IP.Board 3.2.0: Front-end Changes Afoot

While we aren't quite ready to show off IP.Board 3.2.0 in its entirety yet, I wanted to talk a little about what you can expect from our new front-end skin - our thinking behind development, areas we've focused on, etc.

Goals
Before development commenced, we created a list of goals that we aimed to meet. These include:

• Improving the experience
  We've been accused in the past of having a 'clunky' experience in some areas, so we've worked hard to improve the user experience in key areas. Some of these are usability changes, while others relate to reducing clutter on the screen or relocating elements.
  
• Making the skin easier for 3rd party developers (and ourselves!) to use
  Another focus was on making our skin - particularly the CSS - easier to use, for skinners, developers, even our own team. We've found that as new features were added, whole blocks of existing CSS were copied, pasted, then tweaked to suit the new feature. This creates some resource overhead, not to mention more work for skinners and developers. To remedy this, we've begun introducing a new approach to our CSS: more modular units that can be reused and combined easily to make many interfaces easy to implement. This will be gradually introduced throughout the skin as areas get updated in future point releases. Already, we've been able to remove large sections of old CSS as the updated areas make use of the new modular CSS.
  
• Modernizing the display
  It's been 3 years since we first began working on IP.Board 3.0, and the internet has come some way since then. We decided it was time to refresh the visual style of our default skin. While it will still be clearly recognizable as IP.Board, we've added some polish to the overall style, and made more use of technologies such as CSS3.

• Global wrapper
  This is probably a given, since it influences the rest of the skin. Parts have been made more streamlined, with a new member & moderator bar, a new application bar that now supports as many apps as you choose to install, inline sign in and more.
  
• Forum view
  While the basic concept of listing topics inside a forum hasn't been altered, we've made big updates to the presentation, including rethinking the display of non-essential items and a new, friendly topic preview.
  
• Topics view
  As with forum view, the basic structure has not changed (familiarity is a good thing!), but numerous elements have been tweaked, changed, and tidied. All in all, reading topics should be a more pleasant experience for your users.
  
• Profile
  Our profile view was in need of overhauling, so that's what we've done! It now sports a vastly cleaner display while keeping all the relevant information accessible. Data from 3rd party apps is easily incorporated without fear of breaking the tab bar as in 3.0. In addition, we have merged profile comments and status updates, giving members a modern 'wall' in their profile.
  
• Calendar
  We've previously posted blog entries about new features you can expect to see in Calendar, and to go along with that, we've completely revamped almost every aspect of the calendar display - hopefully making it a more inviting place for your community to share events.
  
• Registration
  We identified some time ago that our registration routine was less than optimal, especially when considering communities that make use of IP.Nexus, with its ability to sell packages at registration. To remedy that, we have rethought the registration routine, to present Nexus packages in a better way, get rid of unnecessary steps along the way, and above all make it quicker for your prospective members to register
  
• Moderation
  We will elaborate on this point at a later date, but we have made the various day-to-day moderation tasks easy to access and use - a boon for your moderating team.
  
• View New Content
  Our View New Content area has steadily grown more complex as additional sorting and filtering options have been introduced, so we felt it was time to improve the display of those options to make it all a bit easier to use.
  
• Posting Screen
  We've updated the new topic/reply screen to be more streamlined, as well as integrate some new goodies that we'll talk about later.
  
• Redirect Screens
  The old-fashioned 'you are being redirected' screens are now a thing of the past. Every area has been updated to use a new inline notification display, which doesn't get in the way and fades after a few seconds.