Invision Community Insider
Find news, announcements, and previews by the Invision Community team. Follow this forum for your official news.
Welcome to our Invision Community Insider!
Invision Community Insights: These are our weekly, round-up posts sharing a highlight reel of what was happening this week.
Beta Announcements: If you like taking new features for a spin and trying out the latest version before it is officially released, opt in to be a beta tester. You can use the beta on your site and provide feedback and report bugs in a *dedicated forum. *coming soon!
Release Webinars: We host monthly release webinars to walk you through the latest changes. Join those events or catch up by watching later.
253 topics in this forum
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IP.Content 1.x has turned out to be a very solid, stable, and extensible application, allowing for a vastly diverse number of implementations that showcase many of it's capabilities. We're thrilled to see so many of our customers using IP.Content in different and creative ways. We've been gathering feedback from all of you to help shape the future of IP.Content, and to that end we want to share with you some changes you can expect to see in IP.Content 2.0. Feed Blocks Feed blocks are a very powerful tool in IP.Content. You can create blocks that feed data from any application in IP.Board (that supports IP.Content), as well as from any RSS feed. In fact, much of the d…
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IP.Board already has many moderation tools, including the ability to "approve" and "un-approve" posts and topics to make them hidden from the general community. IP.Board also has a "Trash Can" forum which collects all deleted topics and posts giving you a chance to keep them and manually move them back if you wanted to do so. Recently, we've had several requests for a "soft delete" option. This would work in a similar manner to the "approve" and "un-approve" system but with an extended permission set. Essentially, when you "soft delete" a topic or post, it vanishes for the general community (by default) but is still visible to moderators and administrators in-line. You …
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Yesterday we showed IP.Board 3.1's ad code integration for the first time, today we'd like to give a quick update on the status of this new feature. First of all, we were excited to read all of the positive feedback and great suggestions. We like to write these blog entries before features are 'set in stone', so that we can more easily and quickly include suggestions from our customers. Group Setting In response to your feedback, we've included a new setting that will allow you to hide ads for specified groups. Ad Placement Another common concern was the placement of ads within topic view. While we are not going to add an additional setting that gives you the…
Last reply by Josh, -
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Advertising integration has been an often requested feature for a long time, so we're pleased to announce that IP.Board 3.1 will include this feature! We've create a simple system that will allow you to insert ad code at various locations throughout the forum. The integration is not specific to any ad platform, so you can use this for Google AdSense, or any other platform that you may use for your site. We did not want to choose any specific advertising platform to keep the system flexible plus IPS would never get between you and your advertising revenue. There are several predefined ad spots, all you need to do is paste the code for your ads into any of these locatio…
Last reply by Josh, -
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One of the neat new features of IP.Board 3.0 was its integrated application/hook installer and upgrader. Using this took a lot of the headache out of updating modifications when the author produced a new version as you would have either needed to use a custom installer script or install a component dedicated to modification installations. This has helped out with the installations of modifications, but skins still install in essentially the same way, and there is nothing built in to the product to let you upgrade skins. Currently, when a new third party skin gets updated by its author, it can involve a lot of work for board owners who use that skin to upgrade the copy o…
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I had previously blogged about the status update improvements coming in IP.Board 3.1.0. This blog runs through some exciting new integration features with Twitter. As IP.Board already has Facebook integration, it makes sense to also integrate Twitter. This further lowers the bar when registering a new account on your forum. If your visitors have have a Twitter account, they can use this to register a new forum account or to "connect" their existing account with their Twitter account. Integrating your Twitter account allows you to use your Twitter profile picture and description on the board. You can also import your latest Twitter status onto the board, or post …
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There are a lot of enhancements being made to the application/hook system in IPB 3.1, many of which were discussed in a previous blog post. While that post focused on the hooks system, there have been many other changes made throughout IPB 3.1, and we'd like to highlight a few of those in this blog post. We hope that our modification community will find these changes helpful and can't wait to see what they do with this new version! As always, if there are any suggestions or comments, we would love to hear them. Template Hooks: Replace Output A new optional function has been added for template hooks called replaceOutput(), which receives the entire content of the pag…
Last reply by Josh, -
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We'll keep this blog entry short and sweet, since there's not a whole lot to say. Developers have asked for further documentation of IP.Board (and addon applications), specifically source code-level documentation of the various classes and methods that can be reused. Those of you familiar with phpdoc will know that it's the perfect tool for the job, and thankfully we wrote IP.Board 3 using phpdoc-style comments to facilitate this job. After a lot of cleanup and tweaking, we have made the phpdoc developer documentation available for all. Please be aware that this is the first "release" of these documents, and there are likely going to be some oddities and under-docum…
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It's a well-known fact that one method of ensuring continued visitation of your site is to email members frequently to send reminders and notifications. For instance, if a user posts in a topic, they may forget that they posted after a day or two. If an email is sent to that user after someone else replies, however, it can remind the original user to return to your site to check on the updates. IP.Board has a strong system of notifications, however we found that much of the code to handle this is scattered and duplicated throughout many files in IP.Board 3.0. The methods of managing your notification preferences are also inconsistent, making it confusing and difficul…
Last reply by bfarber, -
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I blogged just before Christmas about the improvements to the status update feature in IP.Board. A recent addition is the ability to locks a status update. A normal member can lock their status to prevent comments from other members, although a super moderator (and admin) can over-ride this and reply and/or unlock the status. When a super moderator (and admin) lock a status, it means that in addition to other members being able to reply, the status owner can not unlock it. I have also improved the sidebar hook to allow on-the-fly commenting, updating and deleting without leaving the page. You can see it in action, here: We feel these minor 'social netwo…
Last reply by Matt, -
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In IP.Board 3, we introduced the hook system, the goal of which was to cut down on file edits from modifications and make modifications easier to install. We designed the system to be as flexible as possible, primarily using the HTML logic feature to create hooks in virtually every portion of the output generated. However, we knew there were still cases where a file edit was needed, to access certain data or to reach any area of the board that was not a template or an action file. One of our primary goals with IP.Board 3.1, is to expand the hook system to further reduce the need for file edits, as well as to make installing them even easier. We've read all the feedba…
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IP.Gallery 3.1.0 will be released soon, so we'd like to take a moment to summarize all the new features we've added in this new release. Friendly URLs We've integrated gallery into the global FURL system used by IP.Board 3, this will allow gallery to create friendly URLs for categories, albums, and images. Category/Album Covers When viewing an image, you will have a new option to set that image as the 'cover' for the category or album that contains the image. When a cover image is specified for a category or album, that image will always be displayed, in place of the last uploaded image thumbnail. Sub Albums Albums now support unlimited sub albums, which work ex…
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As we near the release of IP.Blog 2.1.0 final, I wanted to run through some of the new features you can expect to see after upgrading. This is a very substantial upgrade that gives your blog a major facelift as well as drastically improving functionality. User Interface The user interface has had a complete facelift to bring it up to standard. The new look feels more 'bloggish' and enhances the experience. I've added drop down menus at the top so that you can quickly access common areas and start new entries where you have permission to. The post screen has been overhauled to add functionality. You should find the new version much easier to navigate and easier to use. …
Last reply by Matt, -
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As we near the release of IP.Downloads 2.1.0, we wanted to take a moment just to summarize the changes in this release and to point out the new features you can expect to see upon updating. Friendly URLs Friendly URLs have been implemented into IP.Downloads starting with version 2.1. Ability to shut off "Resume breakpoints" Most download accelerator clients support downloading multiple pieces of a file simultaneously. While this means that the file can download faster for the user, it also means that you can have multiple connections open from one user downloading a single file. Beginning with IP.Downloads 2.1 you can disallow requests for individual file parts …
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Earlier this week we discussed some of the changes you can expect to see with regards to search engine optimization in IP.Board 3.1. Mostly, the changes are basic tweaks that will have great impact. These are the best kinds of changes. Based on the feedback received, we've implemented a few other changes related to optimization of your site for visiting search engines. As before, most of these changes are pretty basic. In the end, the goal is to help streamline your site for purposes of search engine indexing. We want to promote the content that is valuable and worth indexing, de-emphasize the content that isn't, and overall adhere to common industry standards and …
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Many of our customers have expressed interest in optimizing their forums for search engines, and to that end IPB 3.0 introduced many great features to facilitate this. You may recall from our blog entries leading up to 3.0 that we introduced friendly urls, canonical tag, dynamic meta tag support, and many other useful changes to make indexing your website easier for search engine spiders. Here are a few blog entries detailing the new features in IP.Board 3.0. IP.Board 3: Friendly URL Enhancements IP.Board 3.0 Search Engine Optimization IP.Board 3: Friendly URLs at last! For IP.Board 3.1 we have consulted with an industry specialist to determine some areas of IP.B…
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For those of you having issues posting a blog entry using IP.Blog with a year of 2010 a patch has been posted to fix these issues. Please see this post for patch information and instructions. View full blog entry
Last reply by Charles, -
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Not content just sitting back and letting our latest product IP.Content stagnate, I've been hard at work getting version 1.2.0 ready for everyone very soon. In the mean time, I wanted to put up a blog entry to discuss some of the changes you will see with this new release. Field default values There is now a per-field option to define the default value for the field. This default value will be used when the "add new record" form is displayed as the default value to place in the field. The user can still, of course, change this value while configuring their record. Disable fields in listing and display templates Many have requested a method of disabling specific fields…
Last reply by bfarber, -
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Laurel resting isn't an activity we do at IPS and we're all very hard at work on IP.Board 3.1.0 now that we've finished primary development on our suite of applications. We've got lots of exciting things planned and progress has already been made on a few key features. As an early Christmas present to our community and to continue our honest and open development, I wanted to show you one of our already completed 3.1.0 features: Enhanced Status Updates During the latter stages of IP.Board 3.0.0's development, we added in very basic status updates in users profiles that was further enhanced by the index page sidebar hook. We've seen this feature get a lot of use on our …
Last reply by Matt, -
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While we announced planned features for IP.Downloads 2.1 in October, we've been a bit quiet about it since then. This wasn't because we had forgotten about IP.Downloads, or because we had some secret thing going on in the background we didn't want to relay to you just yet. We simply wanted to take the time to test out the changes a little bit before applying them live to our site. We know everyone would be quite upset if the resources section was down for a prolonged period of time, so we knew we had to get it right. I'm pleased to inform you that we've now updated IP.Downloads here to version 2.1, and it seems to be running quite well. There's going to be bugs here and…
Last reply by bfarber, -
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The beta testing for the new IP.Chat service is now open to all active IP.Board and IPS Community Hosting customers. For full information please read the topic in the IP.Chat forum. View full blog entry
Last reply by Charles, -
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You may have noticed that I've updated our blog installation again. This brings many new features sine the last update. This update pretty much wraps up principle coding for new features and although there are a fair few tweaks and bugs to be fixed, we should see a beta release fairly soon. The new feature highlights are: List View Returns A common request was the return of a fully sortable and filterable list view for blogs that emulated a forum view. I have added this in. You'll notice you can click the table headers to sort on that column and click again to reverse the sort. There is also a "List Blogs" sidebar block to quickly filter and list the blogs. There's e…
Last reply by Matt, -
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O'Reilly Answers is a community site for sharing knowledge, asking questions, and providing answers. The site is powered by IP.Board using creative application of hooks and skinning logic. It also uses the IP.Board OpenID authentication for single-sign-on with O'Reilly. The site is a great demo of what you can do with the new software platform from IPS. Read the full announcement from O'Reilly From the O'Reilly announcement: Visit O'Reilly Answers View full blog entry
Last reply by Charles, -
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IP.Content 1.1.2 is being prepared for quality assurance testing, and I just wanted to take a moment to let everyone know about a couple of new (but useful) features and changes in this minor point release. Stability and Performance In addition to fixing all reported issues, and adding in proper support for our MSSQL driver, we've added many resource improvements throughout the software. Databases and fields are now properly cached, preventing the need to query this data throughout the front end of IP.Content. Additionally, we've added a few MySQL indexes that speed up certain areas of IP.Content significantly, reducing overall overhead and improving responsiveness. Da…
Last reply by bfarber, -
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We've just upgraded the IP.Blogs application we use on these forums to 2.1.0 beta 1. As you can see, it's a fairly substantial upgrade with many new features and improvements. This blog entry will run through the main ones: Efficiency I've added several more caching layers for commonly requested data from blogs and entries. This, along with significant SQL query work makes this version the most efficient yet. The improvements are obvious even here. Pages load much quicker with much fewer queries. User Interface The user interface has had a complete facelift to bring it up to standard. The new look feels more 'bloggish' and enhances the experience. I've added drop dow…
Last reply by Matt, -
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