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Search Engine Friendly Community Forums - Invision Power Board 1.3

Search Engine Friendly Forums - Invision Power Board 1.3
Implementing Dizdayne's Lo-Fi Module for Invision Power Board 1.3

Author: Prashant Somashekar
Co author: Rudy DeDominicis

The on the biggest problems for a new webmaster is finding a good message forum software program that is user friendly offers lots of options and is search engine friendly. Some of the features that you should look for in a search engine friendly community board is:
1. Non-sessionized urls in the url string
2. static message pages
3. message topic in the url string

All three of these features can be found in a low-fi mod written by dyzain.

If you are using Invision power board and don’t seem to be listed in the search engines then try installing this mod…it works greart…The below instructions assume you already have for Invision Power Board installed on your web server.
To use this module, your Web Server must support mod_rewrite: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_rewrite.html
To start we have provided a download with some modifications to start with.

Download: lofi-dizdayne-IPB13.zip

SEO lowfi Mod Download

This zip contains the following files:
.htaccess
index.php
instructions.txt

And the following folders:
Html (lofihandheld, lofiprint, lofiscreen)
Skin (sx/skin_mod_lofi.php)
Sources (mod_lofi.php)

1. Using FTP Upload each of these files in the root of your message forum and respective folders within the forum.

2. Open the index.php file (included in download) in the root of your IPB forums directory.
Search for:
'warn' => "misc/warn",
'home' => 'dynamiclite/csite',
'module' => 'modules',

After the last module line add the following code:
//Begin Search Friendly lo-fi Module
'lofi' => 'mod_lofi',
//End Search Friendly lo-fi Module

After this code make sure the following ending bracket is in place…
);

2. Create a .htaccess file (included in download without the .) in your IPB forums root. Insert the following and save:
RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteRule ^index.html$ /forums/index.php?act=lofi [L,NE]
RewriteRule ^forum([0-9]+).html$ /forums/index.php?act=lofi&code=showforum&forum=$1 [L,NE]
RewriteRule ^cat([0-9]+).html$ /forums/index.php?act=lofi&cat=$1 [L,NE]
RewriteRule ^forum([0-9]+)-([0-9]+).html$ /forums/index.php?act=lofi&code=showforum&forum=$1&st=$2 [L,NE]
RewriteRule ^([[:print:]\?\%öëèôtüäÖÜÄ\ß]*)_([0-9]+).html$ /forums/index.php?act=lofi&code=showtopic&topic=$2&topictitle=$1 [L,NE]
RewriteRule ^([[:print:]\?\%öëèôüäÖÜÄ\ß]*)_([0-9]+)-([0-9]+).html$ /forums/index.php?act=lofi&code=showtopic&topic=$2&st=$3&topictitle=$1 [L,NE]

Note: Change all instances of "forums" to the name of the folder which houses your IPB forums.

3. Place mod_lofi.php, found within the sources folder (included in download), in to "YOUR-IPB-FORUMS-ROOT"/sources folder.

4. Place lofihandheld.css, lofiprint.css and lofiscreen.css, found within the html folder (included in download), in to "YOUR-IPB-FORUMS-ROOT"/html folder.

5. Place skin_mod_lofi.php, found within the Skin/sX folder (included in download), in to your "YOUR-IPB-FORUMS-ROOT"/Skin/"YOUR-DEFAULT-SKIN-FOLDER".

The "Help - Search - Members - Calendar" on top, and "To quit out of "lo-fi" mode and return to the regular forums, please click here", found within skin_mod_lofi.php (included in download), was converted to English (was not in English in the original Author's file).
Now you can point your browser to your search engine friendly forum simple enter the path to the index.php file which was included in the download.

You should be able to go to the root index of where you pointed the skins to in your install
http://www.xyzsite.com/forums/index.php

and the low fi seo friendly forums are at
http://www.xyzsite.com/forums/index.html

This lofi version created a duplicate of the messages in a very simple very search engine friendly format you should be careful about how the engines handle duplicate content.
Reference:
http://www.domain.de/forum/index.html
http://ibforen.de/forum/index.php?showtopic=9275


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