IPS Community Suite 4.1.16 is nearing the end of development so I wanted to go over some of the new features in this upcoming release. Some are big and some are small but we always enjoy making any sort of enhancements to the Suite.
We expect 4.1.16 to go to public beta next week. If you are interested in using a public beta please check out our beta forum (clients only) with more info. We welcome as much testing as possible and our betas are considered safe to use on a live site. We do offer support for betas so, if you are technically minded, consider giving them a try.
Commerce: New Ticket Listing
We have redesigned the ticket listing view in Commerce to be much more user friendly and better use screen space. You can also now group by department which is great for organization.
Much like Activity Streams on the front end you can create custom views for tickets based on how you work.
The new My History view allows staff to quickly see their latest replies and actions along with some basic stats.
There are many other smaller improvement in Commerce in 4.1.16 as well. We think you will enjoy all the updates.
Security Questions
To enhance the security of your member accounts we now have a new security questions feature where you can allow your members to put in their own, personal security questions. The member will then be prompted to answer those questions for account actions you define.
Account Change Emails
Members will now receive confirmation emails when they change their email address...
and their password...
Topics per Page
You can now define the number of topics per page in forum view.
Remove all Followers
Moderators can now remove all followers from any item that allows follows. This is useful if you are archiving an old item or otherwise do not want people getting notified of new activity on an item.
Automatic Following
Your members can already choose to automatically follow content they start or reply to but now you can define this as the default behavior for all members. Your members can of course override this to their own preference.
Embed Failure Message
To answer the constant question "why didn't my media embed?" we now show you why. Regular members will just see a message indicating the Suite tried to embed but was not able to. Admins will get more information on what failed.
Suspended Member Page
When you banned/suspended a member previously they simply saw a generic permission denied message. We now show a more friendly page saying they were suspended and why.
The member can click to get the full information from the Warning System as well.
Contact Us
The contact us page now has configuration options to control where messages are sent. You can do email and even Commerce support departments now.
Announcements
Global announcements can now be restricted by member group.
And some technical stuff...
In addition to the new feature additions we have also fixed dozens of issues reported by clients. There was a particular focus on Commerce, Pages, and IPS Connect. Some other items of note:
- Performance improvements in: profile view, sitemap generator, posting replies, and Activity Streams
- We now try to more reliably detect the AWS S3 endpoint for those using S3 file storage
- Tasks view will now show the last time a task ran
- More efficient license key checking to keep the keys from being checked too often which can slow your site down
- If group promotion based on date is enable the system will now auto-promote even if a member does not login
- If you move your site to a new URL you no longer have to update a constant if using the image proxy
- You can now press ctrl/cmd+enter in any editor window to submit the reply (yay!)
- In Commerce ticket view there are keyboard shortcuts to perform common actions (such as press 'r' to open reply box or 'n' for note)
- There is now logic to prevent double-posting when the initial post encounters an error on submit
- If your datastore (cache system) is not working properly the AdminCP will now show you a warning telling you that it needs attention.
