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 wan…
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 renewa…
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.
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? …
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 t…
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 …
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…
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 I…
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.Bo…
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…
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…
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 click…
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 tr…
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 …
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 qu…
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 ti…
IP.Board 3.4 is approaching and will be released soon with all sorts of great enhancements such as SEO improvements, upgraded editor, login enhancements, core performance improvements, lots of minor changes from feedback, and more still to be announced.
This is a great time to take a look at IPS if your community might still be running another software. Perhaps you have a friend or a site you vi…
A Content Delivery Network, or CDN is a distributed system of servers to provide high-availablity and high-performance. For example, rather than serving your CSS, images and Javascript from the same webserver that PHP and the rest of your community runs on, these are loaded from a network of servers, improving performance and reducing load on your server.
Having a CDN can improve your community'…
VigLink is a service which works with a number of affiliates to provide you commission when a user visits the affiliate from your website.
So, as an example, let's say someone posts a link to an Amazon item on your community, with VigLink integration, you'll be provided with compensation every time a user purchases that item if they bought it after following the link from your site.
VigLink, an…
As part of our regular SEO round-up when developing a major new release, I'm happy to run through the latest SEO changes we've made for IP.Board 3.4. Friendly URL Changes
After much research and discussion with other SEO focused forum owners, I decided to revamp the FURL structure when handling additional page parameters.
The existing format uses the following structure:
board.com/topic/123-t…
IPS is introducing a program whereby we nominate a charity to receive our attention and support. These nominated charities are chosen by IPS for the work they do and how they might impact us personally.
The first nominated charity is Autism Speaks. You can find out more information on our charity page. IPS and our Client Community
It is our goal to expose various charities to our client comm…
The IPS Community Suite provides a fantastic community solution for all kinds of websites.
For many of our customers, the community is just one component of their site. Many of these customers utilise single sign-on systems for integrating the community with the other areas.
At IPS, we get requests for this on a regular basis, and over the years, I've worked on many of these solutions as part o…
Custom Sidebar Blocks and Profile Photos
Since the IP.Board 3.2 update, the look & feel of content blocks and sidebar widgets has been somewhat left behind in IP.Blog. Inconsistent avatar image sizes and design decisions that were made for IP.Board 3.1 have left some areas of IP.Blog looking dated and disconnected from the rest of the suite.
For IP.Blog 2.6 these sidebar blocks have been given …
The license changes that we blogged about back in May are now live! License Structure Changes
The main change is that IP.Board is no longer be the "root" license item. You now have a license to the IPS Community Suite and will then have the various applications as additions under that root license. Anyone with a current IP.Board Standard License or IP.Board Business License will see this chang…
