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 …
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 …
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.N…
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…
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). Yes…
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 monetiz…
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 h…
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) al…
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 …
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'v…
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 t…
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 …
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 sys…
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…
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 a…
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 issu…
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 …
Development is much more than just opening a text editor and writing some code. This is how most developers start, of course, and may be what an individual developer's day to day duties entail at a large corporation, however when viewing the "big picture" there are many other decisions that must be made in the course of building a software package for release that clients often don't realize were…
In 4.0, we have made changes to the database class to make use of prepared statements.
For insert and update queries, the syntax is the same as it always has been:
IPSDb::i()->insert( 'table', array( 'foo' => 'bar' ) );
However, where previously the database class would try to work out the type of variable passed to it - it now binds these to a prepared statement.
The real usefulness of …
We have built public beta releases of our entire product line up for testing. Please be aware that beta releases are not supported by IPS technical support. We do not recommend running them on a live site, you may be unable to upgrade from a beta release to the final version, and our only course of support is to recommend you restore a backup of your site if you face any issues.
We appreciate …
This is just a quick update to let everyone know of a small enhancement you can expect to see in the next IP.Gallery release.
We recently noticed that you could not create IP.Content feed blocks to pull featured images from IP.Gallery. We felt that this was a small and easily correctable oversight, so we added a filter option when creating IP.Gallery feed blocks in IP.Content to allow you to ch…
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 a…
While we introduced some of our basic plans for 4.0 many months ago, we wanted to touch base again on some of these plans and expand upon some of our motivations behind decisions we have or will make for our upcoming 4.0 software release.
Before we get too far, let me just state now that there is no expected (or even estimated) release date for 4.0 yet. While we always have internal guidelines,…
Through use of our own marketplace, we often identify small but useful changes to IP.Downloads that benefit sites that both use IP.Downloads to allow distribution of free files as well as those that sell files through a marketplace. While working to improve the user interface of the home page in IP.Downloads, we decided that allowing multiple featured files would be a small change but would help …
