Invision Community
773 blog entries in this category
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It is important that members be able to follow content that they are interested in within your community. This allows members to keep track of topics of interest, increasing the likelihood they will return to your site, especially when those topics are active and new content is added to them. It is equally important that following such topics is as easy and straightforward as possible. Users do not want to jump through hoops in order to be kept up to date about changes within your site, so it
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Following our IP.Nexus 1.3 updates, here are the changes to the support request system: Screenshots shown are subject to design change. New Reply Warning Sometimes when working on a support request, the customer or another staff member will reply while you're in the process of typing your reply. This can be both an annoying and embarrassing situation. In IP.Nexus 1.3, before your reply is submitted, Nexus will check if there has been any replies since you opened the support request (this
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Development of IP.Nexus 1.3 is well underway and the time has come to share some of the new features and improvements we've been working on. IP.Nexus 1.3 shall be released alongside IP.Board 3.2 - but is much more than a compatibility update. Our focus for Nexus 1.3 has been to examine and improve each component rather than making large changes. Many of you will have noticed our client area is now using IP.Nexus - the feedback and experience this change has provided, as well as the ever apprec
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One of our main goals for IP.Board 3.2.0 was to revamp certain areas of the interface to make it easier to interact with the board. We also wanted to put controls at your fingertips rather than make you root through pages of settings. This blog outlines some of these changes. User Control Panel In many ways the user control panel follows the old computing convention of a special area for configuration and settings. The idea being that you keep all configurable elements in a single location. Th
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The "View New Content" (commonly abbreviated to "VNC" on this community) and "My Content" search routines are important tools for most communities using IP.Board. While we have made improvements to these tools in 3.2 to improve both the reliability of both features, and the interface, we wanted to spend a little time enhancing the functionality of both tools as well. We realize that many of our customers have various suggestions and ideas for these tools, and while we cannot implement every su
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Back in February, we posted a series of blog entries about improvements to our Calendar application (part 1 2 3 4 5). To go along with these technical changes and improvements, we've completely overhauled the calendar interface to modernize it and improve usability. This blog entry will review those changes so you know what you can expect when IP.Board 3.2 is available. Main Calendar View When first visiting the calendar, you're presented with a refreshed calendar view. The main calendar no
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In this entry, I'll be showing the new streamlined Sign In and Registration process in IP.Board 3.2. Registration in particular is a key interface in any community. Too complex, and users will be put off signing up and taking part, potentially costing your community dearly. We've known for some time that our current registration process has needed streamlining to improve user conversions, and IP.Board 3.2 has proven the ideal time to implement the changes. Step by Step Our registration rout
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With each release of IP.Board we try to give attention to every area of the software that our customers care about. This is a challenge, of course, because all of our customers have different needs and priorities. Some users want us to make interface improvements, while some customers want us to make it easier for them to edit the interface themselves. Some customers want new features, while some customers want us to cut out "bloat". Every customer has different requirements of the software,
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IP.Board's Admin CP comes with many useful and powerful tools to edit your board's skin. You can edit virtually all of the HTML as well as the CSS from within the "Look & Feel" interface. This suits most people but sometimes you just want to use your own desktop editing tools so you can take full advantage of your text editor's syntax coloring, search and replace, merge and other tools. We added a tool back in IP.Board 3.1 to enable this in a limited way. If you put the board into 'develop
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We've gradually been revealing aspects of the new IP.Board 3.2 front-end interface, and naturally there's much more to come. In this entry I'd like to preview the new interface for the Search, View New Content and User Content views, since all three of these views essentially share the same interface elements. We previously covered the changes and improvements to View New Content, and these changes have been incorporated into the new interface. As always, please note that screenshots are from
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We recently blogged about the notification interface enhancements. I'd like to take a moment to go through some further enhancements we've made in this area. We want the notification system to be something you and your members use regularly to keep updated on new events and new content. We've really re-designed the alert system from scratch to make it simpler to use and indeed more useful. First up, lets take a look at a little interface update from the last blog entry: You'll note right
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We've added a lot of exciting new functionality to IP.Board 3.2.0 already, such as tagging, shared media, enhanced calendars, "like" for posts and much more but we also haven't forgotten the most important part of the user experience: the interface. A good example of re-working certain interface elements to improve work flow or to make a common task less daunting is the forum management screen in the admin CP. We've not added a bunch of new features or radically altered how it works but we f
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Moderators fill an important role on your community: they help to maintain order, they help to filter content out that should not be made available, and they help to assist new users and keep the site moving in the right direction. It is important that moderators have the tools they need made available to them in a manner that is easy to use, and easy to understand. While the moderator tools in IP.Board are robust and powerful, we felt we could improve upon the existing functionality to make u
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It is not an uncommon task that you or a moderator might need to edit a member of your community. Whether the member has uploaded an inappropriate personal photo, posted links to a competing website in their signature, or needs to be temporarily suspended so they can "cool down", managing members is a common task that moderators carry out on every community. We are happy to announce that we have improved this functionality in IP.Board 3.2.0 to make managing your members from the front end easi
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We added a notifications system in IP.Board 3.1.0 and it's been a very popular addition allowing your members to select the type of notification they receive for specific events like a new personal message, quoted post, etc. However, we've received a lot of feedback since and we wanted to make some enhancements to address some common issues. I'm happy to say that we've completed a lot of interface work in this area and we feel we have a much better system. The actual functionality hasn't cha
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Moderating your community is an important function that is carried out not by administrators alone, but often by community volunteers. For this reason, it is important to make moderating your community as easy as possible. To that end, we have made improvements to moderator capabilities in IP.Board 3.2.0, and in this blog entry we will describe some of those changes that relate to the report center specifically. The report center is a central container that all reported content is sent to, a
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As work progresses on the new interface for IP.Board 3.2.0, we can now go into some more detail about the new functionality that's already been added. I must of course stress that the only screen shots I can show are closely cropped to not reveal too much and please keep in mind that IP.Board 3.2.0 is still very much in development so some details may change before the public reveal. Tagging An incredibly popular request has been the ability to 'tag' content with special keywords and then fi
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The ability to easily share content within your community is important to your members. If your members submit an image to Gallery, it's quite probable they'll want to include that image in a post at some point, and there needs to be an easy way to do this. Likewise, if your members submit a file to the Download Manager, they may want to link to that file when replying to a blog entry. There are many instances where it is crucial that members be able to quickly and easily share the content th
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While we aren't quite ready to show off IP.Board 3.2.0 in its entirety yet, I wanted to talk a little about what you can expect from our new front-end skin - our thinking behind development, areas we've focused on, etc. Goals Before development commenced, we created a list of goals that we aimed to meet. These include: Improving the experience We've been accused in the past of having a 'clunky' experience in some areas, so we've worked hard to improve the user experience in key areas. Som
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Parts of this entry may only apply to those who create applications for IP.Board. Feel free to skip the sections that may not interest you. In my last blog entry I mentioned the improvements we have made for the hooks system, in this new entry I'll talk about the changes we have made for applications. Disabling an Application When an application is disabled from the ACP a check is performed on all the enabled hooks that have it listed in their requirements and a warning will appear at the
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Parts of this entry may only apply to those who create hooks for IP.Board. Feel free to skip the sections that may not interest you. As mentioned in our previous blog entries about IP.Board 3.2 we are focusing not only on adding new features but also on improving some of the current areas as well. In this entry I'll talk about the changes we made for hooks. Global Caches Several times it might happen that a hook requires a specific cache on every page (like our IP.Chat hook "Chat Tab Count
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IP.Board allows you to set "ACP Restrictions" which allow you to restrict which administrators have access to which areas of the Admin CP. The two main pieces of feedback we hear about the ACP Restrictions system are: - It should be easy to set up and manage ACP Restrictions, without having to check lots of boxes, but still remaining the high level of control of the current system. - Administrators should only see the areas of the Admin CP that they have access to. Administrators should n
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One of the areas we identified as requiring significant update in IP.Board 3.2.0 was the member management process. Member management is, for most communities, the most frequently-executed task that happens in the AdminCP, so it is important the process is quick and easy. In previous 3.x releases, each different type of member (normal, banned, validating etc.) had a separate page from which you could manage that type. Once on the correct page, you check the members you want to work with, then
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Of all the features we receive feedback on, view new content receives the most. To many this is their primary browsing page and it's vital that it works accurately. We've had database level topic tracking for many years. It was introduced in 2.0 and has gone through many refinements for efficiency and accuracy. We rewrote the system in IP.Board 3.0.0 as a global framework that all applications can use via a small extensions file. This provided great flexibility and a centralized storage area f
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