If you ever find yourself in dire need of a commercial forum or bulletin board system you choices may be limited. If you need an open source or Free forum script you can always head over to OpenSourceCMS.com and browse the one’s listed there. The best thing is you can also take them for a spin.
In this instance I needed to use IP.Board. A wonderful and affordable product from Invision Power Systems.
The forum comes with some really nice features. One of them being the ability to set the home page of the forum to a portal page. IPS calls it the IP.Portal.
It’s easy enough to activate and configure. But, nowhere, you will find any information about how to set the portal to the home page.
I finally tracked it down to a setting within a file that is included with the installation of IP.Board 3.0.5.
To set the portal to the home page with Invision Power Board you need to edit the initdata.php file.
Look around line 48 where it says IPS_PUBLIC_SCRIPT and by default it will say ‘forum’. You need to change that to say ‘portal.’
That’s it. Now your forum will have the portal for the home or index page.
Tom McGuire is a web designer, developer and educator specializing in learning everything there is to learn about everything. He also firmly believes in ‘Touch, not Tech.” He co-runs a boutique style digital media company called Visual Moxie and he spends a lot of his time thinking about and sharing his knowledge of the internet, information philosophy and web design and development.
