Board was version 2.18, released in June 2006. The main task of this version was to bring the forum templates to HTML and CSS standards, as well as all SQL queries to the ANSI SQL standard, which made it possible to implement support for other DBMSs, in particular PostgreSQL, planned in 2.00. In addition, in the same version, export of topics to RSS appeared for the first time and big job to reduce the load on the database.

In July 2006, in order to improve the security of IntB, a hack competition was announced to search for critical vulnerabilities in it.

In version 2.19, released on February 10, 2007 (on the sixth anniversary of the United Open Project), the most significant innovations were human-readable URLs (HURLs), indexing fixation search engines, and the ability to intermediately save an edited message to a draft without reloading the page.

Version 2.20 (August 13, 2007, on the third anniversary of the Intellect Board project) contained two fundamental new types of sections: a user blog and a personal photo gallery, which were created at the request of the user without the participation of an administrator (provided the user has a sufficient level), and in which the user automatically received moderator rights. In addition, two fundamentally new features have been added: The address book and Ignore list, as a result of which the forum acquired basic functions social network.

Initially it was planned that version 2.20 would be the last, but later it was decided to release version 2.22, which implemented the functionality necessary for one of the projects created by 4X_Pro: RSS import, topics only for moderators, and the mechanism for displaying messages in the topic was completely rewritten. In addition, comments on articles, photographs and files were placed on a separate page, and a number of smaller improvements were made.

In the fall of 2006, it became clear that there were too many shortcomings in the Intellect Board 2.x series, eliminating which, in terms of labor intensity, was comparable to writing a new forum completely from scratch. In particular, these include the lack of separation of data processing and output (which creates problems with the output of HTTP headers in some situations), an inconvenient template system, inefficient work with the database and insufficient high quality HTML code. In addition, she herself changed the target audience due to the fact that, on the one hand, saving traffic is currently becoming less and less relevant, on the other - 4X_Pro I came to the conclusion that there is no such obvious opposition between user convenience and traffic savings, and sometimes it is more profitable to spend a hundred or two bytes on writing JavaScript to check the correctness of filling out a form than to waste traffic on sending an incorrectly filled out form to the server. In addition, the idea of a “forum-based site” also lost relevance, gradually being replaced by the “CMS + forum” option (sometimes that’s why Intellect Board 3.x is called Intellect CMS).

All this led to the idea of the need to write new version from scratch. For some time in early 2007, attempts were made to combine the development of versions 2.x and 3.x, but this turned out to be extremely ineffective, and therefore 4X_Pro made the following decision: to complete the planned improvements in version 2.22 and transfer the development of version 2.x to the user Gram, who actively participated in the project from version 2.18, after which he started working only on 3.x. This was done on December 26, 2007, immediately after version 2.22.

Currently, the main concept for the development of Intellect Board 3.x looks like this: “a site as a tree structure of arbitrary objects with specified properties.” These objects may include static pages, articles, photographs, chats, a page with a list of forum sections (analogous to a container top level in 2.x), etc. But unlike 2.x, where each partition type had a strictly specific set properties hard-coded in the topic table and additional table for the corresponding section type, in 3.x a mechanism will be created that allows you to describe and dynamically change sets of properties for each type of object (and perhaps even for individual objects), which creates almost unlimited possibilities for further expansion.

Additionally, the following is planned for Intellect Board 3.x:
1) return to the concept of framework + engine in order to give the opportunity to create your own projects based on IntB 3.x
2) revision of the approach to working with the database: if previously the layer that ensured independence from the DBMS simply duplicated the call of the corresponding functions for working with the DBMS with a different prefix, now the work is carried out at the level of logical operations (for example, “get an array of data for a specific request " instead of "execute a query", "extract the next series of data").
3) ensuring the independence of modules from each other and the forum style due to the fact that the display template, language constants and settings are saved together with the module itself
4) strict separation of data processing and output (the so-called MVC pattern)
5) the ability to process data with various template engines (which, for example, will avoid code duplication if it is necessary to display a topic and RSS for this topic, and will also make it fundamentally possible to write a template engine that will use templates from other engines)
6) support for multi-site and multi-domain (i.e. working with several sites, which from a hosting point of view are aliases, but the engine produces different content for them)
7) the possibility of self-diagnosis (i.e. the presence in each module of a procedure for checking the presence of the necessary access rights and PHP extensions on a given hosting)
8) the ability to connect/disconnect modules “on the fly”, which will allow you to update IntB 3.x at the level of modules, and not releases, as was the case in 2.x
9) changing the approach to creating/updating the database structure: instead of describing the queries that need to be executed, the structure that needs to be obtained as a result is described, after which the module for working with the database compares it with the existing one and makes the necessary changes.
10) transition to UTF-8 encoding (with the ability to compress data if necessary)
11) significant improvement in debugging tools, and in the future - automation of pre-release testing, which will avoid last minute bugs.
12) paying much more attention to developer documentation

The first alpha version of Intellect Board 3.x is currently ready, however subsequent development has been suspended due to the need to complete 2.x

INSTALLING INTELLECT BOARD 2.22 (version dated December 26, 2007)

1. Installation requirements:

1) Web server that supports execution of PHP scripts
2) PHP version no lower than 4.2.0 or 5.0 (short_open_tag option must be enabled)
3) MySQL version 3.23.53 or higher (4.1 and higher recommended) or PostgreSQL 8.1.3 with installed module T2Search
4) a database with rights to create tables and indexes and perform basic actions with them: selecting, creating, deleting records.
5) At least 4 Mb disk space for scripts and pictures and 5 Mb for the database (as the forum grows, the requirements for database volume will increase)
6) For correct operation Graphic files for PHP must include the GD extension (GD2 is recommended)
7) In most cases, 3 Mb of memory is enough for the script to work correctly, but in a number of situations (for example, when loading graphic image with transformations performed on it), this volume can increase significantly.

It is advisable that the forum administrator have minimal knowledge of PHP and MySQL (at least be able to understand the meaning of standard messages about errors).

If you are updating from previous versions, do not forget to make a backup copy of the forum before updating (most often, when updating, the files addons.php and langs/ru/rules.txt are replaced) and read the document “Update Features”, which is located in the distribution package in the file!update!.txt.

Attention: Intellect Board does not work with some older versions of Denver!
If such a situation arises, we recommend updating Denver to the latest version, or using Small HTTP Server or real Apache, and not the one included with Denver.

If the ZZIPlib library is installed on the server, then all files except install.php can be archived in the iboard.zip file and uploaded to the forum as a ZIP archive. If this library is not installed, then files should be uploaded via FTP in binary mode in the usual way(i.e. piece by piece).

The forum should be uploaded to one of the subdirectories (in further examples we will assume that you named this subdirectory forum), nested in the directory intended for HTML pages (usually it is called public_html, html, www, for more details, see your hosting FAQ) . DO NOT PLACE FORUM SCRIPTS IN THE cgi-bin SUB-DIRECTORY! If you want to make a site consisting only of a forum, then upload the scripts directly to the directory for HTML pages.

Access rights.

Access rights should be set depending on whose name the script is running (this information is displayed on the first page along with other information about the server). There are 2 options: 1) the script is executed on your behalf (the username is the same as your main FTP login), 2) the script is executed on behalf of the server user (usually this user is nobody, apache or IIS_*).

If the script is executed on your behalf, then the rights are set as follows:
- on the config and temp directories, it is enough to set the rights to 700 (sometimes this is indicated as rwx------, write/read/execute permission for the owner and prohibition of these actions for the group and everyone else).
- the styles directory and all its subdirectories must be accessible to the owner for any operations, for everyone else only read/execute (permission 755 or rwxr-xr-x).
- the files and photos directories must be accessible to the owner for any operations, for everyone else only read/execute (permission 755 or rwxr-xr-x).
- if you plan to edit language files, then you should set permissions to 644 for all files in subdirectories of the /langs directory.
- the remaining files should have permissions set as follows: the owner has read/write rights, the group has read-only rights (640 or rw-r-----), or this way: the owner has read/write rights, and the group and all the rest are read-only (644 or rw-r--r--).

If the script is executed on behalf of the server user, then the rights must be set as follows:
- on the config and temp directories - rights 777 (any actions are allowed to the owner, group and everyone else)
- for the styles directory and subdirectories - also 777, for files in these subdirectories - 666 (read/write is allowed to the owner, group and everyone else)
- the files and photos directories must be accessible to the owner for any operations, for everyone else only read/execute (permission 777 or rwxrwxrwx).
- if the installation is performed for the first time, in root directory forum needs to be created empty file addons.php and make it writable (permission 666). Attention: this file is not included in the distribution; you need to create it yourself!
- if you plan to edit language files, then you should set permissions to 644 for all files in subdirectories of the /langs directory
- the remaining files should have permissions set as follows: the owner has read/write rights, and the group and all others have read-only rights (644 or rw-r--r--).

Please note: If you install any updates after installing the forum, you may need to make some files writable. In this case, you should set the rights to the same as for files in the /langs/ru directory.

3. Installation

After all the files (or ZIP archive) have been downloaded, you should run the install.php script on the server. (To do this, enter the URL http://your_site/forum/install.php in your browser, where your_site is the name of your site, and forum is the name of the subdirectory in which you installed the forum).

The installation script will search for Intellect Board versions already installed in the current directory (if any) and offer to either change their settings or install a new version.

The next step will unpack the files (if they were downloaded as a ZIP archive) and check their sizes. If the check will pass successful, a form will be displayed asking for the database parameters that will be used for the forum. Here you need to provide the following information:
- path to the directory on the server where the forum scripts and forum URL are located. The script will try to automatically determine the path and URL. In most cases this happens correctly, and you just need to click the "Install" button to proceed to next step installations. If something is wrong, then you need to find out the full path to your site from the hosting support service, and enter it, adding at the end the name of the directory where you want to install the forum. (That is, if the full path to your site is /var/www/iboard, and you install the forum in the forum directory, then the path will be /var/www/iboard/forum/).
- DBMS type (version 2.19 supports MySQL and PostgreSQL)
- username, password and database name that will be used when connecting to the database (you should have received this information when registering the site, if you don’t have it, contact your hosting support)
- prefix of database table names. This is the general part of the name of the database tables related to a given Intellect Board installation; if you have several copies of the forum installed, then each of them should have its own prefix (to avoid confusion). If you do not intend to install more than one instance of the forum, it is recommended to use ib_ as a prefix.
- System user password. The System user has full and unrestricted access rights to the forum Administration Center, so choose enough complex password(recommendations: the password must be at least 8 characters and contain large and small letters, as well as numbers or special characters).
After all necessary information entered, the installation script will produce initial setup forum and writes the configuration files, after which it will display a message that the installation has been completed successfully and will offer to go to the Administration Center, where you can configure the basic parameters of the forum.
After the installation is complete, it is possible that the install.php file will not be automatically deleted. (This usually happens when the script is executed as a server user.) In this case, when you try to go to the Administration Center, an error will be displayed. You need to connect via FTP and delete this file manually, otherwise you will not be able to log into the Administration Center for security reasons.

In order to start sending messages to the forum, you need to create at least 1 category and 1 section in it. This is done in the “Setting up sections and categories” section in the Administration Center (the very first menu item).

Please note: For security reasons, the System user cannot visit the user area of the forum, so you will need to select "Go to the forum as a guest" to access it. Later you can create regular user(menu item "Create user") and give him administrator rights. Such a user will have access to both the user part of the forum and the Administration Center.

4. MySQL Code Page

If you encounter problems with code pages when working with MySQL (such problems most often arise in earlier versions PHP 5.x), then you should edit the db/mysql.php file and uncomment (remove // at the beginning) there next line in the db_connect and db_pconnect functions:
mysql_query("SET NAMES "cp1251"",$lastlink);
Note: this method will not work in MySQL versions 3.x.

5. Some features of access rights in the Intellect Board.

There are 3 special users on the forum who cannot perform any actions on the forum with the following reserved names: Guest (guest), System (superuser), NewUser (new user parameters). Guest and NewUser profiles can be edited in the Forum Administration Center and are used to determine the forum settings that are visible to guests, as well as the settings offered by default to new users.

For almost any action in the section, you can set the minimum access level that is required to complete it. Access levels are organized as follows: each level is associated with a numerical value in the range from 1 to 999 (more precisely, up to 1023, but levels 1000 and above give the right to enter the Administration Center). The user can be assigned a basic level, as well as local level for each section of the forum. Numeric values -1.0, 1024 are reserved for evicted member, guest, and System user.

Access levels can be unique or non-unique. Unique levels can only be set by the Forum Administrator; non-unique levels can be assigned automatically upon reaching a certain number of posts on the forum.

6. Support

If you have any questions about installing or configuring the forum, please contact the official support forum at
To receive a response as quickly and efficiently as possible, we remind you that in addition to posting an error message, it is also necessary to briefly describe the situation when the error occurred (for example, “when adding a photo” or “when viewing news”) and indicate what rights the user has, who experienced this error.
There you can make suggestions and wishes, as well as send your versions of the Intellect Board design.

7. Forum logo

Starting from version 2.19 in Intellect Board, the logo should be located in the styles/style_name directory with the name logo.gif. If the same logo is suitable for several styles, it must be copied to each directory. The option to set the logo URL through the corresponding option in the AD remains available and makes sense only for styles that do not use the integrated template, for backward compatibility purposes. Styles that use an integrated template are not affected by this option (see the "Upgrading to 2.19" section).

8. Human-readable URLs

Version 2.19 added the ability to set human-readable URLs (HURLs) for both sections and topics. In order to use them, you must enable the corresponding option in the "Basic Forum Settings" and also enter necessary settings to the server. On Apache server this can be done in two ways: either by adding an ErrorHandler for the 404 error,
or using mod_rewrite. Both are configured in the .htaccess file

To enable mod_rewrite (if the hosting has it), you need to write the following in .htaccess (if the forum is not placed at the root of the site, in the RewriteBase / directive you need to replace it with relative URL forum without / at the end, for example /forum):
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %(REQUEST_FILENAME) !-d
RewriteCond %(REQUEST_FILENAME) !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*) index.php

Please note: the names of the sections should not match the names of the scripts (without taking into account the extension) in IntB ( typical mistake— section with HURL news)!

To enable calling the script through a 404 error handler, you need to write the following line in .htaccess:

ErrorDocument 404 /forum/index.php

The Intellect Board allows you to create any number of design options, called “style sets.” Each style set consists of a CSS file that defines colors, fonts, and some other display options, a main template that defines the look of the general forum area, and several template files that contain functions for HTML output that are called from the main scripts. Each of the style sets is located in one subdirectory of the styles directory, and the name CSS file matches the name of the subdirectory, the main template is called templat.php, and the templates are called the name of the module for which they are intended.

Starting from version 2.14, a style set inheritance system has been introduced, which works as follows: the presence of a template file in this set styles, if such a file does not exist, then it is searched in the style that is considered the parent of this one, if the file is not there either, then in the style that is considered the ancestor of the parent style, and so on along the inheritance chain until an abstract style will be achieved, which is considered the starting point for all design options and contains all the templates used.

When creating a new style set, the CSS file of the parent style is automatically copied to its directory (and renamed), all graphic files and the main template template.php. Other PHP templates are not automatically copied, so if you need to make changes to any of the template files, copy it manually to a new style and only then edit.

CSS files can be edited in two ways: either directly on the server using the style editor in the Administration Center, or on the user's computer.
Templates can only be edited locally (i.e. you need to download them via FTP, edit them, and then upload them back). When editing template files, you should save the names of functions and the names of fields, forms, as well as the values of hidden fields. It is not recommended to change the default style (it may change in the future with the release of new versions of Intellect Board), it is better to create a copy of it and change it.

10. List of functions for templates

In the main Intellect Board template (as well as in a single template in backward compatibility mode), the following functions are available for calling:

main_action(); — the result of the main action
main_location($locations); - pointer to current location on the forum
time_diff(); — output of script execution time
menu(); — a list of forum sections in the form of a menu
main_copyright(); — output of a copyright message (must be present)
announce(); — forum announcement
last_topics(count, type, message); — displays a list of the latest topics (if the number is not specified explicitly, it is considered equal to 10), type — determines the type of section. 0 — output from sections of any type, 1 — only from standard forums. Message - text that is shown above the list of topics (this parameter is optional).
active_topics(quantity, type, period); — displaying a list of the most active topics (i.e. those that had the most messages and Last update falls within the period specified in days), the quantity and type parameters are similar to the last_topics parameters
small_search_form(); — small search form (throughout the entire forum at once without selecting a subsection and period)
present_list(); — list of those present on the forum/section/topic
fast_switch(); - quickly switch between forums using Select
show_vote(topic_number); — displaying voting from a topic in a given location
allowed_actions() — list of actions available to the user
show_news_feed(section, title, quantity, period) - displays the news feed from the specified section in any form. Section—the number of the section from which news is displayed.
Title - text that should be displayed at the beginning of the feed.
Quantity - maximum amount news, which can be displayed in the feed. 0 - no limit on quantity.
Period - the number of days for which news should be displayed (i.e. news sent more than the specified number of days ago will not be displayed). 0—no limitation. If both period and quantity are specified, both restrictions apply simultaneously (i.e., no more than the number of news items for the specified period is displayed).

The Intellect Board distribution only includes minimum set emoticons and avatars are not included, but the very possibility of supporting them is present in the forum. You can download any emoticons and avatars you like after installing the forum through the "Download emoticons and avatars" menu item in the Administration Center.
Attention: if, when loading an emoticon, the designation is written in plain text (for example, red or crying), it is recommended to surround this text with some special characters (to get something like: red: and: crying:).

12. Backup

Starting with version 2.14, Intellect Board includes the ability to create backup copies of database content. A backup copy is a file with many SQL queries (the so-called database dump), which makes it possible to restore the database from backup in several ways: using a script Intellect installations Board, using the PhpMyAdmin script or using the standard mysql client if you have SSH access to the server (mysq command<имя_файла.sql).
A backup copy can be taken in two ways: a) by executing the mysqldump program through the exec function (a faster and more reliable method), b) if this fails for some reason, then the dump is taken using the forum itself.
Database dumps are created in the temp directory, file names have the format host_name_date_randompart.sql. (The random part consists of 6 digits from 0 to f and is added so that an attacker cannot guess the file name). The list of available files can be viewed using the “Backup files” menu item in the AC. However, for security reasons, downloading files from this directory via HTTP is prohibited using .htaccess (attention: this prohibition only works in the Apache Web server; on other Web servers you must disable downloading yourself). You can either download the dump files via FTP, or change the settings in .htaccess so that only you can access these files (for example, make password verification or access via a fixed IP address). It is also recommended to delete backup files from the server immediately after downloading them to your own computer.
In order to provide backup in PostgreSQL, you need to run queries from the psbackup.txt file once (before the first copy).
Note: If the database size is large, there may be problems when taking a dump due to exceeding the amount of memory or script execution time.
In this case, we recommend using the Sypex Dumper script, which allows you to backup the database in parts. The script is available at: http://www.sypex.net

13. File.htaccess

To make Intellect Board work more efficiently, it makes sense to make some changes to the Apache Web server configuration file. Since the directives allowed in this file differ significantly on different hosting sites, which leads to errors, this file is included in the distribution under the name htaccess.txt. It contains the necessary directives + brief instructions on how to use it.

14. Blogs and user galleries

Since version 2.20, Intellect Board has the ability for users to create their own blogs and photo galleries, while the administrator can set the minimum user level to which this feature is available, and the category and container in which blogs/galleries will be placed. It is important to note that the user creates a photo gallery and blog himself, using a button on the editing page of his profile. There is no need to create custom galleries and blogs from the admin center (since in this case they will not be “linked” to the user).

Note: a copy of this article is included in the distribution under the name!readme!.txt

1. Installation requirements:

1) Web server that supports execution of PHP scripts
2) PHP version no lower than 4.2.0 or 5.0 (short_open_tag option must be enabled)
3) MySQL version 3.23.53 or higher (4.1 and higher recommended) or PostgreSQL 8.1.3 with T2Search module installed
4) a database with rights to create tables and indexes and perform basic actions with them: selecting, creating, deleting records.
5) At least 4 Mb of disk space for scripts and images and 5 Mb for the database (as the forum grows, the requirements for database volume will increase)
6) To work correctly with graphic files for PHP, the GD extension must be enabled (GD2 is recommended)
7) In most cases, 3 Mb of memory is enough for the script to work correctly, but in some situations (for example, when loading a graphic image and performing transformations on it), this amount can increase significantly.

It is advisable that the forum administrator have minimal knowledge of PHP and MySQL (at least be able to understand the meaning of standard error messages).

If the ZZIPlib library is installed on the server, then all files except install.php can be archived in the iboard.zip file and uploaded to the forum as a ZIP archive. If this library is not installed, then the files should be uploaded via FTP in binary mode in the usual way (i.e. individually).

Access rights.

If the script is executed on behalf of the server user, then the rights must be set as follows:
- on the config and temp directories - rights 777 (any actions are allowed to the owner, group and everyone else)
- for the styles directory and subdirectories - also 777, for files in these subdirectories - 666 (read/write is allowed to the owner, group and everyone else)
- the files and photos directories must be accessible to the owner for any operations, for everyone else only read/execute (permission 777 or rwxrwxrwx).
- if the installation is performed for the first time, you must create an empty addons.php file in the root directory of the forum and make it writable (permission 666). Attention: this file is not included in the distribution; you need to create it yourself!
- if you plan to edit language files, then you should set permissions to 644 for all files in subdirectories of the /langs directory
- the remaining files should have permissions set as follows: the owner has read/write rights, and the group and all others have read-only rights (644 or rw-r--r--).

3. Installation

The installation script will search for Intellect Board versions already installed in the current directory (if any) and offer to either change their settings or install a new version.

The next step will unpack the files (if they were downloaded as a ZIP archive) and check their sizes. If the check is successful, a form will be displayed asking for the database parameters that will be used for the forum. Here you need to provide the following information:
- path to the directory on the server where the forum scripts and forum URL are located. The script will try to automatically determine the path and URL. In most cases, this happens correctly, and you just need to click the "Install" button to move on to the next installation step. If something is wrong, then you need to find out the full path to your site from the hosting support service, and enter it, adding at the end the name of the directory where you want to install the forum. (That is, if the full path to your site is /var/www/iboard, and you install the forum in the forum directory, then the path will be /var/www/iboard/forum/).
- DBMS type (version 2.19 supports MySQL and PostgreSQL)
- username, password and database name that will be used when connecting to the database (you should have received this information when registering the site, if you don’t have it, contact your hosting support)
- prefix of database table names. This is the general part of the name of the database tables related to a given Intellect Board installation; if you have several copies of the forum installed, then each of them should have its own prefix (to avoid confusion). If you do not intend to install more than one instance of the forum, it is recommended to use ib_ as a prefix.
- System user password. The System user has full and unrestricted access rights to the Forum Administration Center, so choose a fairly complex password (recommendations: the password must be at least 8 characters and contain large and small letters, as well as numbers or special characters).
After all the necessary information has been entered, the installation script will perform the initial setup of the forum and write the configuration files, after which it will display a message that the installation has been successfully completed and will prompt you to go to the Administration Center, where you can configure the basic parameters of the forum.
After the installation is complete, it is possible that the install.php file will not be automatically deleted. (This usually happens when the script is executed as a server user.) In this case, when you try to go to the Administration Center, an error will be displayed. You need to connect via FTP and delete this file manually, otherwise you will not be able to log into the Administration Center for security reasons.

Please note: For security reasons, the System user cannot visit the user area of the forum, so you will need to select "Go to the forum as a guest" to access it. In the future, you can create a regular user (menu item "Create user") and give him administrator rights. Such a user will have access to both the user part of the forum and the Administration Center.

4. MySQL Code Page

If you encounter problems with code pages when working with MySQL (such problems most often arise in early versions of PHP 5.x), then you should edit the db/mysql.php file and uncomment (remove // at the beginning) the following line there in the db_connect and db_pconnect:
mysql_query("SET NAMES "cp1251"",$lastlink);
Note: This method will not work in MySQL versions 3.x.

5. Some features of access rights in the Intellect Board.

The forum has 3 special users who cannot perform any actions on the forum with the following reserved names: Guest, System, NewUser. Guest and NewUser profiles can be edited in the Forum Administration Center and are used to determine the forum settings that are visible to guests, as well as the settings offered by default to new users.

For almost any action in the section, you can set the minimum access level that is required to complete it. Access levels are organized as follows: each level is associated with a numerical value in the range from 1 to 999 (more precisely, up to 1023, but levels 1000 and above give the right to enter the Administration Center). A user can be assigned a basic level, as well as a local level for each forum section. Numeric values -1.0, 1024 are reserved for evicted member, guest, and System user.

6. Support

If you have any questions about installing or setting up the forum, please contact the official support forum at http://intboard.ru/
To receive a response as quickly and efficiently as possible, we remind you that in addition to posting an error message, it is also necessary to briefly describe the situation when the error occurred (for example, “when adding a photo” or “when viewing news”) and indicate what rights the user has, who experienced this error.
There you can make suggestions and wishes, as well as send your versions of the Intellect Board design.

7. Forum logo

8. Human-readable URLs

Version 2.19 added the ability to set human-readable URLs (HURLs) for both sections and topics. In order to use them, you must enable the corresponding option in the "Basic Forum Settings" and also make the necessary settings on the server. On an Apache server this can be done in two ways: either by adding an ErrorHandler for the 404 error,
or using mod_rewrite. Both are configured in the .htaccess file

To enable mod_rewrite (if your hosting has it), you need to write the following in .htaccess (if the forum is not placed at the root of the site, in the RewriteBase directive / should be replaced with the relative URL of the forum without / at the end, for example, /forum):
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %(REQUEST_FILENAME) !-d
RewriteCond %(REQUEST_FILENAME) !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*) index.php

Please note: the names of the sections should not coincide with the names of the scripts (without taking into account the extension) in IntB (a typical mistake is the section with HURL news)!

To enable calling the script through a 404 error handler, you need to write the following line in .htaccess:

ErrorDocument 404 /forum/index.php

The Intellect Board allows you to create any number of design options, called “style sets.” Each style set consists of a CSS file that defines colors, fonts, and some other display options, a main template that defines the look of the general forum area, and several template files that contain functions for HTML output that are called from the main scripts. Each of the style sets is located in one subdirectory of the styles directory, while the CSS file name is the same as the name of the subdirectory, the main template is called templat.php, and the templates are called the name of the module for which they are intended.

Starting from version 2.14, a style set inheritance system has been introduced, which works as follows: the presence of a template file in a given style set is checked, if such a file does not exist, then it is searched in the style that is considered parent to this one, if the file does not exist and there, then in the style that is considered the ancestor of the parent style and so on along the inheritance chain until the abstract style is reached, which is considered the source for all design options and contains all the templates used.

When creating a new set of styles, the CSS file of the parent style is automatically copied to its directory (and it is renamed), all graphic files and the main template template.php. Other PHP templates are not automatically copied, so if you need to make changes to any of the template files, manually copy it to the new style and only then edit it.

10. List of functions for templates

In the main Intellect Board template (as well as in a single template in backward compatibility mode), the following functions are available for calling:

main_action(); -- result of the main action
main_location($locations); -- pointer to current location on the forum
time_diff(); -- output script execution time
menu(); -- list of forum sections in the form of a menu
main_copyright(); -- output of the copyright message (must be present)
announce(); -- forum announcement
last_topics(count, type, message); -- displays a list of the latest topics (if the number is not specified explicitly, it is considered equal to 10), type -- determines the type of section. 0 -- output from sections of any type, 1 -- only from standard forums. Message - text that is shown above the list of topics (this parameter is optional).
active_topics(quantity, type, period); -- displaying a list of the most active topics (i.e. those in which there were the most messages and the last update occurred within the period specified in days), the number and type parameters are similar to the last_topics parameters
small_search_form(); -- small search form (throughout the entire forum at once without selecting a subsection and period)
present_list(); -- list of those present on the forum/section/topic
fast_switch(); -- quickly switch between forums using Select
show_vote(topic_number); -- display voting from a topic in a given location
allowed_actions() -- list of actions available to the user
show_news_feed(section, title, quantity, period) -- display the news feed from the specified section in any form. Section -- the number of the section from which news is displayed.
Title - text that should be displayed at the beginning of the feed.
Quantity -- the maximum number of news items that can be displayed in the feed. 0 -- no quantity limit.
Period - the number of days for which news should be displayed (i.e. news sent more than the specified number of days ago will not be displayed). 0 -- no limit. If both period and quantity are specified, both restrictions apply simultaneously (i.e., no more than the number of news items for the specified period is displayed).

The Intellect Board distribution includes only a minimal set of emoticons and does not include avatars, but the very possibility of supporting them in the forum is present. You can download any emoticons and avatars you like after installing the forum through the "Download emoticons and avatars" menu item in the Administration Center.
Attention: if, when loading an emoticon, the designation is written in plain text (for example, red or crying), it is recommended to surround this text with some special characters (to get something like: red: and: crying:).

12. Backup

Starting with version 2.14, Intellect Board includes the ability to create backup copies of database content. The backup copy is a file with many SQL queries (the so-called database dump), which makes it possible to restore the database from the backup copy in several ways: using the Intellect Board installation script, using the PhpMyAdmin script, or using the standard mysql client if SSH is available. access to the server (mysq command<имя_файла.sql).
A backup copy can be taken in two ways: a) by executing the mysqldump program through the exec function (a faster and more reliable method), b) if this fails for some reason, then the dump is taken using the forum itself.
Database dumps are created in the temp directory, file names have the format host_name_date_randompart.sql. (The random part consists of 6 digits from 0 to f and is added so that an attacker cannot guess the file name). The list of available files can be viewed using the “Backup files” menu item in the AC. However, for security reasons, downloading files from this directory via HTTP is prohibited using .htaccess (attention: this prohibition only works in the Apache Web server; on other Web servers you must disable downloading yourself). You can either download the dump files via FTP, or change the settings in .htaccess so that only you can access these files (for example, make password verification or access via a fixed IP address). It is also recommended to delete backup files from the server immediately after downloading them to your own computer.
In order to provide backup in PostgreSQL, you need to run queries from the psbackup.txt file once (before the first copy).
Note: If the database size is large, there may be problems when taking a dump due to exceeding the amount of memory or script execution time.
In this case, we recommend using the Sypex Dumper script, which allows you to backup the database in parts. The script is available at: http://www.sypex.net

13. File.htaccess

14. Blogs and user galleries

What is Intellect Board 2

Intellect Board 2 is a website content management system (Content Management System, CMS). The site, based on the Intellect Board, consists of several sections of various types: forum, collection of articles, news, file archive, photo gallery, IRC chat, etc. At the same time, the site has a unified system for registering and authorizing users, a unified search system for sections of any type, a general design, as well as an integrated system for collecting statistics and managing the site, accessible through the Administration Center. In addition, Intellect Board 2 provides ample opportunities for differentiating access levels, in particular, it is possible to set for each section the access levels necessary to perform various actions in this section, as well as assign users rights as the main access level, which will operate by default, and access levels to individual sections.

Development of Intellect Board 2 began in June 2004. The script was written completely from scratch, but its development took into account the experience of supporting the Russian Ikonboard forum engine, as well as the wishes and suggestions expressed by visitors to the United Open Project. On August 13, 2004, the first release of Intellect Board 2 was released. From that moment, testing of the Intellect Board began in real conditions on the United Open Project website, as well as on the websites of Project participants and several dozen volunteers from among its regular visitors. Since the release of version 2.13, the Intellect Board has been separated from the United Open Project into a separate project. The project continued to develop, and the number of users taking part in testing grew. Significant optimization was also carried out in order to increase the efficiency of the forum with large volumes of its database. Currently, the forum can successfully work with a database of more than 100 thousand messages with up to 40 users per 15 minutes (or 3,500 unique visitors per day).
With the release of version 2.15, the first stage of Intellect Board development was completed, the main task of which was to create an engine that was not inferior in functionality to such well-known engines as phpBB and Ikonboard, but had significantly greater opportunities for further development due to modularity and the ability to include sections of various types.

Types of Intellect Board Partitions

Currently, the Intellect Board has the following types of sections:

Forum is the main type of section. In terms of functionality it is not inferior to such well-known engines as phpBB, Iconboard 2.x and 3.x.
News - displays news in blog mode, which can either be viewed sequentially or go to a given date using the calendar.
Articles - placement of large texts with automatic pagination.
IRC chat is a Java applet built into the site engine that allows users to enter IRC chat (the IRC channel and server are set by the administrator) directly from the browser, while the chat uses the same Network name as on the forum, as well as the same emoticons.
File archive - organization of downloading programs from external addresses. It is possible to automatically check the functionality of links.
Presentation is a section containing static text specified by the section moderator. Initially, the presentation was intended to contain a description of the programs, so it may also contain a link to any materials and subsections.
Encyclopedia - dictionary entries in alphabetical order, grouped by letter. Additional tools are available for cross-referencing.
Photo gallery - user placement of photographs with the ability to preview, while preview images are generated automatically.

For more information about all supported partition types, see.

Key features of the Intellect Board

For all sections of any type, it is possible to use special BoardCode tags, which allow you to set the text design without using HTML, as well as the rating of topics/articles/files/photos in the sections.
Setting up pre-moderation, statistics calculation mode, use of emoticons, topic rating and other features separately for each section
The ability to vote for and against a specific user for forum participants, as well as the issuance of administrative warnings and rewards by moderators and administrators (and warnings can be either indefinite or time-limited).
Anti-spam protection of user email addresses
User groups with the possibility of automatic entry or entry upon application, as well as mailing to the group by its coordinator.
3 activation modes for registered users: immediate activation, mailbox activation, and administrator activation.
Ability to set rules for all sections.
Editing letter templates that are sent to users in various situations
Downloadable avatars and photos for users, as well as external avatars
Attaching files to messages and the ability to preview attached pictures in a reduced form.
Protection against DDoS attacks by entering a code during registration.
Support for graphic libraries GD and GD2 for creating small copies of pictures and photographs.
Support for any number of design options (sets of styles), from which the user can choose the one he likes best.

In order for you to get acquainted with all the features of the Intellect Board, including the capabilities of the Administration Center, it is installed on our website. By registering in it, you will receive Administrator rights and will be able to perform almost all possible actions on the forum (with the exception of editing basic forum settings, templates and counters, as well as actions that require System user privileges - such restrictions are made for security reasons of the United Open Project).

Requirements for installing Intellect Board

Web server that supports execution of PHP scripts
PHP version no lower than 4.2.0 or PHP 5
MySQL version 3.23.53 or higher
A database with rights to create tables and indexes and perform basic actions with them: selecting, creating, deleting records.
At least 2 Mb of disk space for scripts and images and 5 Mb for the database

Using and maintaining the Intellect Board

Technical support for the Intellect Board is provided by its developers - participants in the United Open Project on the Intellect Board. It includes prompt correction of found software errors, as well as consultations on installing/configuring a site content management system, and resolving various difficult situations associated with its use. In addition, if critical errors from the point of view of security or data integrity are detected, all users registered on the technical support forum (provided that they indicated a working e-mail address and did not opt out of receiving administrative mailings) are sent an error notification and information about measures necessary to correct it.

The Intellect Board is completely free for any use (both non-commercial and commercial) provided that links to the official Intellect Board website and the United Open Project website remain unchanged and visible to forum visitors (however, links may be moved and changed in color and font style to suit website design).

The free version of Intellect Board can be downloaded directly from this website, however, before downloading and using it, you are required to familiarize yourself with the non-commercial version of Intellect Board.