As work progresses on the new interface for IP.Board 3.2.0, we can now go into some more detail about the new functionality that's already been added.
I must of course stress that the only screen shots I can show are closely cropped to not reveal too much and please keep in mind that IP.Board 3.2.0 is still very much in development so some details may change before the public reveal.
Tagging
An incredibly popular request has been the ability to 'tag' content with special keywords and then find other content tagged with the same keywords. This gives a secondary way to organise data beyond the administrator defined 'categories' and 'forums' set up.
We're very pleased to say that this functionality is now available in IP.Board 3.2.0 and we've spent some time to make sure we have a robust and thoughtful implementation.
A tale of two modes
Our tagging implementation is available in two modes:
- Open Mode: Where allowed, your members can create new tags on-the-fly and add them to content.
- Closed Mode: Where allowed, your members can select from pre-defined tags and add them to content.
We feel this gives you the best of both worlds. Some communities may not need a full tagging system, but you may wish to enforce secondary categorisation via pre-set tags that you as the administrator control. Alternatively, you may wish to throw the doors open and let your members tag their content as they see fit. The choice is yours!
As you'd expect, this feature comes with many controls. You can define the minimum and maximum number of tags per item, the minimum and maximum length of each tag and more. You can even override the pre-defined tags on a per app (and thus per-forum) basis giving full control over the tagging system.
Prefixes
Another very popular feature request is the ability to assign a custom or pre-defined prefix to a piece of content such as a topic or blog entry. In many ways this works very similarly to tagging so we've created a single system that allows the use of a tag as a prefix!
As you'd expect, you can disable prefixes and tagging on a per member or per group basis giving you complete control over your members' permissions.
You can even set the system to be used solely for prefixes by limiting the number of tags to one and enforcing the use of pre-defined tags. It really is a very flexible system.
This screen shot shows how you add tags when creating a new topic. This is in 'open' mode with prefixes enabled.
This shows a topic that has been tagged and a prefix added.
This shows the search page which is shown when you click a prefix or tag.
This shows the Admin CP settings page.
This shows the per-forum settings.
We hope you enjoy this new functionality. We'll be rolling out tagging in our applications once IP.Board 3.2.0 has been released!
Feel free to comment on this blog entry below or, if you have feedback unrelated to this blog entry, start a new topic in our feedback forum. Be sure to check the What's New in IP.Board 3.2 topic for a running list of announced changes!
By Matt