IpbWiki Features
From IpbWiki
key feature: integrates the login system of MediaWiki and Invision Power Board.
Try it out! Create a member account (either from within the forum, or from within the wiki). Visit the forum then come back to the wiki and notice that you are automatically logged in in both the forum and the wiki. (If necessary press F5 to refresh the browser cache).
Be sure to also test your wiki editing skills in the Sandbox
Create users from within the wiki or from within the forum.
You can specify that you don't want people to create accounts from within the wiki by setting the createaccount right for the Membergroup "Guests" to no. If you have set this setting to yes, people will be able to create a new member account not only from within the forum but also from within the wiki!
Integrated skin
IpbWiki comes with 2 types of skin integrations, both skin integrations are fully automatic and are compatible with over 95% of all Invision Power Board Skins...
click on the below links for a Live View of these 2 types of skins:
- IpbWiki Skin Type 1 "ipb style": Make your wiki look like your Invision Power Board Control Panel
- IpbWiki Skin Type 2 "mediawiki style": Make your wiki look like a blend between MediaWiki and Invision Power Board
Besides these 2 types of skin integrations you can use any custom made or default MediaWiki Skin (for example the MediaWiki Monobook skin)...
 IpbWiki Skin Style 1: Ipb Style |  IpbWiki Skin Style 2: MediaWiki Style |
These 2 types of skins adjust really well to any type of skin, to try this out, login to the wiki, use the skin chooser at the bottom of the wiki and click the live links (above the images)!
Grant the user wiki-rights (read, edit, move, delete, undelete, protect, block, createaccount, upload, rollback, patrol, editinterface, siteadmin, bot, asksql and checkuser) based on the member's Forum User Group and member's amount of posts.
Granting rights to users is based on their forum group. Typically you will want members to be able to edit your wiki-pages, but you might not want them to edit pages before they reach 20 posts?
Configuring this with IpbWiki is easy:
- Visit your forum Admin CP Panel and select the option IpbWiki Group Access.
- Choose Edit Wiki Permissions next to the group Members.
- Activate the edit permissions by choosing Yes in the On/Off column
- Type in 20 in the PostsReq input field to only grant this right to members who have 20 posts or more...
As you can see in these screenshots, the interface in the Admin CP Panel is pretty self-explaining. (Click on the images for a larger view).
highly configurable: all options can be simply turned on/off in your Admin CP Panel.
Not only can you set group permissions, but also all general settings can be managed from within your Admin CP Panel. The screenshot below shows a screenshot of the configuration settings in Ipb 2.1. Click on the image for a larger view...
Parses BBCode
QUOTE("IpbWiki")
Next to MediaWiki Markup Syntax, you can also make use of BBCode you're using on your forum!
Click here to see an overview of all the supported BBCodes...
Emoticon Support
All emoticons which you defined on your Invision Power Board forum, can be used on the mediawiki as well!
IpbWiki Discussion Threads
Determine the behaviour of the "Discussion" tab button above: either have it create a discussion page on the wiki (Mediawiki default behaviour) or let it create a thread in your forum so that your wiki articles get extra exposure from your forum community.
Automatic wikification
By using the automatic wikification IpbWiki extension, whenever there's a sentence typed in your forum post that matches an article on your wiki, the bbcode parser automatically links the keyword to your wiki article.
When you rather link your keywords manyally that's possible too, simply by using the [wiki] bbcode.
(the automatic wikification module requires ipb 2.1+)
Namespaces support
Namespaces are a way to categorize content on the wiki. Not only can you configure them from within the IpbWiki control panel, but you can also indicate to have a seperate discussion forum for each of them...
SEO: Search Engine Optimization
It's not the purpose of IpbWiki to become a fully fledged SEO-module, but that doesn't mean that we think SEO isn't important. Therefore IpbWiki allows you to easily set your wiki meta-tags from within your invision power board admincp.
Topic Lists
Add topic lists to list content from your forum on your wiki with a simple tag eg the following <ipbwiki_topiclist forumid=2 count=3 /> displays the 3 latest articles from the news forum:
| Topic Title | Replies | Topic Starter | Views | Last Action | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
2 | Peter | 1541 | Mar 30 2008, 09:33 AM Last post by: Peter |
||
|
0 | Peter | 1028 | Feb 4 2008, 07:04 PM Last post by: Peter |
||
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4 | Peter | 1278 | Feb 1 2008, 04:29 AM Last post by: Peter |
Forum Posts
Include content from a forum post in a wiki page by the means of a simple tag, eg the following <ipbwiki_post post=4674 /> shows you the first post of the IpbWiki 2.0 release topic which looks as follows:
| Peter |  Dec 23 2007, 10:34 PM |
 Administrator  Group: Root Admin Posts: 2245 Joined: 5-February 06 Member No.: 1  | Changes in IpbWiki 2.0: the improvements in IpbWiki 2.0 focus on the visual side of the wiki. New Features
Bugfixes
IpbWiki Documentation! A weak point of IpbWiki in the past was documentation, I know it's still not perfect, but besides the Installation which was already available, there's now also documentation for the configuration of IpbWiki on the following page: http://www.ipbwiki.com/IpbWiki:Overview . Over the coming days the actual usage of IpbWiki will also be documented on the same page. Important! Take a backup of your forum and wiki before upgrading. (The IpbWiki 2.0 release contains a lot of code changes and is almost twice as big as the IpbWiki 1.7.1 release). Normally upgrading should work fine, but if you have a backup and it fails you have something to go back to. Installation:
And last but not least, a small announcement: New Prices for IpbWiki starting May 1st 2008 |
(see screenshot on the right at the bottom of this post)Easy Install: No manual modifications needed, the installer does all the edits.
The IpbWiki installation procedure consists of:
- uploading the files.
- applying a chmod to 5 files.
- start the ipbwiki setup.
- specify the location of your invision power board.
- sit back and relax!
All MediaWiki Features
IpbWiki is a shell over MediaWiki, this means you automatically enjoy all MediaWiki features:
- Look And Feel
- Links with shortcuts, arrangement depends on skin
- Skins: Different ways to present the site, can be expanded using PHPTal templates.
- Monobook, a modern skin with accesskeys and tooltips
- User styles: Users can adapt the look and feel of the site through custom CSS on their user pages.
- "Stub" threshold: Users can see links to articles below a certain size rendered in a different color
- Printable versions of articles can be generated
- Auto-number headings in an article (optional)
- Intra-page Anchors (automatically generated for headings, and also with <div id="tagname">...</div>)
- Generate a table of contents for long articles (optional)
- Automatically turn ISBN numbers into links to an editable list of booksellers
- XHTML-compatible output (or darn close to it), tidy integration
- Multimedia and extensions
- File upload feature allows to upload graphics or sound files, see special:Upload to see in operation, and Uploading files for description. Uploaded files are listed on Recent Changes and they are also logged on log:Uploads.
- Mathematical formulas using LaTeX syntax: see texvc
- Automatic resizing of images using ImageMagick or libgd, simple syntax for image captions and image alignment
- WikiHiero for Egyptian hieroglyphs (needs separate installed components)
- EasyTimeline for time charts (needs separate installed components)
- Keeping track of edits
- Watchlist Every page has a link "Watch this article for me". Use special:Watchlist to track changes on the articles you declared as interesting; watched articles are also bolded in the Recent changes list .
- User contributions in the sidebar of each user page list all articles the user has worked on, according to the database.
- Extended recent changes with dynamic collapsing of edits to the same article and quick links to diff the edit, show the article history, show the user page, show the user talk page, or block the user (for sysops)
- "Related changes": View a filtered version of Recent Changes to the pages linked from the current page.
- Side-by-side diffs - the diffs are shown side-by-side, and changed portions of lines are highlighted, making it much easier to see what's what. Additionally, a diff is shown during an edit conflict so you can see exactly what you need to reintegrate.
- Real names. Users can (optionally) specify a "real name" they want to use for author credits.
- On-page credits. Administrators can enable an on-page paragraph giving credit to editors who've worked on a page.
- Structures and syntax
- By default, only restricted use of HTML is allowed. There is an option to allow full use of HTML.
- Editing syntax based on UseMod, with support for mixing wiki-syntax and HTML. Only free links are supported for linking, not CamelCase (deliberate design decision).
- Namespaces allow content separation (to address the namespace, use the [[Namespace:Page title]] syntax).
- Discussion (Talk:) pages are separate from article pages, "meta" project pages can be separated from content pages, image pages are used for image descriptions.
- MediaWiki: namespace contains all user interface texts, so that they can be edited like any other wiki page
- Template: namespace for custom messages. Templates may contain string variables which are replaced with certain values passed to the template from the calling page.
- Transclusion of arbitrary pages in any namespace: {{:Page Name}}. See Templates
- Word-extension linking: If you include a link of the form [[war]]s, or [[war]]time, the system will automatically display it as if you had typed [[war|wars]] or [[war|wartime]], respectively, saving some typing.
- Parenthetical hiding If you include a link of the form [[kernel (mathematics)|]], the parenthetical portion will be hidden in the link: kernel. This is useful for disambiguating different meanings of a word without making linking too difficult or cluttering up the text of articles. This also works with cropping out namespaces when you want a cleaner-looking link: [[Wikipedia:copyrights|]] becomes copyrights
- Link to individual sections of an article, e.g. MediaWiki roadmap#Version 1.4 (these links may become invalid if sections are retitled or removed -- a modification that would mitigate this has been proposed.)
- Support for subpages (link to "Foo/Bar" from "Foo" by just typing "/Bar", "Foo/Bar" contains a backlink to "Foo"), these can be enabled or disabled by namespace (e.g., Wikipedia currently supports subpages on discussion pages, to make archiving easy, and on user pages, to give users space for personal pages)
- Special keywords for inserting dynamic data such as the name of the current page, the current date, the number of articles, etc.
- Multiple Categories can be assigned to any page, including categories itself eventually creating a hierarchy of categories. Category pages automatically list all pages assigned to them including sub-categories. Categories allow classification and hierarchical browsing of the content.
- Editing
- Section editing. Users can enable an option that allows them to edit individual sections of an article (separated by headlines) instead of loading the entire article.
- Edit toolbar (JavaScript-based) for formatting text as bold, italic etc. (fully works in Mozilla and IE, other browsers use it to show the syntax, but cannot format text inside the textarea because their JavaScript implementation does not support it). If JavaScript is disabled, the toolbar is not shown.
- Edit summary which is shown in "Recent changes". Will be prefilled with section title when section editing.
- Double click editing: Users can enable an option that allows them to edit articles by double clicking them.
- Edit preview (can be shown before or after edit box)
- Handle edit conflicts (page being saved by a user while still being edited by another one, then saved again). MediaWiki will merge changes automatically if possible and otherwise require the user to do a manual merge.
- Mark edits as minor; users can decide to hide such edits from the Recent Changes list. Only signed in users can mark edits as minor.
- Anti-spam Features: Prevent link spamming, and other forms of abusive editing.
- Spam blacklist: List of spammer's domain names which users are not allowed to link to.
- Anti-spam Features: Prevent link spamming, and other forms of abusive editing.
- Discussions
- Talk pages: Each user (including every anonymous user) and every article has an associated page where messages can be left. These are separate namespaces (see above), "Talk:" and "User talk:".
- Message notification (user gets a "You have new messages" notice if someone else has edited their user discussion page); this also works for anonymous users
- Automatic signature: Just type three tildes (~) when you edit, and on saving the page, it will be replaced with your user name and a link to your user page. If you use four tildes, the current date will be added as well. Mainly intended for Talk pages.
- Support for emailing users through the wiki (email address not shown to the user)
- Multilanguage support
- Translated into many languages (see en:Wikipedia:Multilingual coordination for details)
- Interlanguage links: handy method for linking articles between wikis in different languages (each language requires its own database)
- UTF-8 support
- Backend
- Database-driven (MySQL and PostgreSQL are both supported)
- Parser caching: rendered pages are cached to reduce redundant processing
- Output caching: complete page output can be optionally saved as static HTML files for serving to other clients; support for Squid proxies
- Cookie-based account and login system, but anonymous users can also edit pages
- All revisions of an article are stored (optionally compressed)
- RSS syndication available for many special pages, such as Special:Newpages and Special:Recentchanges
- RDF metadata
- Permissions
- Different rights for anonymous users, signed in users, sysops, bureaucrats and developers.
- Signed in users can:
- move and rename pages
- upload files
- have and use a watchlist
- mark edits as minor edits (eg. typo correction)
- Sysops can:
- protect pages from editing
- delete and undelete pages
- edit protected pages
- ban users by IP address
- ban users by username, if this option is enabled
- run SQL queries on the database, if this option is enabled
- "Bureaucrats" can:
- create sysops
- rename users
- Developers (admins) can:
- lock the database
- run various maintenance tasks
- Other permission schemes (e.g. only signed in users can edit pages) can be configured.
- Search and Queries
- Full text search
- "Go" button allows direct viewing of a specified article's contents (tries near match if no exact hit)
- "What links here": View pages that link to the current page (backlinks)
- Special report pages:
- New pages: List of newly created articles
- Ancient pages: Articles sorted by timestamp, ascending
- List of images
- List of users
- Site statistics
- Orphaned articles (articles that have no links pointing to them)
- Orphaned images
- Popular articles (articles by number of visits, works only if counters are enabled)
- Most wanted articles (non-existent articles sorted by number of links pointing to them)
- Short articles
- Long articles
- List of all pages by title
- Query API - allows scripted access to various metadata
- Misc.
- Random article display function
- Users can configure their timezone, which is used on all report timestamps
- The attributes of many report pages (number of results etc.) can be set in the user preferences