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There will be some maintenace on our network infrastructure.
Downtime is expected between 2AM PST to 4AM PST on Saturday May 15th. There will be a few service interruptions during this time span.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
If you have questions, please visit our community forums.
Time for another list of new stuff we’ve added to our resource database. Remember, it’s up to the community to decide what gets added, and it’s all been submitted by everyday iPBFree users for free.
You’ll need to be registered at our community forums to use these resources. It only takes a minute or two, is free, and you’ll have access to hundreds more resources for your board as well as official support for iPBFree.
Skins
Mods
Graphics
As usual, thanks to everyone who’s submitted and voted for stuff!
- Tom 
If your forum provides free skins, mods or graphics for iPBFree boards, you might like to enter it in our resource board of the month contest.
You have until May 17th to do so, so get your entry in early so more people have a chance to check your board!
Here’s another list of new items that have been added to added to our resource database. Remember, it’s up to the community to decide what gets added.
You’ll need to be registered at our community forums to view these resources. Registration only takes a minute or two, is free, and you’ll have access to hundreds more resources for your board as well as official support. If you’re not registered, click here to get started.
Skins
Mods
Graphics
Thanks to everyone who’s submitted and voted for stuff this week!
Tom.
Here’s another list of new items that have been added to added to our resource database. Remember, it’s up to the community to decide what gets added.
You’ll need to be registered at our community forums to view these resources. Registration only takes a minute or two, is free, and you’ll have access to hundreds more resources for your board as well as official support. If you’re not registered, click here to get started.
Skins:
Mods:
“This mod adds extra pages such as ‘About Us Page’ ‘Contact Us Page’ and much more.”
If you’d like to be informed as soon as a mod, skin or graphic submission is added to the database and have Twitter, this would be a good place to look. If you don’t have Twitter, the same thing’s available via RSS.
Thanks for reading and submitting!
Tom
This is the first in a series of articles describing the features and changes to the next major upgrade to IPBFREE. Information presented may or may not be in the final product.
Introduction
IPBFREE 3.0 is the next generation of IPBFREE software. The goal of this version was to give IPBFREE a complete facelift:
The upgrade is slated for release sometime this year.
Components
Credits
One of the major design goals in Phalanx was to do away with the credits. At the time, it was used as a way of reducing the load on our systems. Because we have rebuilt all our components from the ground up, the credit system is no longer needed. Community owners can enable or disable components without credit limitations.
Blogs
Community blogs is one of the most requested features. This feature allows users to create their own blog within a community.
Gallery
We have added a photo sharing component. This feature allows users to create albums and share them among the community.
Army System
The next update to iPBFree will feature a whole new set of components however we have removed the army system. In the current version(s) of iPBFree the army system is required to interact with other components such as IBStore. Components in the next update of iPBFree will work independently, due to this we decided to remove the army system and focus our work on the Store System.
Mods
YUI
JQuery is currently used in IPBFREE 2.1. However, during the development process we had issues with many JQuery plugins. They were inconsistent and only worked with certain browsers. Also, the documentation was not good. We ended up going with the YUI javascript library. The reasons were simple, we wanted something that was consistent, good quality, and well documented.
Issues
There have been many mods created by dedicated users over the years. However, we have come to the point where in order for us to improve our service, we must break some of these mods. We understand that this may cause some frustration among community owners. To counter this, we are actively working with many of our top modders to help them transition over to the new platform.
Skins
XHTML
In an effort to improve the quality of skins, we opted to ensure semantic markup. Semantic markup helps make style changes via CSS or Javascript much easier to do. Templates are XHTML 1.0 Strict making it more accessible for screen readers and search engines.
Issues
In order to provide a good foundation for skins and mods, we had to rewrite the HTML, CSS, and Javascript. As with the mods, we are working with many of the skinners to aid in the migration of skins to the new format.
Languages
New Languages
There are currently 25 languages supported in IPBFREE 2.1. However, many of our users have asked us to support more translations of our software. In IPBFREE 3.0, we will have support for 51 languages.
UTF-8
Instead of dealing with all sorts of complicated charset issues, we chose to standardize on one single charset – UTF-8. It allows for different languages to be posted on the same page without having encoding issues. For example, if I had a forum in Hebrew or Arabic, I can post in English without having funky characters show up. It helps make your site more diverse and open to more users.
This is just some of the major highlights. We will be going into detail in the following posts.
If you have questions about this blog post, please post them here.
Suggestions for the next blog post (part 2) in this series, please post them here.
Today we have a quick update, firstly we say Happy birthday(s) to the following.
On to a more pressing matter, our dearest Tombob is doing lots of work and getting no reward for it you can show you support him at http://freebieplace.co.uk/tombob or read more at http://forums.ipbfree.com/index.php?showtopic=9079
Happy Birthday & Remember, SUPPORT TOMBOB!
At iPBFree we’re very fortunate to have a great community of people who submit excellent skins, mods, graphics and more for other iPBFree users to customise their boards. Occasionally, some of these people really excel themselves and submit several great-quality resources in one go. Normally this would be where I list the latest items to be added to our resource database and the people who submit them, but this week all the new skins were created by Milkman… and there are lots. So it seems only fair to showcase them all, which means this week is a Milkman edition of this post.
You’ll need to be registered at our community forums to view these resources. Registration only takes a minute or two, is free, and you’ll have access to hundreds more resources for your board as well as official support. If you’re not registered, click here to get started.
We are preforming maintenance on the servers at 12AM PST (8AM GMT) tonight. We have placed notices on all boards regarding the downtime.
We are expecting downtime for about an hour.
Here’s another list of new items that have been added to added to our resource database. Remember, it’s up to the community to decide what gets added.
You’ll need to be registered at our community forums to view these resources. Registration only takes a minute or two, is free, and you’ll have access to hundreds more resources for your board as well as official support. If you’re not registered, click here to get started.
Skins:
Modifications:
Graphics:
For those who haven’t seen, you can now join our Facebook page as well as following us on Twitter.
Thanks!
- Tom