Pages - Feature - questions

[Foxtrick]

Hello,

I'm considering purchasing Pages for our IPS community Forum and wondered if anyone could point us in the right direction. It's setup to use a free theme that we've customised a little to be "ours" and fit our niche gaming community.

 

Since we set that up, we've been working on a PHP website to host a news feed, navigation bar with a link to the forum, it uses its own authentication using an existing MSSQL database thats connected to a game server that we hope to host - but the trouble is, we want to keep all the authentication as simple as possible and don't want to get weighed down by integration and SQL triggers etc. (Yes, I know why did we purchase a MYSQL based forum when we have a MSSQL based game... nvm)

So my first question is - Does the feature Pages actually work as I hope it would do - can I build a home page e.g. index.php and heavily customise it or even be completely custom - rather than working in with some page designer, and let mel use Invisions authentication and member system? Could I mostly copy and paste my existing php/html code into a Pages 'page' and it will just display the same way?

Second question is - will we have more control of the user CP buttons and its placement in a page in the Pages feature, which at the moment is very restrictive in the current Forum layout?

Thanks for any help you can give 🙂

Edited August 8, 2021 by Foxtrick

[opentype]

10 minutes ago, Foxtrick said:

can I build a home page e.g. index.php and heavily customise it or even be completely custom - rather than working in with some page designer

Yes. When you create a page, you have the choice of using “Page builder” mode for drag-n-drop widgets or “manual HTML” for a custom page. 

10 minutes ago, Foxtrick said:

Could I mostly copy and paste my existing php/html code into a Pages 'page' and it will just display the same way?

Kind of. PHP code should be written as template code, as with theme templates.