IkonForums
IkonForums is a free online forum or Bulletin Board System developed in Perl for use on MySQL.
IkonForums History
IkonForums was conceived around April 2006 and is the concept of a group of volunteers formerly known as 'The Ikonboard Team'. After much discussion and for various reasons The Ikonboard Team decided to part company with Ikonboard and the Ikonboard project.. Out of respect for the Ikonboard Community, The Ikonboard Team presented a final update, publicly known as Ikonboard version 3.1.5, which consisted of a few bug fixes and security patch.
The IkonForums website went live on 10th September 2006. With close to a year in development, the first public Beta release occurred on 8th April 2007. The first release candidate was made available on 8th September 2007. The first stable release was iF 1.0.0, made on 1st January 2008.
Version History
iF 1.0.0
IkonForums 1.0.0 was first released as a public beta on 8th April 2007. During early development it was originally referred to as 'Ikonboard 3.2' prior to the formal launch of ikonForums. The original plan was to release a public beta within a few weeks of the launch, however the forum software was developed further and major changes were made.
IkonForums 1.0.0 includes...
- Serving XHTML 1.0 Strict DOCTYPE with CSS compliant web pages.including separate CSS for both Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7. tables are used for tabular data and not for styling purposes.
- ISIS™ (Intuitive Selective Interoperable Skins) - the IkonForums skin engine that allows for the creation of separate skin components and assigning selected components to form a new skin.
- Incorporation of a template system ensuring separation of HTML from Perl Source this allows for easier and more concise customization without the need to be a Perl master.
- AJAX implementation
- Quick Reply for instant posts while reducing server load.
- Quick View allows scanning the first post of Topics from Forum list.
- Supports mySQL databases (mySQL v:4.1 and up) using intelligent query methodology that ensures low server loads and quick response.
- Multi-lingual default language is English with the ability to translate into almost any language that utilizes the UTF-8 character set. Instead of textual image buttons for menus, all menus are raw text assigned though a language variable defined by the selected language package. For added visual clarity, small icons are used in conjunction with the text; these are optional and may be removed from source.
- Installation is quick and easy with the IkonForums intuitive Installer.