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IPS Blogs
414 topics in this forum
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The site eGullet.org was literally the first client of Invision Power Services when our company was founded over 12 years ago. Steven Shaw, along with his partner, stepped up and supported IPS in its first days and stayed with us all these years. They were our first paying client, our first hosting client, and often the first to get early betas of our releases. It was with great sadness that I read today of the passing of Steven Shaw. Steven was a friend and mentor to me personally. He advised me as IPS grew, provided valuable feedback, was our first attorney (he actually registered the first code copyright of IPB), and was always on board to hear out ideas. My firs…
Last reply by [R] NuclearGeneral , -
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Some sites make use of multiple calendars to help differentiate what type of events are being contributed to the community. You might have a staff calendar that allows staff members to add events and a community calendar for the rest of your users. Or you may have a holidays calendar as well as a gaming "raids" calendar on your community. Individual calendars are a form of categorization in IP.Calendar, and we wanted to bring some enhancements to them in the 4.0 Community Suite. Colors You will now be able to specify colors for each calendar you create. The software will automatically suggest a new unique color each time you create a new calendar with several p…
Last reply by [R] NuclearGeneral , -
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Copying Settings Sometimes you need to change the same setting across multiple categories. For example, let's say up until now I've not allowed comments on files and now I want to enable it for most categories. In IP.Downloads for 3.x, I'd have to go into each category one by one and toggle the setting on. In 4.x, when editing a category, each setting has a "Copy" button next to it, when opens a window asking which categories to copy that setting value to, so I can make the change to one category and then copy it to others (or all) quickly. This feature is also available when editing things in other applications, such as forums in IP.Board or products in …
Last reply by [R] NuclearGeneral , -
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Effective moderation features are essential for online communities. Forums, blog entries and member-to-member messaging are particularly attractive for spam bots and nuisance users alike. IPS Social Suite has always been best in class when it comes to moderation features with features like the free IPS Spam Service that are completely unmatched by other web applications. Over this series of 5 blog entries I'm going to introduce you to some of the new moderation features in the IPS Community Suite 4.0. Part 1: Setting up moderators Part 2: Approval Queue Part 3: Reports Part 4: Effective Moderation Part 5: Warnings Multi-moderation It's really important …
Last reply by [R] NuclearGeneral , -
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Different staff members typically have different roles within a community - especially larger communities, where you may have staff responsible for the theme, others handling tickets and different staff maintaining the system. In 3.x, we had a 'Bookmarks' system in the AdminCP that allowed you to create a menu of frequently-used sections in an effort to make them easier to get to, rather than navigating the main menus. As with every feature in IPS4, we took some time to think about what this Bookmark feature aimed to achieve, and whether it was the best way to achieve it (seriously - we have considered everything you'll see in IPS4 very carefully; nothing gets a free p…
Last reply by [R] NuclearGeneral , -
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One of the goals for IPS Community Suite 4.0 was improving content discovery. In other words, making sure content still receives exposure even if it is posted in less used areas of the suite. The sidebar that shows on the IP.Board index page in 3.x helps with this goal to some extent, however people who visit the forums app infrequently may miss out on valuable content. This became an even more important issue when the decision was made to decouple IP.Board as a standalone application. What if the focus of your site is Gallery or what if IP.Board is not even enabled for example? Our solution was to extend the sidebar across all applications as shown below in IP.Down…
Last reply by [R] NuclearGeneral , -
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IP.Calendar has supported an RSVP system for events for the last several versions, and this has been a well received addition to Calendar. Where allowed, users can request RSVP for events submitted to the calendar, and where allowed, other users can RSVP (and subsequently un-RSVP) for these events. This functionality is useful for real-world events being coordinated through your site to help event organizers know who will attend. Some minor but useful enhancements have been made to the RSVP functionality in calendar for 4.0. RSVP Limits Often times, you may only have a limited number of spots available for an event. You may only be able to accommodate 10 users…
Last reply by [R] NuclearGeneral , -
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A few years ago we revolutionised theme editing in IP.Board with the addition of the "Visual Skin Editor". This tool quickly became a popular way of making broad color changes to new themes to match in with an existing site or existing branding. For the first time, you could instantly view the changes you were making. Goodbye Visual Skin Editor, hello Easy Mode Editor. We have rewritten this tool from the ground up in IPS Suite 4.0 and renamed it the Easy Mode Editor now that it's a fully integrated part of the suite and not just a license add-on. It retains all the features you love and has a much better interface, more control and fully supports gradients. Let's tak…
Last reply by [R] NuclearGeneral , -
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A little history For many years, IP.Board functioned under a relatively normal model of managing a content's status. A topic, for example, was either unapproved or approved. If a moderator did not like the topic, that moderator could delete the topic. This worked well for many years, but improvements in technology and processes necessitated changes. As IPS software evolved we recognized the need to handle all content throughout the entire suite in a uniform manner, so old concepts like the "trash can" forum were no longer relevant when considering how you work with Gallery images or Download Manager files. Additionally, many sites today employ moderators that they …
Last reply by [R] NuclearGeneral , -
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IPS Connect is our in-house cross-site authentication framework utilized by IP.Board in order to facilitate sharing of login credentials on one or more of your websites. While IP.Board supports Connect out of the box (meaning administrators of two or more IP.Board installations can allow users to use the same login credentials on any site in the network with just a few clicks in the ACP), the design of the system allows for third party software to tie in to the network as well. Indeed, one of the more popular addons in our Marketplace is the Wordpress IPS Connect plugin. We have made several changes to IPS Connect in 4.0 that we believe will help you better manage a …
Last reply by [R] NuclearGeneral , -
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Back in June, we announced several updates to our proprietary Spam Service, which includes influences from existing spam mitigation services (Project Honeypot and Stop Forum Spam). Today, we are announcing the release of more options to help you fine-tune the spam service for your site. These features are being released as a part of our new Enterprise Spam Service package, which is available now. Weighting The first feature added, as a part of this new package, is “Weighting.” With this feature, you will be able to adjust how influential the Spam Service is against registrations to your site. As you can see, the slider here presents several options to he…
Last reply by [R] NuclearGeneral , -
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We have seen a huge increase in people switching to us over the last year or two and want to take advantage of this momentum and offer an exciting conversion promotion. But first some information... Our Pre-Packaged Converters Our conversion scripts make it very easy to convert your existing community to the IPS Community Suite. The process is very simple: just install IPS, upload the converters, and then tell the converters what software you're coming from. It will ask you a few questions and then copy over your data to our format. For many systems we even include scripts to 301 redirect your old links so internal references and search engines don't get lost! Ou…
Last reply by [R] NuclearGeneral , -
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IPS is happy to offer 15% off starting now through Monday on all new purchases for both new and existing clients! This includes all software licenses and Community in the Cloud hosting. This is a great time to add on those extra Suite applications you're missing or to go ahead and try out IPS if you have always been considering us. Just use the coupon code HOLIDAY2013 at checkout. Conversion Promotion Coming Soon... Are you using another community software and thinking of switching to IPS? We will be posting a great conversion promotion on Tuesday for those wanting help in converting their community data to our format. So take advantage of the 15% coupon abov…
Last reply by [R] NuclearGeneral , -
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In IP.Board 3.x, we have a setting group where you can specify some global advertisement HTML. You can enable and disable advertisements, and you can specify code to insert into the header and footer of the page. For the forum index, forum listings and topic view pages, you can override these header and footer ad codes, and you can specify advertisement code to insert into a couple of other areas specific to those pages. If you install IP.Nexus, this setting group redirects you to the IP.Nexus advertisement control panel where you can effectively do the same thing, but with a few more options (including click and impression tracking, advertisement image uploading, auto…
Last reply by [R] NuclearGeneral , -
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Last week I attended ZendCon 2013, a prominent PHP developer-oriented conference designed to give industry professionals information on tools, practices and trends which will help them deliver enterprise-class software to customers. During the conference, many sponsors set up booths in order to demonstrate new products and services, and many industry professionals hold tutorials and sessions that attendees can attend in order to learn more about our trade. The conference was held in Santa Clara, CA (about an hour south of San Francisco, just outside of San Jose) from October 7th through October 10th. I spent a lot of time at the conference focusing on tutorials and s…
Last reply by [R] NuclearGeneral , -
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Introduction The IPS Social Suite needs to store lots of different files - there's attachments and profile photos uploaded by members, CSS and JavaScript files, emoticons, etc. In IP.Board 3.x, various images got stored in different places: Files uploaded by users get put in the /uploads directory. If you have a complicated setup, it's difficult to handle these. If you have a load-balanced cluster you need to set up an environment whereby all files are stored on a single server, or all uploaded files are synched between servers, but serving these files over a high-performance CDN can be difficult. CSS, JavaScript files, images and emoticons get put in /style_* direc…
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IPS Social Suite 4 is a modernization of our software line and rather than just refactor existing work, we are rewriting the code from scratch which gives us a chance to really evaluate the interface elements and labels. We felt that "themes" was a much more modern and better understood term than "skins". Of course, the name is just the start, here are some of the other improvements: Managing Themes in IPS Social Suite 4 As you would expect, the interface has been completely overhauled in IP.Social Suite 4. All the familiar elements are there but we've simplified areas and made it easier to manage your themes. As you can see from this screen shot, theme authors…
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In 3.x, we support HTML emails being sent by the software. However, due to constraints we had at the time, HTML emails use pretty much the same content as plain text emails, but wrapped in a simple HTML wrapper. Additionally, users had to explicitly decide whether they wanted to receive HTML or plain text emails via a preference setting - quite an anachronism. All in all, not a very satisfactory user experience. Email handling in 4.0 In 4.0, users no longer choose which type of email to receive. Our email handler sends both types in a single email, and the email client chooses the most appropriate to show based on its capabilities. If it can display a fancy HTML ver…
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Diagnostics For the development team here at IPS, we're constantly striving to make the most stable and reliable software we can. We currently have three main channels through which we hear about potential issues: Our QA team and other power users submit bug reports to our bug tracker. Community owners contact our technical support team who then, where necessary, communicate issues to us. Our Community In The Cloud team monitor server error logs (etc) and where necessary, communicate issues to us. For IPS Social Suite 4.0, I really wanted to examine how potential software issues (as well as general questions and support enquiries, which I'll talk about in another blog …
Last reply by [R] NuclearGeneral , -
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We've been hard at work on IPS 4.0 for some time now, and we're finally at a stage where we are ready to reveal the new AdminCP to you. I won't be showing you everything the ACP has to offer - some things will be revealed in more detail in later blog entries. But lets get to an overview. Background information IPS4 brings with it a new CSS framework that aims to modularize our styles. This is something we started to work towards in IPB 3.2, but at that time we couldn't completely replace our structure. We no longer have a monolithic ipb_styles.css file. We now have a bunch of small CSS files, and each one handles something in particular. There's one each for forms, …
Last reply by [R] NuclearGeneral , -
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Introduction Modifications, add-ons, plugins, hooks - whatever your preferred name for them is - 3rd party code modifications are an important part of any successful web application. It wasn't that long ago that the way you did this was manually opening up files and copying and pasting bits of code in, or the really cool web applications had points scattered throughout the code for modifications to be injected into, or even scripts which opened up the files and made the changes for you (I'm not joking, that's seriously what used to go on!). In fact, IP.Board was one of the first web applications to, using OOP, support modifications in a more structured way. Currentl…
Last reply by [R] NuclearGeneral , -
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Piracy is something that all software companies face and IPS is no exception. Our losses due to credit card fraud and software piracy are significant and to minimize passing along costs to customers, we are seeking to expand our piracy department and take a harder stance against piracy and pursue those who engage in it. The position entails: - Identifying customers, using internal tools, that have inactive licenses and are using later versions of the software than their license allows and report to customer service for license termination. - Identifying customers, using internal tools, that have shared IPS products or marketplace purchases with illegal download si…
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One of the things we wanted to focus on for IPS Social Suite 4.0 right from the beginning was providing better support for sites which do not use English or use multiple languages (or, as it was scribbled on my whiteboard, "++ i18n/L19n"). In this blog entry I'm going to cover some of those changes and new features. Translatable Everything Currently when you create a forum, user group, custom profile field, etc. you have to give it a title and can only do this in one language. If you have more that one language installed, you might want to provide different titles for different languages. In 4.0 you can do exactly that - if you have only one language installed,…
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We have a few updates to our services to share with you. Community in the Cloud For over 11 years IPS has provided hosting services for clients that want a turn-key approach to their online community. Over time we have become more and more focused on community hosting solutions so it seemed like a good time to drop the older "hosting" term and adopt a new name for our service: Community in the Cloud. Granted it's the buzzword of the day but we were in the cloud before the cloud was a term http://community.invisionpower.com/filestore/public/style_emoticons/default/smile.png. Right now it's all that you had before but presented in a much easier to understand format…
Last reply by [R] NuclearGeneral , -
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I'd like to introduce two new areas we've been working on. These new areas are designed to support our developer community, while making it easier for our clients to get their custom projects taken care of. Projects http://community.invisionpower.com/resources/projects The first new area is Projects. When you have a custom project for which you need a developer/designer, this new area will allow you to gather responses from developers interested in working with you. Post your project details, choose an approximate budget and date, if applicable, and developers can then register their interest in the project. From there, you can contact developers to help you dec…
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