There are some new features of 5.0 that 4.3 does not have such as a Shout Box (one line statements in cronological order), Profile Index (profiles displayed in a cataloged style and searchable), Picture Posts (attached pictures from posts displayed in a cataloged style and searchable) and a number of other enhancements.
My main goal was to rewrite the 5.0 I had been working on at my test site to utilize a seperated language file and the templated layout that .threads uses along with a control panel setup. (actually I had started off with my own template idea/route and scrapped it to keep things uniform)
Custom boxes could easily be added to IIP's templates as desired. Using an "include" in the template to pull in any custom code you have created should work as long as you remember to include the "//UBBTREMARK" annotation after the include line.
Custom boxes, such as weather boxes, are great but I myself do not intend to write or distribute the code as such services have their own terms of service that need to be agreed to and followed for each user. Also, I do not intend to write or distribute code that will rip content from other sites for display in the IIP's layout. Some exceptions would be publicly available news feeds from sites that offer them.
One of the problems I have to get around right now is that I wanted to cache most of the information that is displayed by IIP but since this information is formed according to group access I can not store "one size fit's all" data. (been pulling some hair out over this one) LoL
The other thought is to work on an archival system to move older posts into a seperate "archive" table so that IIP can continue to pull fresh information from the forums without having to go through all of the older posts. This will help the speed issues with large sites.
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