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!
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244 topics in this forum
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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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We recently blogged about our new profile customization options. I've made a few updates since and wanted to update you on them. As you may already be aware, we have added Twitter integration into IP.Board 3.1. This enables you to 'connect' your Twitter account to your forum account to share links, status updates and to allow you to use your Twitter photo on the board. I've taken this a step further and added an option to allow you to import your Twitter background preferences to your profile: My test Twitter account with using a different Twitter theme The background preferences (img and color) imported into IP.Board The preferences control panel I've also ad…
Last reply by Matt, -
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While not a particular interesting blog entry :) I wanted anyone interested to know that our demo service term has been extended from 24 to 48 hours. As always, you can email sales for a further extension if you might need more time. If you are considering using IP.Board now is a great time to get your proverbial feet wet on version 3.0.5 so you are ready as soon as the upcoming version 3.1 is released! If you have any questions, feel free to email sales@invisionpower.com to speak to our sales staff or post in our pre-sales forum for friendly help from the community. View full blog entry
Last reply by Charles, -
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We read virtually every piece of feedback we receive, even if we don't reply and we often see the same requests coming up. The ability to 'preview' the topic by viewing an excerpt from the first post is often requested and we've added this into IP.Board 3.1. We've made it a little more useful by also including the last time you read a topic (if applicable) and the number of unread posts so you can quickly review how much activity has taken place since you last read the topic. When you 'mouse over' a topic entry, you'll see a little 'pop-up' icon. Clicking this loads an excerpt from the first post along with some data underneath. This is very useful for moderators wh…
Last reply by Matt, -
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The IP.Board 2 series introduced a number of new profile features designed to make your profile page a little more interactive. Besides the usual stats and figures, we introduced a personal photo and the ability to leave comments and list recent visitors. This made your profile page a little more personal and encouraged repeat visits. With the status updates feature in IP.Board 3.1, the profile page is becoming increasingly like a little user portal. With that in mind, we've extended the personalization options to include profile page background customization. You can allow your members permission to add a new background image or change the background color which instan…
Last reply by Matt, -
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IP.Content is a complex framework that allows you to create and manage website content in many different ways. You can embed blocks and databases into pages, and pages can be wrapped by templates. You can define page names and use friendly URLs through the IP.Board built-in FURL system, you can use friendly URL's through the included index.php file with IP.Content (for instance, if you want your website in the root of your domain, and the forums in a subfolder), or you can optionally not use friendly URLs at all. Because of the many configuration options, and the fact that you are already embedding a database within another friendly URL system of sorts (given that you def…
Last reply by bfarber, -
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The page manager, introduced with IP.Content 1.0, is a core feature to IP.Content. It allows you to create pages and folders, and manage those pages and folders, core functionality that IP.Content relies on for everything else. Page management has been pretty reliable and functional, but we decided we wanted to improve the interface for IP.Content 2.0 to make it sleeker, faster and even more functional. Several interface tweaks have been (and are still being) implemented in IP.Content, and the page manager was one of the primary focuses of these interface enhancements. We'll quickly describe the major changes below. Redesigned "buttons" The IP.Board ACP interface u…
Last reply by bfarber, -
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Over the past year we have introduced new services that are available to our IP.Board Standard Licenses holders, such as the spam service and the chat service. We also have plans for more services that will be tied to your license. While this provides a lot of value to your license, managing these services is a cumbersome process, you need to create keys for each of these services and enter them in different areas of the ACP. We're always looking for ways to streamline and improve your experience, toward that end we will be introduce a new centralized license key that will work for all services. Starting with IP.Board 3.1, all licenses will be given a single key that…
Last reply by Josh, -
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When we were developing IP.Board 3.0 we were looking for ways to lower the barrier for registering. There are many single sign in providers but most of them required separate registration and set-up. Around this time, Facebook released their emerging API "Facebook Connect". We seized the opportunity to implement it within IP.Board 3 and adhered to all their guidelines. The first implementation of the Facebook Connect API was less of a point of authentication but more of a way to appear as a member of a site. This was slightly at odds with the concept of permanent registration at a forum and a few work-arounds had to be made. For example, there was no way to request you…
Last reply by Matt, -
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Following on from our recent blog entry about Twitter Integration, I'd like to present our newest IP.Board 3.1.0 feature: Sharing Links. This new feature makes good use of our improved Facebook Connect integration and the new Twitter integration. As most Facebook and Twitter users have discovered, sometimes you see a link to a great article or topic and want to share it with your friends and followers. This new feature makes this very easy to do. You don't even have to leave the page to do it. The ease of use will encourage your members to share your links among their friends increasing the traffic to your forum. If you have connected your forum account to Twitter and…
Last reply by Matt, -
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Database "Tweaks" The database functionality in IP.Content is quite powerful at its core. You can do a lot of things with the database feature that would normally be laborious coding yourself. A lot of addon applications add common features: rating, comments, sorting options, etc. IP.Content takes all of this legwork out of the picture by providing it for you with just a few clicks in your admin control panel. But there's always room to improve! We have focused on some small but useful tweaks and improvements to the core database features that we think will benefit everyone. Specify The Text IP.Content databases refer to stored entries as "records". This is a generi…
Last reply by bfarber, -
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Last year we introduced a Spam Monitoring service to combat the increasing problem of registrations on communities from spam accounts and the response to this service has been great! The spam service has been a great success so far and we would like to take the time to share some stats about how effective the service has been. The service is only as effective as the number of communities that sign up and report data back to our system, so we are happy to report that thousands of communities have joined the service and are helping each other to reduce the amount of spam each receives. If you have not yet signed up, we would encourage you to take this opportunity to do …
Last reply by Josh, -
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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…
Last reply by bfarber, -
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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 …
Last reply by Matt, -
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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…
Last reply by Michael, -
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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 …
Last reply by Matt, -
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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…
Last reply by bfarber, -
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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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