Forum Insider: Forum Insider -> Interview with Brandon Farber - IP.Board Developer

Hot on the heels of our interview with Josh Williams from IPS, we've got an interview with Brandon Farber. Brandon was a very popular modification developer in the IPB community prior to being hired to work for the company. He now works on IP.Board, as well as their IP.Content product and IP.Chat service, amongst other things.


1. Can you tell us a little about yourself, and what you’re interested in outside work?

I'm 26, married with 3 children, and will be celebrating my 10th wedding anniversary this year with my wife. I graduated high school from a home school program, and went on to earn an Associates Degree in Electronics and Computer Technology from Florida Technical College in Jacksonville, FL, graduating as Valedictorian of my class. Since then I've also passed the A+ exam, and more recently the Zend Certification Exam.

Outside of work, I spend a lot of time coding. Often it's just tinkering with ideas, researching how to accomplish difficult things, or helping friends out with their website, but at the end of the day I just enjoy coding. I like to play Xbox 360 when I have time, and I read from time to time, mostly Dean Koontz novels. My wife and I watch a lot of movies, and now have a collection of more than 500 DVDs. Last but not least, I spend a lot of time with my children when I'm not working, ensuring they experience all those fun things you're supposed to experience as a kid. I'm thankful I can do that as a younger parent, because I feel like the bonding experience is just that much stronger being so young myself. It's also nice to know that I'll only be in my early-mid 40's when my infant daughter turns 18.

2. How did you first get involved with forum software?

I wanted to start my own website a few years back, and managed to teach myself HTML and some Javascript relatively easily. From there, I decided I wanted to host my website (which had maybe 1 or 2 visitors a day, at most) from my home computer, and in doing so I downloaded one of those wonderful all-in-one webserver packages meant for developers. It came with Invision Power Board 1.2, and a few other software packages I can no longer remember. After playing around with IPB a little bit, I decided I wanted to start my own forum about one of my hobbies at the time: customizing Windows XP. I launched http://bfarber.com (which I no longer own) shortly after, and quickly found the IPB modding community and all the wonderful things that you could do with your own IPB forum.

I spent some time installing modifications to my forum, but eventually found that I wanted stuff for which there were no modifications yet, and I wanted some of the modifications I found to work differently. I started learning PHP, mainly through dissecting the modifications I was installing, and the code in IPB I was actually altering. It wasn't too long before I was writing my own code and sharing it with the community.

3. What in particular interests you about forum software?

Forum software is a great way for people to communicate online. While there are many websites these days dedicated to the social interaction between people online, forum software remains the best method to communicate with users around specific themes in a clear and concise fashion, in my opinion. You post a topic, someone else comes along and answers your inquiry. If no one is available when you ask, it's likely someone will see your question later and respond. In particular, I enjoy watching how a concept as simple as a forum has expanded and improved over the years to encompass so much more.


4. What would you say is the most commonly requested feature by your users in 2009? and what do you expect it might be in 2010?

Throughout 2009 we've seen a lot of requests for search engine optimization. I'd venture to say that many people asking for "SEO" aren't fully aware of what the term means or what it encompasses, however that doesn't change the fact that it was probably the top requested feature. IP.Board 3.0 made great strides towards this end by introducing friendly urls, stronger meta tag support, a cleaner HTML structure, and other features meant to help guide users and search engine spiders through your site. IP.Board 3.1 will improve upon the optimization features introduced in IP.Board 3.0.

I think moving forward we're going to see requests meant to simplify user navigation and discovery of content. One great example is tags. Many people are requesting tag support in IP.Board, and I think the primary reason is because tags work differently from traditional searching (and in some cases, simplify the process a lot). A user would have to think of the term they want to search for, but with a tag cloud on the page, they can see which tags are used the most already, without having to think up the term themselves. I believe we're going to continue seeing a shift towards feature requests that focus on simplifying usability and navigation, and in the end, this is a good thing for everyone.

5. What feature or features added in your most recent release are you most excited by?

I must say, it's not a feature in our most recent release I'm most excited about...I'm most excited about our new IP.Content package as a whole. IP.Content is an application for IP.Board that facilitates creation of other content on your site. Using the system, you can create folders, pages and databases, and allow for many different configuration possibilities within these systems you create. You can create feeds of data from just about anywhere in IPB and show them on your IP.Content pages, or on other IPB pages. You can really do quite a bit with IP.Content, and we've only just scratched the surface. We've got a lot of good ideas in store for our next big IP.Content update, and I'm looking forward to working on them.

6. Can you tell us about any upcoming features? Anything you think will particularly interest your users?

As you've already seen in our blog, we're implementing several search engine optimization suggestions for IP.Board 3.1. We've also improved the status support in profiles to support archived statuses and commenting on status updates. We hope to announce more plans for IP.Board 3.1 in the coming weeks.

Download Manager is introducing support for multiple files per record. This terminology is a little abstract, and perhaps not so exciting, until you start thinking about the implications of such functionality. For instance, you can now have a primary source and multiple mirrors for a file download. You can have multiple screenshots for a given file. You can upload required files for a particular package you are distributing. There are many, many uses for this functionality, and I think it's been a long-time coming.

We're also starting to map out feature ideas for our next big version of IP.Content, and while I can't get into details too much, some of the oft-requested changes we're strongly considering include more default templates, stronger "article" support, and an easier-to-use user interface for new users.

7. Who do you consider to be your biggest competitors at the moment? and is there anything they are doing at the moment that interests you?

This is a particularly difficult question to answer, primarily because IPS does not just do one thing. We release forum, gallery, blogging, content management, and download management software; we have services to help mitigate spam; we have a chat service; we offer website hosting. We also occasionally take on custom development and skinning requests, and in general are open to discussing custom needs with customers on a case-by-case basis. Because we do so many different things, pinpointing a single competitor is rather difficult.

8. If you could go back change one thing about forum software before it became the de-facto standard, what would it be?

I can't think of anything I would change about forum software itself. Forum software acts, generally speaking, exactly as one would expect. There's a hierarchical organization for members to peruse (categories and forums), and then members define the title of the topic at hand, and submit their thoughts. Overall, this sort of structure has mass appeal and is easy to understand, and is a contributing factor to why forums are so popular: they're easy to navigate and understand.

I can, however, think of many ways to improve current feature implementations moving forward, and look forward to watching the progression of forum software in the future.


Thank you to Brandon for agreeing to answer some questions for us! Coming up soon, we've got interviews with developers from vBulletin, phpBB and MyBB. We're also looking forward to starting some interviews with forum administrators shortly. If you've got any suggestions, please let us know.