Invision Power Board
 |
|
| Developer(s) | Invision Power Services |
|---|---|
| Stable release |
4.1.19.4 / May 10, 2017
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| Preview release |
4.2.0 Beta 5a / June 13, 2017
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| Platform | PHP / MySQL |
| Type | Forum software |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | invisionpower |
IPS Community Suite (previously known as Invision Power Suite) is primarily an Internet community software produced by Invision Power Services, Inc. It is written in PHP and uses MySQL as a database management system. Invision Power Services sell applications that each can be bought and installed separately in addition to the Suite, the most widely known being the Internet forum software Invision Power Board. Invision Power Suite refers to the combined collection of applications provided by Invision Power Services and is the core of the framework.
Invision Power Suite originated from Invision Power Board, one of the applications that can now be bought separately and requires IP.Suite. Up until version 3.4 of Invision Power Board the staff at Invision Power Services had gradually expanded their product line with additional community-centered applications like IP.Blog, IP.Gallery and IP.Content. However, IP.Board was always required as many aspects of the core and other applications relied on it. Starting with IP.Suite 4 they decided to abandon IP.Board as their "flagship"-product and unify the version numbering and release schedule for all their applications.
The software also provides tools and documentation to let the community create their own applications, themes and other things that can also be shared for free or sold to other customers through Invision Power Services own community.
Invision Power Services (IPS) was created in 2002 by Charles Warner and Matt Mecham after they left Jarvis Entertainment Group, which had bought the forum software Ikonboard from Mecham. Their first product as IPS was the forum software Invision Power Board, which quickly gathered a community of former Ikonboard users.
The first releases of Invision Power Board were available as a download free of charge under a proprietary license. The last version released under these conditions was Invision Power Board 1.3. A minor update to 1.3 was released under a new license which allowed free of charge use for evaluation purposes only. Because of this, version 1.3 is commonly used on free forum hosts such as InvisionFree. Since its release, many exploits have been found, but many patches have been produced by the community that fix most of these issues.
2.0.0 was released under the same license as 1.3.1. Although the software developers originally maintained that it would remain a free package, in 2004 Invision Power Board ended its free releases for non-commercial uses. After the 2.0.1 update, the free downloads were replaced with a free demo with restrictions of 5000 posts, 1000 threads, 200 members and other restrictions, thus ending its claims that Invision Power Board would be free forever.
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