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 area…
The following applications are available for beta testing: IP.Board 3.4.6
IP.Nexus 1.5.9
This round of maintenance updates includes bug fixes for the listed applications. We would like to encourage all interested users to perform as much testing of these apps as possible.
As of the date of this post our company forums have been upgraded to these releases.
Please report any bugs you find …
Last week I attended ZendCon 2013, a prominent PHP developer-oriented conference designed to give industry professionals information on tools, practices and trends which will help them deliver enterprise-class software to customers. During the conference, many sponsors set up booths in order to demonstrate new products and services, and many industry professionals hold tutorials and sessions that…
In a recent blog entry, we talked about theming in IPS Social Suite 4. More often than not, you'll want to upload a new logo, tweak a few colours, add some custom HTML or work on the global template to incorporate your existing site wrapper.
For this blog entry, I want to talk about the tools we have for more in-depth theming that professional themers will want to use to create downloadable the…
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 cl…
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 …
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 The…
We refer to the icons you can use to post to third party services such as Facebook, Twitter and Digg as "Sharelinks" in our software suite, and we consider these an important tool both for community promotion and for search engine optimization. Not only can you get links to your community out there on other large, popular sites on the internet where you might be able to drive back more traffic to…
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 u…
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 s…
Introduction
Modifications, add-ons, plugins, hooks - whatever your preferred name for them is - 3rd party code modifications are an important part of any successful web application. It wasn't that long ago that the way you did this was manually opening up files and copying and pasting bits of code in, or the really cool web applications had points scattered throughout the code for modifications…
** We have enough applications to fill this position. Thank you for your interest! **
Piracy is something that all software companies face and IPS is no exception. Our losses due to credit card fraud and software piracy are significant and to minimize passing along costs to customers, we are seeking to expand our piracy department and take a harder stance against piracy and pursue those who enga…
One of the things we wanted to focus on for IPS Social Suite 4.0 right from the beginning was providing better support for sites which do not use English or use multiple languages (or, as it was scribbled on my whiteboard, "++ i18n/L19n"). In this blog entry I'm going to cover some of those changes and new features. Translatable Everything
Currently when you create a forum, user group, custom …
The IPS Social Suite stores skin and language (and some other stuff) in xml files which are imported into the database at installation and upgrade. The reason we do it this way is so of course, you can export skins and languages and install them on other sites or distribute them via the IPS Marketplace.
I'm not the biggest fan of PHP's XML handling at the best of times (it would seem whoever wro…
We have a few updates to our services to share with you. Community in the Cloud
For over 11 years IPS has provided hosting services for clients that want a turn-key approach to their online community. Over time we have become more and more focused on community hosting solutions so it seemed like a good time to drop the older "hosting" term and adopt a new name for our service: Community in the …
Charts and graphs are an essential tool in modern web applications. The API we use for displaying charts and graphs in IP.Board presently is something we wrote in-house during IP.Board 2.x - it uses the PHP GD library to generate an image representing a chart. At the time, it was pretty amazing, but as times have changed a number of libraries for generating much more visually appealing and intera…
Javascript is a key component of front-end web development - it's essential for a modern web app to provide a good user experience, and javascript is central to enabling that. Getting it right in 4.0 has been one of our goals from the start. Problems
To begin, let's summarize some of the issues with javascript in the current 3.x series: Lack of file organization (a single JS directory that cont…
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. Wh…
I'd like to introduce two new areas we've been working on. These new areas are designed to support our developer community, while making it easier for our clients to get their custom projects taken care of. Projects http://community.invisionpower.com/resources/projects
The first new area is Projects. When you have a custom project for which you need a developer/designer, this new area will allo…
Our proprietary Spam Service which was launched in 2009 has been a very popular feature for IP.Board license holders. This service (which is included at no additional cost for all active license holders) is queried during account registration on your IP.Board installation and will respond to the query with a flag to indicate the likelihood that the registration might be a spammer. You can contro…
To round up our previous blog entries on the post editor in IPS Social Suite 4.0, there's just a few extra features not previously mentioned to show off. @mentions
@mentions are a common feature on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. If you type an @ symbol and then start typing the name of a friend, an autocomplete menu shows so you can quickly then click on the user and they'll re…
Introduction
Joining my previous entries about content and uploading features in post editor in IPS Social Suite 4.0, I'd like to take you through the customisation features on the editor. Toolbar layout
The buttons that appear on the toolbar are completely customisable in 4.0 and you can set different layouts for desktop, tablet and mobile (so that you don't show more buttons than the devic…
Introduction
In the last blog entry I introduced some of the features in the post editor in IPS Social Suite 4.0. In this blog entry I'd like to show you the uploading features in the editor. Using the "Image" and "Attachment" dialogs
Along the bottom of the editor there are two buttons that deal with uploading files: image and attachments. Both present a dialog which looks like this:
We d…
Introduction
The post editor is undoubtably one of the most frequently used features of the IPS Social Suite as it's the way users submit content to your community and functionality has evolved dramatically from the early days of forum software which consisted of a plain textbox in which users would type BBCode into the feature-rich WYSIWG (What You See Is What You Get) editors prevalent on the …
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