I want to use IPB 2 for the forums on my site, but have decided I do not want to use the XOOPS plugin for this (i.e. x-ipb)

There are several reasons for this. Firstly the XOOPS version of IPB does not seem to be the latest version of IPB and it would be nice to keep the forums up to date. Secondly, I am worried that development will stop for x-ipb at some point. Lastly, I can't really afford to buy IPB let alone then have to fork out more for the plugin.

Don't get me wrong, I fully appreciate the work being done on x-IPB but I am just wary of development coming to halt at some point.

So my solution is to buy IPB 2 directly and then use it from a subdomain, for example, forums.****.com. This would then link from my XOOPS home page.

There are two things I need to be able to do for this to work :

1. Remove the login block completely. There will be no need for it and people will just login from the forums. All content on the XOOPS pages will be free for all content.

2. Add a link to the XOOPS main menu which redirects to forums.****.com

The problems are :

1. If I remove the login block completely, how will I login as admin to edit the site ?

2. How to add the link to the main menu ? It only seems to be for the modules you have added.

1 - by using the url directly (www.yoursite.com/admin.php - I think)

2 - either multimenu, or by hardcoding the link onto the menu. I preffer multimenu myself.

Thanks for the advice.

I have tried using the admin URL directly but it just tells me that I do not have permission to access it.

Rather than removing the login block, why don't you go to system>groups and assign NO permission for Registered and Anonymous users to the Login Block?

This way the login block won't be visible to users.
And since you dont want users to register through XOOPS user registration, don't forget to set "Allow new user registration?" to "No" in system>preferences>User Info Settings.

For the simple reason that when I first connect to the site, I am an anonymous user and wont be able to login as admin.

I have already made this mistake and I ended up reinstalling as I couldn't find a way to login.

The login page is /user.php

Thanks, I'll try that later.

Also, are there obvious problems that I am missing with setting my site up like this ?

For example, will I regret not having users login to my main XOOPS site ?

With IPB you can automatically create a new XOOPS user when someone do a successful registration in the board and other things.

You only have to tweak with IPB_ROOT/modules/ipb_member_sync.php