ipb blog or wordpress

[luca.mayo]

hello everyone my solution would be to put on a tech site with blog + forum .. having the forum license I'm really undecided if wordpress or IPB blog. pros and cons ? what do i choose?

[Jimi Wikman]

I would say go with Pages over IP Blog and Pages is a better product than Wordpress in my opinion, but it depends on your need.

The biggest advantage for going with Pages is that a) you have one database for the users so you actually can make a seamless experience and b) you will have the capability to create pages and additional databases with ease using Pages.

I spent 10+ years working with Wordpress and I always felt that the biggest issue with Wordpress was that it has no real community features. I tried them all over the years and they all felt bad compared to Invision that is built from the other side and started with community 🙂

With Pages you can create a blog in less than 5 minutes and you can design it anyway you like by adding fields, or linking to other databases with cross-references.

So pros and cons for Wordpress:

• Pro - Amazing documentation and huge community to get help from
• Pro - tons of plugins to expand the functionality
• Pro - Stable product with pages and blog in one product.
• Pro - If you want to add E-commerce you have a great product in Woo Commerce.
• Con - As the worlds largest CMS it is the worlds largest target for hackers
• Con - You pretty much must have plugins for Wordpress to be useful
• Con - Have few community applications and the ones that exist sucks.

Pros and cons for Pages

• Pro - Great functionality that is pretty much unlimited out of the box. Build as many databases as you like with any fields...
• Pro - Easy to work with (if you know what to do - see con below).
• Pro - The community have some amazing people that spend a lot of time helping you figure out how to make magic.
• Con - Documentation is not great and it can be frustrating to get started.
• Con - If you want to add E-commerce, then it's not much to cheer for.
• Con - Few plugins, but good ones with active and passionate developers.

 

So my vote is on Pages 🙂

[aia]

With my experience of using both WordPress and IPS Community for years, I would choose and recommend WordPress for blogs.

And there is no other choice between those two, honestly, IMO.

IPS isn't bad for what it was initially created for, i.e., for forums. But not more than that.

Edited July 12, 2021 by Mr 13

[Angel Costa]

On 7/12/2021 at 1:14 PM, 13. said:

With my experience of using both WordPress and IPS Community for years, I would choose and recommend WordPress for blogs.

And there is no other choice between those two, honestly, IMO.

IPS isn't bad for what it was initially created for, i.e., for forums. But not more than that.

Absolutely agree with you.

It's been a pain to create a portal with IPS, pages is extremely difficult to use, not at all intuitive or friendly. The community here does not give you the code for what you want (like wordpress community often does) and you will not find blogs, websites or your doubts anywhere other than here.

Go with WP for your main website and IPS for the forum. That's it.

[jaeitee]

How valuable is the content going in to Wordpress and how much do you want it integrated in to the rest of your community?  If the content is to be totally stand alone then Wordpress, if the content is going to be valuable to the community and you want it to drive engagement then Pages as they'll 'discover' it more through the tight integration of Pages and the rest of the suite.  

Personally I find Wordpress is like being given a balloon animal and having to try and re-twist it to get what you want. 
Pages is a fresh ballon that from the start you can turn in to whatever you want.

[Davyc]

The big turn off with Pages (and don't get me wrong here, it is a 'powerful' application) is lack of flexibility in terms of user ease; you really need to understand a lot about databases and templates in order to wring out the best from Pages; that's not for novices.  I've been a hound dog in these forums advocating more time to be spent on the other applications besides forums in order to give them some muscle that can empower users to have more ease of use and more options.

There are some excellent add ons in the marketplace for Pages, especially from @opentype and they bring a semblance of simplicity to using Pages, but it pretty much ends there.  Documentation, as @Jimi Wikman points out is, in a word, crap.  I fail to understand why the developers have produced such a powerful application and basically shelved it.  

I wouldn't touch WP with a bargepole as it is an accident waiting to happen in terms of hackers and having to continuously updating plugins in, not many of which are guaranteed to be constantly supported, especially if they are free.  The integration of a single system is far better, but having said that it is only as strong as its weakest components, and weakest doesn't necessarily mean those points are not strong, simply that they are lamentable components for those who are not developers or coders.  If they were brought into the 21st Century with simple, but powerful, options that everyone could use out of the box, then we would have a VERY powerful suite of applications to play with and create some amazing sites.

[opentype]

On 7/10/2021 at 11:19 PM, luca.mayo said:

hello everyone my solution would be to put on a tech site with blog + forum .. having the forum license I'm really undecided if wordpress or IPB blog. pros and cons ? what do i choose?

Depends on your goals. If you go with WordPress + Invision Community you essentially set up two different websites — one for the blog, one for the community. If that’s fine with you, you can do that. If you want your blog posts to be PART of the community, you should go with Pages. 

Others have correctly pointed out that Pages has a steep learning curve in contrast to the other IC apps and WordPress, but learning how to do it might be a small price to pay if you run the website for years to come. 

[Troy Shaffer]

Luca,

IPS is still the preferred choice for forums, so your question comes up quite often in entrepreneur groups I belong to. Folks understandably want to learn one platform instead of two, if possible.

Luckily, there's an easy answer.

Wordpress is the standard for blogs. The platform is the CMS of choice for an ever-growing number of businesses, small and large. 

At times, Wordpress is a challenge in terms of security, backups, caching and hosting. But it is a well-supported platform that continues to get better and better for its users.

IPS is at least 15 times (maybe 20) times more difficult to use. Also, and you probably already know this, but if you're self hosting (not using paid IPS cloud services), asking for help in any way is met with extreme resistance and almost outright hostility. The message is brutally clear. I finally just hired a developer to handle the IPS side of things. Life is too short to fear asking questions about a service you pay for, right?

So no, you absolutely do not want to use IPS pages as a substitute for a Wordpress blog. You'll be posting routinely and want a user-friendly platform like Wordpress.

Use IPS only for forums, and possibly the gallery if integrated with your forum. This is critically important if you're self hosting. And this is just as critical: be prepared to solve ALL problems and have ALL questions answered by someone you trust - who is an advanced PHP developer.

Just my two cents.

Best of luck to you.

[WP V0RT3X]

On 8/16/2021 at 3:45 AM, Troy Shaffer said:

IPS is at least 15 times (maybe 20) times more difficult to use.

Not really, you just have to work your way into it. After that you will realize pretty quickly that Pages is much more powerful than WordPress.

Btw I'm a WP-User since 2008, know both systems very well and nowadays I rather invest 200 bucks for a Core and Pages only license instead of using WordPress (which is free).

[Troy Shaffer]

Darth Vortex,

Thank you for the feedback. I appreciate it.

Your experience with Wordpress and your comparison with IPS pages is helpful and encouraging.

I upgraded my IPS suite to include pages a couple months ago. I'm glad to hear a recommendation e.g. "just have to work your way into it" like yours. 

[403 - Forbiddeen]

I prefer to use Wordpress. The IPS Blog its very poor, don't have any function and don't work fine. Maybe worked fine when was launched a 10 year ago.

why don't have any big upgrade to turn the feature more atractive?

[opentype]

On 8/19/2021 at 7:04 AM, Darth Vortex said:

… nowadays I rather invest 200 bucks for a Core and Pages only license instead of using WordPress (which is free).

Not to mention that many WordPress installations don’t stay free. If you need anything more than the core functionality, you probably will need to install plugins. So you find one, but you will soon discover, that one feature you need is only in the paid version, which you need to buy from the developer’s website as a subscription. Add a couple of third-party resources and then it will not only cost a lot of money, but also be nightmare to maintain. 

[Jimi Wikman]

8 hours ago, 403 - Forbiddeen said:

I prefer to use Wordpress. The IPS Blog its very poor, don't have any function and don't work fine. Maybe worked fine when was launched a 10 year ago.

why don't have any big upgrade to turn the feature more atractive?

This is why you use Pages instead.

It will allow you to build things just the way you want (without having to curse over the loop).

[Claudia999]

On 8/9/2021 at 2:36 AM, Angel Costa said:

Go with WP for your main website and IPS for the forum. That's it.

 

On 7/12/2021 at 6:14 PM, 13. said:

IPS isn't bad for what it was initially created for, i.e., for forums. But not more than that.

It’s easy for you but not for your users.

We don’t make our website for ourselves or so that it is as easy as possible for us. We have to think from a user perspective. And there the separation is wrong in my eyes. It starts with the different UI and ends with the search function at the latest. No matter how great your articles in WordPress are - they won't be found in IPS. No matter how exciting your users content is in your community, the readers of your WordPress site will never get to know them.

If your community is really important to you and the contributions of your community users are just as important as your WordPress contributions, then they should also be found in a single search function.

Yes, Pages is very brittle. And yes, it takes some effort to change from the fancy WordPress editor or pagebuilder. But as I said - it can't be about what *we* like, it has to be about what makes the site the easiest for users to use.

On 8/9/2021 at 10:07 AM, Davyc said:

I fail to understand why the developers have produced such a powerful application and basically shelved it.

Exactly my question. 

[403 - Forbiddeen]

6 hours ago, Jimi Wikman said:

This is why you use Pages instead.

It will allow you to build things just the way you want (without having to curse over the loop).

Did you have a tutorial to explain how to construction a 'blog' with pages?

[opentype]

1 hour ago, 403 - Forbiddeen said:

Did you have a tutorial to explain how to construction a 'blog' with pages?

If you install pages, you get a demo article section. For all intents and purposes, that works just like a WordPress blog. 

[Angel Costa]

22 minutes ago, opentype said:

If you install pages, you get a demo article section. For all intents and purposes, that works just like a WordPress blog. 

I deleted it, if I remove and install it again, will it recreate it?

[403 - Forbiddeen]

54 minutes ago, opentype said:

If you install pages, you get a demo article section. For all intents and purposes, that works just like a WordPress blog. 

Great, i will test this.

32 minutes ago, Angel Costa said:

I deleted it, if I remove and install it again, will it recreate it?

Maybe. It's not hard to uninstall and reinstall.

[Claudia999]

If we are honest, Pages is not very nice after installation. It looks like just forum sections on another way. Without photos, not inviting. But if you don't look after installing Pages and immediately install a template from @opentype or another developer right away, it's actually fine. 😉 

Seriously and @all: Where are the examples of good, beautiful pages made with Pages, to convince people like @Angel Costa or @403 - Forbiddeen?

Of course, opentype's pages https://typography.guru/ and https://www.typografie.info/ come to my mind, and Jimi Wikman's https://jimiwikman.se/. Or https://www.aspergerexperts.com/. Or https://www.npnparents.org/parenting/travel.

Which ones do you know?

[opentype]

57 minutes ago, Claudia999 said:

 It looks like just forum sections on another way.

Which is easily fixed by selecting “Show records like articles” and then choosing a template—even a stock template. That results in a perfectly fine blog layout for the front page. 

 

I also now finally started working on a (commercial) Pages online course which will explain the app in ‘easy to consume’ videos. More details soon. That will remove the excuse of “it’s just too complicated to learn”. 😉 

[Angel Costa]

40 minutes ago, opentype said:

I also now finally started working on a (commercial) Pages online course which will explain the app in ‘easy to consume’ videos. More details soon. That will remove the excuse of “it’s just too complicated to learn”. 😉 

Don't play with my heart like that. lol

Where do I sign up? Count me in as the first in the course!

[Angel Costa]

21 hours ago, Claudia999 said:

If we are honest, Pages is not very nice after installation. It looks like just forum sections on another way. Without photos, not inviting. But if you don't look after installing Pages and immediately install a template from @opentype or another developer right away, it's actually fine. 😉 

Seriously and @all: Where are the examples of good, beautiful pages made with Pages, to convince people like @Angel Costa or @403 - Forbiddeen?

Of course, opentype's pages https://typography.guru/ and https://www.typografie.info/ come to my mind, and Jimi Wikman's https://jimiwikman.se/. Or https://www.aspergerexperts.com/. Or https://www.npnparents.org/parenting/travel.

Which ones do you know?

I am gonna use @opentype's pages. No wonder IPS itself does not use its own blog app.

[Jimi Wikman]

2 hours ago, Angel Costa said:

I am gonna use @opentype's pages. No wonder IPS itself does not use its own blog app.

@opentype's SuperGrid let you create a very nice blog in literally 5 minutes. It is how I started 🙂