A common problem for all administrators that have skin customisations is having to apply them after each upgrade. This is often time consuming and laborious. One has to pour over a difference report and manually copy and paste the new code into existing templates. A major upgrade such as 3.1 can mean dozens of changed templates.
I'm pleased to say that we've added a new tool to greatly assist in…
We introduced IP.Chat 1.0 in January of 2010 and our servers have already processed over 6 million chat messages in just a few short months and the rate of adoption of IP.Chat continues to accelerate. Many communities are making good use of the chat software and we hope you are enjoying the IP.Chat product so far.
Logs of your chat room are an important tool for moderation of your community. P…
The first public beta release of IP.Board 3.1, applications, and related services is fast approaching. This blog entry will let you know what to expect and what you can do to help us in the process.
We believe, as most other responsible software development companies do, that releasing beta versions is the best way to ensure that the software is as stable as it can be before a final, supported v…
On Wednesday at the F8 conference, Facebook unveiled their new "Graph" API.
This is brand new set of APIs including a new oAuth based log in system. There is much speculation in the media about the current (now old) APIs like Facebook Connect, which IP.Board currently uses. Some sites are reporting that Facebook will simply kill it off while other more optimistic journalists envision a long grac…
The new mobile skin for IP.Board 3.1 is now available for viewing right here on our community! Just visit on a popular mobile device and the skin will load automatically. Separate Skin
The mobile skin shows as a separate skin in your AdminCP so you can edit it as you see fit. Change the colors, put up your own logo, or even put in mobile ads to monetize your community. Support for Popular …
Since first unveiling the notification changes coming in IP.Board 3.1 we've received a ton of feedback from our customers to further improve the system and make the notifications more useful. We've been listening to your feedback (and often agreeing with your points) and have decided to implement many great ideas to the make the notifications system cleaner, easier to use, and less intrusive. B…
Development is under way (and wrapping up, in fact!) on IP.Chat 1.1.0, so we wanted to take a few moments to illustrate what new functionality you can expect to see with the next update of IP.Chat.
If you are not already familiar with IP.Chat, we offer a javascript-based chatroom solution that any customer with an active IP.Board license (or support and services contract) can add to their site. …
Having a great forum skin is something every forum owner craves. A great skin is a big selling point, as it gives visitors a good first impression, and it colors (pun intended) the overall experience of using that forum. While a great many sites are perfectly happy with the stock IP.Board forum skin, getting something new is often a top priority for sites that are trying to make it big. Up unti…
IP.Content has many features, and indeed it's quite possible to create a rather useful articles system using the custom databases feature introduced in IP.Content 1.1, however many of our users have been requesting a true "articles" feature since the first release of IP.Content. In typical IPS fashion, we've listened, and you will be happy to hear that IP.Content 2.0 introduces a new "Articles" mo…
When we developed IP.Board 3, one of the main goals was to centralize searching and simplify it to provide results cleanly and concisely. Since then we have had a lot of emphatic feedback on how to develop the search further and to improve the interface.
We've have taken all that feedback on board and completely overhauled search making it more flexible and more useful. This blog entry lists the…
IP.Content is an extremely flexible system. While considering the possibilities with IP.Content and feeding content to your external pages, we knew that there were multiple options.
Using a database
You can create a database to store content such as articles, and then allow commenting on these articles directly. In doing so, you keep your articles and your topics separated.
Using a blog
…
Templates in IP.Content are a useful tool that can save administrators a lot of work managing their site. They are utilized to facilitate displaying database content, and can be utilized to normalize the display of multiple pages through a shared template. We have made a few small tweaks to templates to make them easier to manage and easier to use in IP.Content 2.0. Separation of templates
In …
Add and edit hookpoints
Based on requests from users integrating IP.Content into their website, we have added two new hook points to the database handler: postSave() and postSaveEdit(). These are called immediately upon saving the record to the database (for add and edit requests, respectively), and can be utilized to take action on a record after it has been saved. This could be used, for instanc…
In IP.Board 3.0 we introduced a simple reputation feature, allowing users to give positive or negative reputation to a post.
While administrators can view who gave reputation through the Admin CP, in IP.Board 3.1 we have introduced a way for all users to view who gave reputation on any given post.
To view who gave reputation, you just click on the reputation number at the bottom of the post whi…
We recently blogged about our new profile customization options. I've made a few updates since and wanted to update you on them.
As you may already be aware, we have added Twitter integration into IP.Board 3.1. This enables you to 'connect' your Twitter account to your forum account to share links, status updates and to allow you to use your Twitter photo on the board.
I've taken this a step f…
While not a particular interesting blog entry :) I wanted anyone interested to know that our demo service term has been extended from 24 to 48 hours. As always, you can email sales for a further extension if you might need more time.
If you are considering using IP.Board now is a great time to get your proverbial feet wet on version 3.0.5 so you are ready as soon as the upcoming version 3.1 is r…
We read virtually every piece of feedback we receive, even if we don't reply and we often see the same requests coming up. The ability to 'preview' the topic by viewing an excerpt from the first post is often requested and we've added this into IP.Board 3.1.
We've made it a little more useful by also including the last time you read a topic (if applicable) and the number of unread posts so you c…
The IP.Board 2 series introduced a number of new profile features designed to make your profile page a little more interactive. Besides the usual stats and figures, we introduced a personal photo and the ability to leave comments and list recent visitors. This made your profile page a little more personal and encouraged repeat visits.
With the status updates feature in IP.Board 3.1, the profile …
IP.Content is a complex framework that allows you to create and manage website content in many different ways. You can embed blocks and databases into pages, and pages can be wrapped by templates. You can define page names and use friendly URLs through the IP.Board built-in FURL system, you can use friendly URL's through the included index.php file with IP.Content (for instance, if you want your w…
The page manager, introduced with IP.Content 1.0, is a core feature to IP.Content. It allows you to create pages and folders, and manage those pages and folders, core functionality that IP.Content relies on for everything else. Page management has been pretty reliable and functional, but we decided we wanted to improve the interface for IP.Content 2.0 to make it sleeker, faster and even more funct…
Over the past year we have introduced new services that are available to our IP.Board Standard Licenses holders, such as the spam service and the chat service. We also have plans for more services that will be tied to your license. While this provides a lot of value to your license, managing these services is a cumbersome process, you need to create keys for each of these services and enter them…
When we were developing IP.Board 3.0 we were looking for ways to lower the barrier for registering. There are many single sign in providers but most of them required separate registration and set-up. Around this time, Facebook released their emerging API "Facebook Connect". We seized the opportunity to implement it within IP.Board 3 and adhered to all their guidelines. The first implementation of…
Following on from our recent blog entry about Twitter Integration, I'd like to present our newest IP.Board 3.1.0 feature: Sharing Links. This new feature makes good use of our improved Facebook Connect integration and the new Twitter integration.
As most Facebook and Twitter users have discovered, sometimes you see a link to a great article or topic and want to share it with your friends and fol…
Database "Tweaks"
The database functionality in IP.Content is quite powerful at its core. You can do a lot of things with the database feature that would normally be laborious coding yourself. A lot of addon applications add common features: rating, comments, sorting options, etc. IP.Content takes all of this legwork out of the picture by providing it for you with just a few clicks in your admin …
