With the upcoming release of IP.Board 3, we will of course be updating our first-party components to be compatible with the new architecture. Releases of IP.Blog, IP.Gallery and IP.Downloads will be available alongside IP.Board 3.0 so that you can update everything at the same time and not have to worry about when your components will be ready.
We are working with the community project teams to help them get releases of Tracker and Shoutbox ready for 3.0 as well. They should be available at, or shortly after, the release of 3.0 to help ensure a more seamless move forward to our latest platform.
We've determined that initially for the big release, we will only be working for application compatibility between our components. We wanted to spend all of our time focusing on IP.Board itself to ensure maximum stability, especially given the fact that we are working on an entirely new platform. This means that you won't really notice any new features to speak of with the Blog, Gallery and Downloads updates. You will, however, notice much better integration between the applications and the board itself, and an updated look and feel for all applications. Some examples of this include
- Integrated searching - one search form will search everything
- All application caches managed from cache management screen.
- All skin data managed from template editor screen.
- Ability to edit all group settings from group management page.
- All application permissions handled from one location.
- Ability to show gallery or blog data on board index through hooks
Shortly after the dust settles following the big releases, and everything is calmer and stable, we will be working on "big" updates for our first-party application addons. At this point, we are still discussing what new features would best serve our customers for Blog, Gallery and Downloads. Below is a list we've discussed that we think you'll like. What do you think of it so far?
IP.Blog
- Site/group blog - a blog that can be created belonging to no individual member, but rather to the site as a whole (i.e. a company blog) or a group (i.e. a developer blog)
- Proper user-customizable headers
- RSS blogs - allow members to import their remote blog into your board
- "Blog this post" support
IP.Gallery
- Ability to crop, rotate, dynamically resize images. Use Javascript for front end, then re-generate image using GD on backend when user saves.
- Fancy slideshow feature. Something like Flickr, but done completely in Javascript (no flash needed), little simpler probably.
- Better album control based on friendships - only allow friends to view album, allow friends to submit to your album, etc.
- Sub-albums
- Image tagging
- Correct category/album markers (ala IPB)
- Allow users to choose album covers from images in an album
IP.Downloads
- Better and more abstracted support for file records. Ultimately the goal would be to allow you to submit multiple files to a single file record. Uses would include "contributed files", breaking single files into "parts" (i.e. for large movies), and multiple screenshots per record, for instance.
- Support for mirrors
- Ability to shut off "resume breakpoints"
- Better category control - template type system perhaps with ability to selectively override without ditching entire template
- More reliable upload progress meter
- Correct category markers (ala IPB)
- File tagging
- Dynamic and session-based download urls (when you start a download, create a new "url" for it that is only accessible for that session and is destroyed afterwards to further prevent hotlinking)
These are just some ideas we're floating around. Final feature lists will be determined after the release of IP.Board 3.0.
We know many of you have been wondering how component updates will be handled with this release, and we've stayed quiet mainly because we weren't certain what we'd be able to accomplish. Hopefully this information will help you plan your site updates accordingly.