Invision Community
773 blog entries in this category
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IP.Nexus 1.3 will soon be released alongside the upcoming IP.Board 3.2. Dozens of our clients specifically requested 2Checkout as a payment gateway and we are happy to say that IP.Nexus 1.3 adds 2Checkout as a payment option. Special Promotion from 2Checkout We are happy to say that 2Checkout has agreed to waive their normal $49 setup fee for all IPS clients for the next 60 days. While IP.Nexus 1.3 is not out just yet you may want to take advantage of this great offer now to prepare for its r
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Spam is as much a part of life on the internet as emoji overuse, serial GIF abuse and regretful tweeting. But I'm not here to talk about how I conduct myself online; I wanted to talk about three spam improvements coming to Invision Community 4.6. As you may be aware, Invision Community has its own Spam Defense functionality, which uses a mixture of crowdsourced data, publicly available data and our own special sauce to help reduce the number of spam accounts that get through the regist
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IP.Board has grown a lot over the years. We've added new functionality through the components framework, allowing us to deliver first-party supported addons such as IP.Gallery, IP.Blog and IP.Downloads. Our Community Projects leverage this infrastructure to provide even more value for your board, and third party developers have produced wonderful components utilizing the same infrastructure on their own. As IP.Board has progressed, we've seen challenges with the integration and continued
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Different staff members typically have different roles within a community - especially larger communities, where you may have staff responsible for the theme, others handling tickets and different staff maintaining the system. In 3.x, we had a 'Bookmarks' system in the AdminCP that allowed you to create a menu of frequently-used sections in an effort to make them easier to get to, rather than navigating the main menus. As with every feature in IPS4, we took some time to think about what this B
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In IP.Board 3.x, we have a setting group where you can specify some global advertisement HTML. You can enable and disable advertisements, and you can specify code to insert into the header and footer of the page. For the forum index, forum listings and topic view pages, you can override these header and footer ad codes, and you can specify advertisement code to insert into a couple of other areas specific to those pages. If you install IP.Nexus, this setting group redirects you to the IP.Nexu
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Building off of our previous blog entry regarding the developer center, application management and distribution has been fleshed out to a point where we are ready to reveal the changes coming with the 4.0 Social Suite. Please keep in mind that while we are discussing some specific changes (and showing screenshots!) of changes you can expect to see in 4.0, everything in this blog entry is subject to change before final. With that said, let's take a look. This screen represents the applicati
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IP.Calendar has a few primary important views: the monthly grid view (i.e. a typical calendar table), the weekly view which lists a calendar week and any events occurring during that week, a daily view which lists all events occurring on a given day, and the actual event views where you view details about a specific event. All of these views have their usefulness, however we felt that there was a missing piece to the puzzle. During planning meetings we discussed adding a popular feature reques
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Almost all of our applications support commenting or reviewing to some degree. You can comment on events in IP.Calendar, images in IP.Gallery and blog entries in IP.Blog, and you can review products in IP.Nexus, for instance. The differences between reviewing and commenting are subtle, yet important. Commenting allows you to say something about a content item that has been contributed, while reviewing is intended to allow you to give feedback about the item based on your experience. You shou
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I want to briefly show our new cover photo support. Cover photos allow users to upload an image to represent something in the community; we currently support them in profiles and calendar events and may roll out support to other areas later. Here's a video of it in action for a calendar event. It's really simple to use, and of course still works responsively like the rest of our default theme. We hope it adds a new element of customization for content in your community. Developers For d
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IPS Community Suite 4.0 is nearly here, and we'll be distributing betas very soon. But 4.0 is really just the beginning; with the new tightly integrated, one-version suite of applications, we're already starting to think about all of the features we'd like to add in the future. This brings us nicely to the final 4.0 feature we'd like to talk about: the upgrade system. In 4.0, when a new version is released, you'll see a message like this pop up in the Admin CP: Clicking the "Download" butto
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A while back, we casually mentioned in a blog entry that 4.0 would be next major version after 3.4. Development of 4.0 is underway and we're going to be using this new blog to talk about development as we go. As Brandon mentioned a couple of days ago - the format of these entries is going to be developer-specific. If what we're saying doesn't make much sense right now, we will still be putting announcements up in our main blog when they're finished and ready for everyone to see. Because of t
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In 3.x, we support HTML emails being sent by the software. However, due to constraints we had at the time, HTML emails use pretty much the same content as plain text emails, but wrapped in a simple HTML wrapper. Additionally, users had to explicitly decide whether they wanted to receive HTML or plain text emails via a preference setting - quite an anachronism. All in all, not a very satisfactory user experience. Email handling in 4.0 In 4.0, users no longer choose which type of email to recei
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IP.Board 3.x supports "My Media", which enables you to share other content from within the community by using the "My Media" button on the editor. This results in: http://community.invisionpower.com/files/file/4464-ips-gdk-for-ipboard-32-amp-33/ While this works, it has a few shortcomings: The styling of the block isn't really designed for each type of content it might show Users have to click the My Media button, then browse for the item, when they probably already know the URL they w
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Reminder: this blog covers the technical details of 4.0's programming. For details on 4.0's features, follow our main blog. Reviewing controllers Some time ago, I blogged about the javascript framework we've built for IPS4. In it, I covered the most important component: controllers. To recap, a controller is a special object within the framework, and is applied on specific elements. That element is the controller's scope, and the controller works on it to provide its functionality. For exampl
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Introduction The IPS Social Suite needs to store lots of different files - there's attachments and profile photos uploaded by members, CSS and JavaScript files, emoticons, etc. In IP.Board 3.x, various images got stored in different places: Files uploaded by users get put in the /uploads directory. If you have a complicated setup, it's difficult to handle these. If you have a load-balanced cluster you need to set up an environment whereby all files are stored on a single server, or all uplo
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Following content is an important aspect of interacting with your community. It allows you to be notified when there are updates to the content or when other users comment on the content, and it allows you to find content you are interested in at a later date. We have taken the opportunity with 4.0 to enhance the system where-by users can follow content in the IPS Community Suite to simplify and clarify certain processes, make it easier to follow content you submit, and to be sure you are rece
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Forms are an ubiquitous aspect of any web application. In the IPS Social Suite, particularly in the Admin CP, I often find myself copying and pasting code in various places to create a form. We've had the ipsRegistry::getClass('output')->formInput() and similar methods since 3.0, but you still have to copy all the HTML to display the rows, and write all the code to validate it yourself. Copying and pasting code is something all developers hate. It's a red flag that you're probably doing som
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We've previously shown how responsiveness works in the AdminCP, but I'd like to briefly introduce responsiveness on the front end, and pick a few views to show you as examples (this will be a screenshot-heavy entry!) What is responsiveness? Before we get to that, allow me to recap what responsiveness is. Responsive design is a method by which you design one page in such a way that it adapts for the available screen space on the device the user is using. This means that one theme handles both
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One of the goals for IPS Community Suite 4.0 was improving content discovery. In other words, making sure content still receives exposure even if it is posted in less used areas of the suite. The sidebar that shows on the IP.Board index page in 3.x helps with this goal to some extent, however people who visit the forums app infrequently may miss out on valuable content. This became an even more important issue when the decision was made to decouple IP.Board as a standalone application. What if
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Sending email is an important part of almost any web software available today. Social Suite applications have varying needs for sending email. Examples include allowing users to confirm their email address during registration, advising users when there are updates regarding content they are following, and bulk mailing your member base to alert them to something important regarding your site. While functionally the email handler has not significantly changed in 4.0, the process has been vastly
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Some sites make use of multiple calendars to help differentiate what type of events are being contributed to the community. You might have a staff calendar that allows staff members to add events and a community calendar for the rest of your users. Or you may have a holidays calendar as well as a gaming "raids" calendar on your community. Individual calendars are a form of categorization in IP.Calendar, and we wanted to bring some enhancements to them in the 4.0 Community Suite. Colors You
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We've been hard at work on IPS 4.0 for some time now, and we're finally at a stage where we are ready to reveal the new AdminCP to you. I won't be showing you everything the ACP has to offer - some things will be revealed in more detail in later blog entries. But lets get to an overview. Background information IPS4 brings with it a new CSS framework that aims to modularize our styles. This is something we started to work towards in IPB 3.2, but at that time we couldn't completely replace our
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IPS Social Suite 4 is a modernization of our software line and rather than just refactor existing work, we are rewriting the code from scratch which gives us a chance to really evaluate the interface elements and labels. We felt that "themes" was a much more modern and better understood term than "skins". Of course, the name is just the start, here are some of the other improvements: Managing Themes in IPS Social Suite 4 As you would expect, the interface has been completely overhauled in IP.S
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Copying Settings Sometimes you need to change the same setting across multiple categories. For example, let's say up until now I've not allowed comments on files and now I want to enable it for most categories. In IP.Downloads for 3.x, I'd have to go into each category one by one and toggle the setting on. In 4.x, when editing a category, each setting has a "Copy" button next to it, when opens a window asking which categories to copy that setting value to, so I can make the change to one cat
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