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Bitter: To begin, tell us a little about yourself. What is your name, where are you from, how old are you and what got you into becoming apart of such an expansive forum software community?
Alex: My name is Alex, I am from Bristol in the United Kingdom (though currently staying in Ireland on a long vacation
). I am 20 years old and started getting interested in IP.Board when I was a staff member at a fansite for a game we used to play (RuneHQ), since then I started up my own fansite, we originally had IP.Board 1.3 but felt it was lacking, so we purchased 2.1, and since then I have been tweaking the code ever since 
Bitter: Must be nice staying in another country for vacation
Alex: Yeah its pretty cool, visiting family really, but sort of turned it into a holiday aswell
Back at the end of this week though.Bitter: That's cool. So many people know you from your extremely popular modifications such as Reputation System and Socialiser. What sparked your interest to create those modifications?
Alex: Where to start
Reputation System was actually a takeover, though not many people know about that, we took over it sometime in the closing stages of 2006, and been adding features to it ever since. The downside to Reputation is that the base code was not originally ours, we were planning to rewrite it for 5.0, but seeing there will be one included in IP.Board 3, we didn't feel there was much point.As for Socialiser, it actually started off as another component we had planned, which was a Gallery. We had all the functionality in the Gallery such as the drag-and-drop you find in Socialiser now, but during the development of Gallery, we thought it would suit better if we made a whole modular profile system, and incoporated Gallery as a 'application' with widgets included. Since then its grown, and we have recently been rewriting the code from scratch, and made the jump to PHP5 for its better OOP!
Alex: Any more needed on that
Alex: I could go on for days about socialiser hehe
Bitter: I never knew Socialiser started out as something else, but then again, a lot of projects people do start out as one thing, and turn into another, and for the most part, probably turn out to be a better idea than the original project planned
Bitter: So with Reputation, are your plans for v5 basically kaput since IP.Board 3 will include a reputation system?
Alex: You could say that, but then we also felt that Reputation had held us back in more ways than one, because the basecode was not originally ours, we didn't know it that well, and therefore trying to eliminate bugs whilst adding new features was near impossible, IP.Board 3 just made our decision all that much easier
Bitter: Makes sense. While we are on the topic of IP .Board 3.0, there is some speculation about its release. What are your thoughts and opinions about new features, interface, PHP5 support only, etc.?
Alex: Its shaping out to be quite a good release isn't it
PHP5 was a great move for IPS, and it will set IP.Board 3 out from the rest of its competitors. ipsRegistry (the main framework behind IP.Board 3) is very good, infact we have a mimic of it in Socialiser (classRegistry).Bitter: Awesome. and since you are well established in the IPS community and have developed some great modifications, what is next for you? Any new modifications or possibly updates for existing ones?
Alex: Well, as it stands Socialiser2 is our biggest project, but since that has just gone out into Beta stages, its nearing completion. We will probably hold off on anything new until IP.Board 3 is actually in Beta, or until the framework is complete. We have plans to rewrite Report Manager into the same framework that Socialiser uses, and we also have a few new things lined up, and some great Socialiser applications (such as Gallery as stated above). As it stands though, I am currently busy on IP.Tracker 1.2, general helping out on IP.Shoutbox, and then getting the featured resources for IPSResources launched. So yeah, you could say its a busy time for me at the moment
Bitter: Sounds very time consuming but still very interesting since IP .Board 3 is on a lot of people's minds at the moment, whether they are coding for it, or anxious for its release
Bitter: IP .Board 2 was very big in the last year or two with modifications and skins, etc. How do you see yourself being able to stand out with competition getting bigger and bigger, now with IP .Board 3 coming out in the (hopefully) near future and a clean slate for developers to produce modifications?
Alex: That's a very good question, as far as I can see it, there will be a lot of developers of smaller modifications trying to rush out their modification to be one of the first for IP.Board 3. That's not our intention, whereas we may have a head start in some cases (in the sense that our frameworks won't be too hard to convert), we will be taking more time over the releases, and will probably end up making Betas for the IP.Board 3 version aswell, just to make sure the same quality can be expected. We will be releasing the current IP.Board 2 version of each modification as it stands, and then we will revisit the majority of them to utilize the great new framework implemented by IPS, sense a Socialiser3 in the air yet
Bitter: I can sense that, and likely a 4 and 5, etc. too, ha
Alex: We'll see
We just have to see what the new IP.Board 3 profile screen contains, hopefully Socialiser can live for IP.Board 3 More than likely it will because of its capability, a lot of people (the average forum owners) only see the standard screen, but for the PHP people among us, Socialiser has one of the most extensible frameworks around, and makes for a good social-network.Bitter: Indeed. Now there are a lot of people out there who obviously love your work and what you have done and wish they could get to your level and I'm sure you have been asked this quite a lot, but for those who want to get into PHP development and make their own modifications, or even just become ZEND certified or improve what they already know, what advice can you give?
Alex: My story could possible be quite good advice, when I first started, I knew absolutely nothing about PHP, apart from the exception of printing Hello World to the browser. I started off by looking at other peoples modification (many of them happened to be Michaels), and looked at how he managed to do what he could, then I started piecing bits of code together to see if I could accomplish some things for my old website, from there I started to get the hang of it and that got me where I am today. Anyone can get to this stage, if they put their mind to it. The most important reference site ofcourse, is php.net itself, it contains detailed information on every function, which can help in more ways than one, oh yeah, and don't forget to read the IP.Board code, its very useful
On a side note, IP.Board itself has helped me get where I am, compared to other bulletin boards out there, IP.Board has the easiest to read code, and they set it out in a professional way, which helps developers a lot. So make sure you take a read!
Bitter: I definitely know what you mean about IP .Board. It helped me get where I am for sure. It is just organized a lot better and easier to comprehend things compared to other software that makes my mind feel all jumbled
Alex: Yeah, its a shame that one particular software itself looks like it was coded by ten year olds, but apparently they have a MVC framework coming soon, so hopefully they can improve on that, though I don't think any software will get close to an ipsRegistry equivalent anytime soon
Bitter: I find it hard to believe how (in my opinion) that IPS is way ahead of the competition, yet, I see more vBulletin boards around the internet on big name sites than I do IP .Board. Is it just because they probably didn't get the memo or something? Or do you believe there are legit reasons why those companies and such decided to go to the dark side?
Alex: The dark side is a nice way to put it,
Joking aside though, vBulletin is a good product for your average user, and larger companies probably go for it because more people are used to it. However I have noticed a lot of the vBulletin customers are tending to get fed up with Jelsoft now, so that could all change in the future! Generally, I think IP.Board is meant for a more professional site as it has a more corporate feel out of the box.Bitter: Agreed. On that note, this is the conclusion of the interview. Thanks very much for putting up with my boring, drawn out questions. Hope to see much more from you and good luck with Socialiser2 and of course with IP .Board 3 in the future
Alex: Thankyou, its been a good interview, and *hopefully* a good read
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will I have time to think about new modifications 
