Invision Community
773 blog entries in this category
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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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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 even considered. We thought you might be interested in hearing about some of those decisions that
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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 this change though, is apparent when you need to use a where clause. Where previously you'd ha
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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 clients who wish to participate in beta testing programs. We would recommend cloning your live site
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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 choose whether to pull only featured images or not. You can expect to see this new option beginning w
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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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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, timeframes and milestones, we do not communicate these publicly until we are absolutely sure they a
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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 improve the interaction and discoverability of useful content in the marketplace. After all, every
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We identified a use case recently where we wanted to send a bulk mail to all clients who had purchased a particular package in IP.Nexus. This is not uncommon. Perhaps the package is being discontinued. Perhaps you erroneously over charged for this package. Perhaps there will be a special on additional purchases of this package. Regardless of the reason, it is logical and ordinary that you want to email all clients who have purchased a given package. Because the bulk mailer was improved in
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Our marketplace is an area where developers can submit free and paid resources for other clients to download and use on their website. IPS processes many, many transactions through the marketplace, both one-off purchases and renewals for applications clients have previously purchased. When an application has renewals, however, it was pointed out that the client had no way to cancel those renewals. Perhaps the client is no longer using the resource they purchased, for instance, and does not w
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We have launched our new blog The Development Channel to allow our development staff to more frequently update our clients on everything that goes on behind the scenes. From the technical aspects, to fun insights, and new feature announcements you can follow The Development Channel to follow our software being made.
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Hello everyone! Us developers are a strange bunch. We have a lot of crazy thoughts that just don't make sense to anyone else. Our brains are wired different. We get from point A to point B by going around point Z and bouncing off point M first. And very few of us (*cough*me exempted*cough*) are able to type up posts that make sense to more than just other developers. So what are we to do? Keep all of our great thoughts to ourselves? Nonsense. Nevertheless, we cannot flood everyone wit
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We have added a minor enhancement to IP.Nexus 1.5.7 that we thought you might be interested to hear about. Our customer service representatives found that when they "voided" an account in IP.Nexus (by clicking the "Void Account" button when viewing the customer screen in the ACP) that they often wanted to leave a customer note at the same time, explaining why the account was voided. For years they simply added the customer note manually after they voided the account. This isn't a big deal, b
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Last year, we added an auto-install/upgrade tool into our client area. The tool would upload the latest version of the IPS Community Suite to your server automatically. The way it worked was after submitting the request, you were entered into a queue, and a program on our server uploaded the files, and emailed you when it was done so that you could run the upgrader script. It normally took about 30 minutes. 30 minutes is pretty good. For someone without the technical knowledge to upgrade, it
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We are happy to report some really dramatic improvements to the IPS Converters. If you have been considering switching to IPS from another community software now is the time. Performance Improvements One area for improvement we focused on was the overall time it took to do a conversion. Doing a conversion is always going to be a time consuming process as it involves translating all of your data from your old format to IPS format. But we have made two big improvements: MySQL queries, where p
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It's an unfortunate fact that when you run a successful site, you attract unwanted users posting spam on your site. IP.Board has always been incredibly pro-active in preventing spam users from signing up by making use of built in tools such as the question and answer challenge, spam monitoring service and CAPTCHA systems. I'd like to take a moment to talk about some enhancements we've made in IP.Board 3.4.0 to help prevent unwanted posts and spam. Spam Monitoring Improvements We've furthe
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There has been much confusion over the recent exploit reported to us and subsequently patched. I would like to personally apologize for any confusion and inconvenience caused. We have conducted a review and made appropriate changes to our policies to ensure a smoother release and notification schedule for any future incidents. With that said, it is very important to note that while an IP.Board vulnerability did exist, its impact would have been minimal, if not non-existent on serv
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We are nearly ready to release the supported version of IP.Board 3.4 and are very excited to get this great new release out to you. Beta Testing We are currently doing a public beta test of IP.Board 3.4. If you are comfortable testing pre-release software please consider testing and letting us know any bugs you might find. You can find the pre-release on our forums but you will need to login as an active IPS Client to access. The more people who test our beta releases the better for everyone!
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At IPS, we pride ourselves on providing industry leading products and services, unsurpassed in quality, features and support. Much like any other company, we indeed have our strengths and weaknesses. One admitted weakness is clearly developing an independent mobile app platform that can meet your and our expectations. We have struggled over the past several years in securing a proficient mobile app development team and ultimately, the platform has not met our expectations. Our mantra has beco
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As we wrap up principle development of new features for IP.Board 3.4, I wanted to go through some of the other changes we've implemented for the new release. Share a single post A common feature request has been the ability to share a single post. You might want to share a great reply to a topic on Facebook or perhaps email a link to an interesting post to a friend. You can now do this by clicking either the post number or the little share icon to the right of the post number. This brings up
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IP.Board has for a long time allowed administrators to send bulk mails to members, including the ability to filter recipients and use variables to customise the message sent to each member. This is an important tool for communicating with the members of your community and in 3.4 we've made it even better. The problem with bulk mail Sending vast amounts of email through your own server is troublesome. Firstly, it takes a long time (you can't just send out thousands of emails in one go) an
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The Admin Control Panel (ACP) is a very comprehensive section of your IP.Board. The ACP is used for everything from managing members, creating forums to dealing with support tickets from within our IP.Nexus application. Indeed, the ACP has grown so large that it can be a little bewildering remembering where pages are and you may find that there are areas of the ACP you rarely use and would like to tuck out of the way. Happily, we've made significant improvements in these areas for IP.Board 3
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We're always amazed at how diverse our customer base is and how many different uses customers find for their IP.Board. Many customers, ourselves included often have a forum that invites questions such as pre-sales or support forums. These forums often generate a lot of topics with many replies and it can often be confusing for other readers to know which reply definitively answered the original question. The Best Answer Feature IP.Board comes with a brand new 'best answer' feature. This enable
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The new IPS Backup Service is our latest addition to our Community Enhancements services being introduced in IP.Board 3.4. This service allows for remote-backups of your community database processed constantly without any work on your part. How it Works The service works by logging all "write" queries to your database that are processed by the IPS Community Suite. What this means is that any time a database entry is inserted, updated, or deleted a log of that action is created. We ignore what
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