Community Management

We frequently encourage people to use custom CSS files when designing their themes. The reason for this is simple: it makes upgrading your site much easier because IPS4 can apply any changes to its own CSS files, and will leave your custom CSS files untouched. If instead you made edits to IPS4's CSS directly, it wouldn't be able to upgrade them automatically, which means more work for you, and a potentially broken UI on each upgrade. Something that's not quite as common, but that we still s

Our Pages app includes a powerful feature that allows you to create your own databases within the community. Within each database, you create custom fields (we support a number of custom types, from plain text fields, to YouTube embeds and more). And while we provide some generic, simple templates to display your data, custom templates allow you to more precisely control how your database looks in a manner best suited to your site. Anyone who has created a Pages database will be familiar wi

Blocks are an extremely popular feature in IPS4, used by a huge number of customers to great effect. They range from feeds of topics, to statistics, to custom blocks that can contain anything you wish. They're a great way to add dynamic content to your community theme. What many people don't know is that blocks you create with Pages can be used anywhere in your theme, not just in the designated block containers (in the header, footer & sidebar).   The {block} tag It's rea

Security should never be an afterthought for your community. All too often, site owners consider beefing up their security only when it's too late and their community has already been compromised. Taking some time now to check and improve the security of your community and server could pay dividends by eliminating the cost and hassle of falling victim to hacking in the first place. Let's run down 7 ways that you can protect your community with the IPS Community Suite, from security features

When IPS4 encounters an error (be it a simple 404 Not Found or a more complex configuration issue), the user sees a standard built-in error page. That's fine in many cases, but did you know you can create your own error page using our Pages app? This is a particularly good approach for communities that use Pages for their website too. If you have built a website theme, the standard error page may not fit with your visual style, so building your own error page allows you to improve it. You m

HTML Logic is our name for the additional tags available in IPS4's templates that allow runtime logic to be executed. It comprises if/then/else statements as well as loops and more. Since HTML Logic has access to all of the underlying PHP framework in IPS4, it's very powerful and a lot can be achieved with it. One common use is to limit certain content within a template to particular member groups. Let's see how that might be done.   Showing or hiding content only to guests W

When you use custom templates for a Pages database, you'll often need custom CSS to go along with it to provide the styling. There's two main ways of doing this: CSS files within Pages Pages allows you to create CSS files, and then associate them with particular custom pages of your community (you create these in the AdminCP, under Pages > Templates > CSS). So simply create your CSS file, and associate it to the page that your database is displayed on. The benefit of this me

Several clients have asked how we placed the Twitter feed block on the sidebar of our News page. It's really quite easy and a great demo of how you can place custom HTML in our system. Here is how it was done: Get the embed code from Twitter Create a custom HTML block in our Pages app Drag and drop that block into the sidebar That really is it! Here is a video walkthrough: This is a basic example of a custom HTML block that you can use in so many different