To wrap up our blog entries on IP.Nexus, there's a few more additional features and enhancements that we haven't previously covered:
Custom Advertisement Zones
IP.Nexus allows you to create advertisements and even sell advertisement space on your community.
There are several different areas where the IPS Community Suite has built-in advertisement spots where Nexus can place advertisements.
In IP.Nexus 1.5, you can create your own custom "zones" and then add tags into your skin templates, IP.Content pages or even external websites outside of your community to display the advertisements in the zones you have created.
Expected Output Monitoring
IP.Nexus can monitor your servers and report to you if any of them are not responding.
Sometimes though, a site can be having issues, but not actually be reporting as down - for example, if a database table had collapsed, the server would be reporting as online, even though the site isn't actually usable.
In IP.Nexus 1.5, you'll be able to create custom "Expected Output Monitoring" rules. IP.Nexus will then call the URLs you provide at regular intervals, and if the page output is not what is expected, will notify you that there's an issue.
Transaction Review
Details on the items being purchased is now available in the transaction review screen without having to click into the invoice.
Voiding Customers
IP.Nexus has a tool to quickly ban a customer, refund their transactions, close their support requests, etc.
Sometimes however, you might want to only perform a select few of these actions. In IP.Nexus 1.5, each "action" now appears as an individual toggle when you go to void a customer.
Resource Improvements
When we work on a new release of any application, we look at the resource usage to see if any improvements can be made.
We've made several changes to improve the resource usage of IP.Nexus.
The most significant of these changes is a change to how package data is cached.
Some communities use IP.Nexus with lots of packages in many categories. Up until now, IP.Nexus stored all packages in a cache so that they didn't need to be fetched from the database on every load. However, for communities with lots of categories and packages, this can result in a large cache which ends up using more resources to process than is necessary.
In IP.Nexus 1.5 we've reworked some of the logic to make this method of caching data no longer necessary, and as a result, Nexus is able to scale much more efficiently when there is a large number of packages.
This wraps up all of the changes we're making in IP.Nexus 1.5. Keep an eye on our pre-release testing forum over the next couple of weeks for public betas :smile: