I've done some work on the OBSF skin engine and the default OBSF skin recently, making several changes throughout. Most importantly, the showuser() function is now fully implemented, so you can view user info for any registered member (try it out by viewing mine). I also tweaked some of the HTML in areas such as the post headers and I've added the ability to tack on arbitrary HTML to the end of the forum list, which I've used to add some link images to this site.

Also of note: my primary development computer has been temporarily disabled due to some hardware issues, so all the recent changes have been made on the vonetwork server only and won't be committed into CVS for a little while (note the '-notcvs' suffix on the version string). I apologize for this delay.

I've decided to change the goal of OpenBoard from simply cloning Invision Board to a much more broad one. Read the intro for the specifics.

As of today, OpenBoard is now the system running the OpenBoard home page. To facilitate this, openboard.sourceforge.net now redirects to openboard.vonetwork.com since SF.net is unable to run OpenBoard due to much too old software.

This site is using the OBSF skin engine which was designed specifically for this purpose. It's a unique way of displaying a message board so that it looks more like an informational website.

The site is currently in read-only mode, since OpenBoard support for adding posts and topics and other things is still rather sketchy. The version of OpenBoard running here will be kept in very close sync with the latest CVS version as you will notice if you look at the "powered by" text at the bottom of this page.

I've finally got a good usable demo of OpenBoard up and running! w00t!

The free hosting was graciously provided by Nirosh at VONetwork.com. Much thanks to the folks at VON.

As you can probably tell, the front page is no longer made of static pages, but is powered by OpenBoard itself now. I started work on this skin engine a while ago and since I intended to be using it on the SourceForge servers, it's called OBSF (from OpenBard.SourceForge.net). Ironically, SF.net's servers were unable to run the software due to antiquated software, so the first demo of this skin engine will be right here on a VONetwork server.

The site is currently in read-only mode simply because the ability to register, log in, and post topics isn't complete enough to demonstrate. However, you can browse some topics already posted here and I hope that will satisfy curiosity for now.

This OBSF skin engine is a brand-new concoction of mine, and I'll admit I'm not a very good web designer (not very artistic... =P) so any constructive criticism or comments would be appreciated. If anyone wants to see what skins for this engine look like, hop on over and look at the default skin in the SF.net CVS repository. The OBSF skin engine code can also be found there.

After a little more testing in the coming days, I'll probably switch this server over to be the project's primary website and configure the SF.net site to forward here.

I've added a lot of code from the PHP_Compat project that should help in making OpenBoard work on older versions of PHP like the one SF.net runs (PHP 4.1.2). Hopefully this helps.