Invision Community
773 blog entries in this category
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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 interactive graphs have emerged. For IPS Social Suite 4.0 we've decided to retire our GD-based charting li
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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 contains dozens of unrelated script files) Different script types are bundled together (interface widge
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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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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 allow you to gather responses from developers interested in working with you. Post your project detail
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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 control how your site should react to the various responses the service may return in the admin control pa
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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 receive a notification that they've been mentioned. In 4.0 you can do exactly this to mention any user
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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 device can show). This is what the management screen looks like: (This is an unfinished design - the
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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 decided to keep both an images and an attachments dialog as users wanting to insert an image will nat
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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 web today. For the IPS Social Suite 4.0 we really wanted to focus on making the editor as good as
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The following applications are available for beta testing: IP.Board 3.4.5 IP.Blog 2.6.3 IP.Content 2.3.6 IP.Chat 1.4.4 IP.Downloads 2.5.4 IP.Gallery 5.0.5 IP.Nexus 1.5.8 IP.Calendar 3.3.4 This round of maintenance updates represents updates to all of our applications. At this point in time, there are zero open bug reports in our tracker (that are not flagged to be resolved in a future major version). We would like to encourage all interested users to perform as much testing of these
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At IPS not only do we create market leading products, we also use them heavily ourselves. In doing so we often identify problems and needs in the software very early on. Two of the minor changes we've introduced with Nexus 1.5.8 are a direct result of management and support staff feedback during their use of the product internally. Separating Outgoing Email Addresses In the next release of IP.Nexus we've introduced the ability to set up separate outgoing email addresses for billing and suppor
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We are pleased to announce an update to our popular converter application and with it support for conversions from vBulletin 5 Connect. This release has been particularly focused on converter stability and performance improvements. At the time of writing there are 0 open bug reports in the bug tracker. Performance Improvements Whilst data integrity will always be our number one priority we do often review and apply performance improvements where appropriate. In a previous release we intro
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The IPS Marketplace is the place to go for plugins, skins, language packs, full applications, and other resources provided by the IPS community. Some resources are free and some have a small fee. It's a great way to find ways to personalize your community and expand its functions. Some updates... I wanted to share some general statistics on the Marketplace (yes, I'm channeling Apple here). Yesterday we reached a great milestone: Since its inception, we have paid out over $250,000 to contri
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IPS is always looking for ways to assist our clients in monetization and promotion of their community traffic. After we saw so many clients successfully using VigLink on their community we decided to bundle it directly in the AdminCP under the Community Enhancements section. Since then many clients have reported success in using their service. Many clients have also since looked into other monetization options and have started to really grow. Information from VigLink: If you want to give i
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Introduction I previously wrote a blog entry about building tables in IPS Social Suite 4.0. Similar to tables, we also have trees. Trees in many ways look and behave similarly to tables, but can be distinguished mainly by the fact that trees show a collection of objects in a fixed order (often, though not always the order can be changed by the administrator) whereas tables can show data sorted however you like at the time. An example of trees would be the list of forums in IP.Board. Trees va
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A few weeks ago, I posted a blog entry mentioning a new feature in 4.0 which aims to make development of applications within the IPS Social Suite (both for us and third party modification authors) easier. We focussed on managing the database schema in that blog entry and I'd now like to take you through the other features. Modules Two tabs (one for admin modules and one for front modules) allow you to view all modules and sections in your application. You can add modules (which will both i
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Login Handlers are the different methods for logging into the IPS Social Suite. We currently support: "Internal", which is for accounts created natively through the suite. Facebook Twitter Microsoft (this is currently referred to as "Windows Live", though they rebranded to "Microsoft Account" a short while ago) LDAP "IPS Connect", which is our SSO solution for connecting your site with other IPS Social Suite installations or third-party applications. A generic handler for any MySQL databas
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We've just rebuilt IP.Board 3.4.4 for further beta testing. Thanks to everyone who has tested this release so far and for reporting the bugs you've found. We've fixed a good portion of these and would like for you to update your test installations with the latest release. All customers with an active IP.Board license can download the beta at: http://community.inv...ower.com/qa.php Once you've uploaded all the files to your server, there's no need to run the upgrade system as the version nu
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IPS is seeking a knowledgeable and experienced individual to join its support team in an advanced support capacity. Successful applicants will be responsible for answering general support tickets, including providing customers with information, troubleshooting issues not resolved as part of the general product support process and performing maintenance. You would be expected where appropriate to interact with other technicians and developers to resolve issues. Requirements: * Must be fa
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IP.Board 3.4.4 is now available for beta testing! We have been hard at work on IP.Board 3.4.4, and following a good week of testing here on our company forums, we have built a downloadable IP.Board 3.4.4 package for you to test on your own servers. We appreciate any testing you can perform. Please report any bugs you find with the beta to our bug tracker. Please pay particular attention to using the editor with IP.Board 3.4.4. A very large focus was placed on resolving some of the outsta
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The eagle eyed among you may have spotted that we've just upgraded our company forums to IP.Board 3.4.4. We routinely do this during a development cycle so that we can get some extended testing prior to a beta release. When we write new features and fix bugs we do test ourselves but of course we can't replicate the testing hundreds of active users with all the different browser and operating system combinations can offer. The focus of 3.4.4 has been to further stabilise the editor. We've mad
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There's a table in the Admin CP of the IPS Social Suite that I really like - the members table. It has some really cool options - you can reorder the data just by clicking on a column head; you can quickly search for a member by typing a name into a search box at the top; there's some filter options to quickly show banned, locked, spam and validating members; and there's an advanced search form to search for members based on practically any criteria. It would be great if these features were av
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One question I have seen surface in the past (and present), revolves around how we decide when to use a third party library or framework, and how we decide when to develop something in-house entirely. For instance, in the 4.0 Suite we will utilize jQuery (a third party javascript framework), however we will build our underlying PHP framework in-house. How did we decide to go that route? There are several PHP frameworks on the web, many of which having licenses compatible with our commercial l
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When developing, modifying the database schema (such as adding a column to a table) can be surprisingly time consuming. Currently, we have to: Make the change locally Change the installer Add the query to make the change to the upgrader for whatever version we're working on Let the other developers know so they can run the query to make the change in their installs. This can cause issues, especially at the last step - we currently use a large .sql file in the trunk directory of our r
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