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.
239 topics in this forum
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In a previous blog entry we covered the ordering process for both the end user and administrator, but of course administrators can generate invoices manually. In this blog entry we're going to be demonstrating the how administrators can manage and generate invoices for users. Please note that the interface shown in the screenshots is not finalised subject to change. Managing Invoices There are two ways you can view invoices, and we imagine most administrators will either use one or the other depending on the size of community. Firstly, you can view all invoices in a list with the most recent invoices first. We imagine this will be useful to smaller communities. …
Last reply by Mark, -
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A week ago we launched the first version of our IP.Board Communities iPhone App and the response has been great so far with thousands of downloads! It's been really exciting for us to see the great feedback and start incorporating it into the newer versions of the app. We have a new version of the app awaiting approval that addresses many of the issues from the first release, we expect that it will be live on the app store within the next 48 hours. In addition to bug fixes, this version includes a few interface tweaks that improve the user experience. In addition to the version that is awaiting approval, we have an even newer version that we will be submitting to the…
Last reply by Josh, -
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In our last IP.Nexus Dev Update, we demonstrated the storefront and checkout process for the end user. In this blog entry, we're going to show you some of the Admin features for processing orders. Please note that the interface shown in the screenshots is not finalised and subject to change. There are two stages to processing an order: Approving the transaction IP.Nexus can automatically process transactions that the payment gateway reports as successful. Some users may wish to set all transactions to be manually approved for extra security, and in some cases, transactions may also need to be manually approved if the payment gateway reports a problem. Shipping the…
Last reply by Mark, -
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With the release of IP.Board 3.1 and our new iPhone application, we decided to make some further improvements to our mobile skin to expand on the great start introduced earlier this year. We wanted to give the skin a more modern, touch-friendly feel, and improve usability for those devices to suit. So here's some of what we've done: As you'll see straight away, the board header is now significantly smaller. We wanted to make the content the focus of the new design, so we've cut out all of the space-hogging links and replaced them with a clean button-activated menu. Which looks like this: We've also made important buttons bigger and easier to press when you're o…
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In our previous blog entry, we covered how to create packages in IP.Nexus. This blog entry will cover the storefront and ordering process for the products that you sell. The Store The front page of the store looks like this: The front page allows users to view products items (you can configure which products are featured in the Admin CP) or the most popular (i.e. most sold) products. Users can navigate the store using the category menu on the left. When you navigate into a category, it opens a tree with subcategories. The bar on the left shows the products currently in your shopping cart, including any tax and discount costs. As discussed in a previous blog…
Last reply by Mark, -
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IP.Nexus allows to you to create packages with a variety of options and even create custom packages for your users. In this blog entry we wanted to go through some of the options available to you. Please note that the interface shown in the screenshots is not finalised subject to change. Package Groups IP.Nexus allows you to split your packages into package groups. You can have as many groups as you like, and groups can be children of other groups going as deep as you like. This is the main "Manage Package" screen in the Admin CP: You can click on a group to view the packages within that group: And click on a package to edit it: Physical Items You can se…
Last reply by Mark, -
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IPS is changing the name of our new IP.Commerce (as yet unreleased) application to IP.Nexus. We have received an exceptional amount of interest in this product to date and many have been a bit confused with the name. The major confusion lies in the fact that this application is not just an ecommerce application but also used for advertising, metrics, customer interaction, and more. So, we thought that a more generic name suited well and hope this will remove the "commerce-only" connection that the old name created. Also, there are many similarly named products out there that we wish to avoid confusion with. As the product has not yet been released this is the best tim…
Last reply by Charles, -
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I had previously blogged about the API in IP.Nexus allowing other applications to process payments using IP.Nexus. We have implemented this in IP.Downloads to bring paid file support. You can specify which groups can add paid files, and which groups (for example the admin group) can download paid files without paying. You can also specify how much commission to take from sales and what to give to the user who submitted the file when it is purchased. A member who has permission will be able to specify how much to charge for a file when submitting it. When viewing a paid file, instead of the "Download File" button, users will see a purchase button. When clicking…
Last reply by Mark, -
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One of the first things I wanted to talk about with IP.Nexus is how easy it is for third-party developers to integrate with IP.Nexus. You could for example, have an area of your application that you only want available to users who pay a fee. IP.Nexus makes this possible. There is a special class in IP.Nexus called commerceApi that allows you to generate an invoice, and check if an item has been purchased. In addition, you can make use of special extension files to automatically run when an item from your application is purchased, expires or is renewed - and your items can appear in the Admin CP "Generate Invoice" page. For example, we have written integration for I…
Last reply by Mark, -
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Our IP.Board 3.1 beta testing stage is well underway, and so far things are looking pretty good. We want to take a moment to thank everyone for their time and effort helping us to test IP.Board 3.1. Your contributions are appreciated and only help to ensure the quality of the software is nothing less than you would expect from us upon final release. While IP.Board 3.1 is feature locked, we recently took some time to work on the URL parsing routines to deal with a couple of issues, and thought you might like to hear about these updates. Auto parsing of media tags IP.Board 3.0 introduced the new [ media ] tag, which is used to embed multimedia, like YouTube videos …
Last reply by bfarber, -
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The first release of our Skin Generator tool was quite successful, and the feedback we got from everyone was very valuable. We've worked on taking that feedback into consideration in our continuing refinement of this tool. While development of this is certainly not done (there's a lot more cool stuff we are working on adding!), we would like to roll out our next major update to this tool. In this update you'll find the following new features and enhancements. Page reorganization We started to realize as we were planning out some of the things we'd like to do, that the system may require many more options. With the old way of showing all of the options on the left al…
Last reply by Michael, -
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A common problem for all administrators that have skin customisations is having to apply them after each upgrade. This is often time consuming and laborious. One has to pour over a difference report and manually copy and paste the new code into existing templates. A major upgrade such as 3.1 can mean dozens of changed templates. I'm pleased to say that we've added a new tool to greatly assist in this process. Indeed, skins with just a few minor customisations such as colours can almost automate the upgrade process. Introducing the Template Merge Center This new tool will check for differences and attempt to perform a merge on your templates and CSS files. For those…
Last reply by Matt, -
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We introduced IP.Chat 1.0 in January of 2010 and our servers have already processed over 6 million chat messages in just a few short months and the rate of adoption of IP.Chat continues to accelerate. Many communities are making good use of the chat software and we hope you are enjoying the IP.Chat product so far. Logs of your chat room are an important tool for moderation of your community. Presently, you can download your chat logs from your client area, and while this is fine, it limits access to the account owner only. Wouldn't it be nice if you could access your chat logs right from your IP.Board ACP? Beginning with IP.Chat 1.1.0 you will be able to review c…
Last reply by bfarber, -
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The first public beta release of IP.Board 3.1, applications, and related services is fast approaching. This blog entry will let you know what to expect and what you can do to help us in the process. We believe, as most other responsible software development companies do, that releasing beta versions is the best way to ensure that the software is as stable as it can be before a final, supported version is released. These beta releases are for testing purposes and allow our customers who are interested in testing them prior to release a chance to let us know what problems they may find so we can fix them before the software goes out to the many thousands of casual users a…
Last reply by Charles, -
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On Wednesday at the F8 conference, Facebook unveiled their new "Graph" API. This is brand new set of APIs including a new oAuth based log in system. There is much speculation in the media about the current (now old) APIs like Facebook Connect, which IP.Board currently uses. Some sites are reporting that Facebook will simply kill it off while other more optimistic journalists envision a long grace period to allow developers update and migrate their applications. We didn't want to hang around and find out, so today I recoded our Facebook integration using the new oAuth 2.0 methods using FQL as much as possible which is more likely resistant to change. What does that me…
Last reply by Matt, -
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The new mobile skin for IP.Board 3.1 is now available for viewing right here on our community! Just visit on a popular mobile device and the skin will load automatically. Separate Skin The mobile skin shows as a separate skin in your AdminCP so you can edit it as you see fit. Change the colors, put up your own logo, or even put in mobile ads to monetize your community. Support for Popular Mobile Devices IP.Board 3.1 has built in support for a list of many popular mobile devices. Keep in mind it's easy to add support for even more right in the AdminCP. Included with IP.Board 3.1 This new mobile skin is included for free with IP.Board 3.1 when it is released…
Last reply by Charles, -
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Since first unveiling the notification changes coming in IP.Board 3.1 we've received a ton of feedback from our customers to further improve the system and make the notifications more useful. We've been listening to your feedback (and often agreeing with your points) and have decided to implement many great ideas to the make the notifications system cleaner, easier to use, and less intrusive. Better defaults upon upgrading With our first beta release, nearly everything that can issue a notification did. While inline notifications were set for various less important notifications (such as "Your friend has updated their status"), this quickly proved to be intrusive fo…
Last reply by bfarber, -
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Development is under way (and wrapping up, in fact!) on IP.Chat 1.1.0, so we wanted to take a few moments to illustrate what new functionality you can expect to see with the next update of IP.Chat. If you are not already familiar with IP.Chat, we offer a javascript-based chatroom solution that any customer with an active IP.Board license (or support and services contract) can add to their site. The first level of service for the IP.Chat product allows for you to host up to 5 simultaneous chatters, and is available at no cost to you while your license is active. Other packages are also available for sites that expect more traffic to their chatroom. For more informatio…
Last reply by bfarber, -
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Having a great forum skin is something every forum owner craves. A great skin is a big selling point, as it gives visitors a good first impression, and it colors (pun intended) the overall experience of using that forum. While a great many sites are perfectly happy with the stock IP.Board forum skin, getting something new is often a top priority for sites that are trying to make it big. Up until now, you've had a few options for this: Download or purchase a skin from IPS Resources, or a third party resource site Pay a skinner to make you a custom skin Teach yourself how to skin While all of these options are certainly good choices, we'd like to introduce another…
Last reply by Michael, -
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IP.Content has many features, and indeed it's quite possible to create a rather useful articles system using the custom databases feature introduced in IP.Content 1.1, however many of our users have been requesting a true "articles" feature since the first release of IP.Content. In typical IPS fashion, we've listened, and you will be happy to hear that IP.Content 2.0 introduces a new "Articles" module. Building on existing functionality As I mentioned, you can create a very useful and workable articles section using the existing databases features in IP.Content. The database feature accomplishes so much of what needs to be implemented for articles, in fact, that arti…
Last reply by bfarber, -
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When we developed IP.Board 3, one of the main goals was to centralize searching and simplify it to provide results cleanly and concisely. Since then we have had a lot of emphatic feedback on how to develop the search further and to improve the interface. We've have taken all that feedback on board and completely overhauled search making it more flexible and more useful. This blog entry lists the major improvements. There's a lot to get through, so lets get started. Search Form The search form has been redesigned with separate applications in mind. Right away you'll notice that there are radio buttons to select which app you want to search in which then presents its o…
Last reply by Matt, -
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IP.Content is an extremely flexible system. While considering the possibilities with IP.Content and feeding content to your external pages, we knew that there were multiple options. Using a database You can create a database to store content such as articles, and then allow commenting on these articles directly. In doing so, you keep your articles and your topics separated. Using a blog You could create a blog, and then create a feed block that pulls entries from this specific blog to your homepage. In doing so, you could create a dynamically updated homepage which is fed from a specified blog. You would not easily be able to allow commenting on the entries on th…
Last reply by bfarber, -
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Templates in IP.Content are a useful tool that can save administrators a lot of work managing their site. They are utilized to facilitate displaying database content, and can be utilized to normalize the display of multiple pages through a shared template. We have made a few small tweaks to templates to make them easier to manage and easier to use in IP.Content 2.0. Separation of templates In IP.Content 1.x database templates and page templates were displayed on the same page. While they technically use the same backend system to render the templated HTML, it can be confusing for users to associate page templates and database templates on the same page. Utilizing cont…
Last reply by bfarber, -
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Add and edit hookpoints Based on requests from users integrating IP.Content into their website, we have added two new hook points to the database handler: postSave() and postSaveEdit(). These are called immediately upon saving the record to the database (for add and edit requests, respectively), and can be utilized to take action on a record after it has been saved. This could be used, for instance, if a file is uploaded or linked, and you need to take action on this file, but don't want to until the record itself has been accepted. Format numerically We have added a new field formatting option that will allow you to automatically format fields numerically, based on your …
Last reply by bfarber, -
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In IP.Board 3.0 we introduced a simple reputation feature, allowing users to give positive or negative reputation to a post. While administrators can view who gave reputation through the Admin CP, in IP.Board 3.1 we have introduced a way for all users to view who gave reputation on any given post. To view who gave reputation, you just click on the reputation number at the bottom of the post which will now display a popup balloon indicating who has given reputation. There is a per-group setting to control who can use this feature. If a user does not have permission to use it, the number will not be clickable and appear unchanged from how it currently is. The data i…
Last reply by Mark,
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