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 …
Last year we introduced a Spam Monitoring service to combat the increasing problem of registrations on communities from spam accounts and the response to this service has been great! The spam service has been a great success so far and we would like to take the time to share some stats about how effective the service has been.
The service is only as effective as the number of communities that s…
IP.Content 1.x has turned out to be a very solid, stable, and extensible application, allowing for a vastly diverse number of implementations that showcase many of it's capabilities. We're thrilled to see so many of our customers using IP.Content in different and creative ways. We've been gathering feedback from all of you to help shape the future of IP.Content, and to that end we want to share wi…
IP.Board already has many moderation tools, including the ability to "approve" and "un-approve" posts and topics to make them hidden from the general community. IP.Board also has a "Trash Can" forum which collects all deleted topics and posts giving you a chance to keep them and manually move them back if you wanted to do so.
Recently, we've had several requests for a "soft delete" option. This …
Yesterday we showed IP.Board 3.1's ad code integration for the first time, today we'd like to give a quick update on the status of this new feature.
First of all, we were excited to read all of the positive feedback and great suggestions. We like to write these blog entries before features are 'set in stone', so that we can more easily and quickly include suggestions from our customers. Grou…
Advertising integration has been an often requested feature for a long time, so we're pleased to announce that IP.Board 3.1 will include this feature! We've create a simple system that will allow you to insert ad code at various locations throughout the forum. The integration is not specific to any ad platform, so you can use this for Google AdSense, or any other platform that you may use for yo…
One of the neat new features of IP.Board 3.0 was its integrated application/hook installer and upgrader. Using this took a lot of the headache out of updating modifications when the author produced a new version as you would have either needed to use a custom installer script or install a component dedicated to modification installations. This has helped out with the installations of modifications…
I had previously blogged about the status update improvements coming in IP.Board 3.1.0. This blog runs through some exciting new integration features with Twitter.
As IP.Board already has Facebook integration, it makes sense to also integrate Twitter. This further lowers the bar when registering a new account on your forum. If your visitors have have a Twitter account, they can use this to regis…
There are a lot of enhancements being made to the application/hook system in IPB 3.1, many of which were discussed in a previous blog post. While that post focused on the hooks system, there have been many other changes made throughout IPB 3.1, and we'd like to highlight a few of those in this blog post. We hope that our modification community will find these changes helpful and can't wait to se…
We'll keep this blog entry short and sweet, since there's not a whole lot to say.
Developers have asked for further documentation of IP.Board (and addon applications), specifically source code-level documentation of the various classes and methods that can be reused. Those of you familiar with phpdoc will know that it's the perfect tool for the job, and thankfully we wrote IP.Board 3 using phpd…
It's a well-known fact that one method of ensuring continued visitation of your site is to email members frequently to send reminders and notifications. For instance, if a user posts in a topic, they may forget that they posted after a day or two. If an email is sent to that user after someone else replies, however, it can remind the original user to return to your site to check on the updates. …
I blogged just before Christmas about the improvements to the status update feature in IP.Board.
A recent addition is the ability to locks a status update. A normal member can lock their status to prevent comments from other members, although a super moderator (and admin) can over-ride this and reply and/or unlock the status. When a super moderator (and admin) lock a status, it means that i…
In IP.Board 3, we introduced the hook system, the goal of which was to cut down on file edits from modifications and make modifications easier to install. We designed the system to be as flexible as possible, primarily using the HTML logic feature to create hooks in virtually every portion of the output generated. However, we knew there were still cases where a file edit was needed, to access ce…
IP.Gallery 3.1.0 will be released soon, so we'd like to take a moment to summarize all the new features we've added in this new release. Friendly URLs
We've integrated gallery into the global FURL system used by IP.Board 3, this will allow gallery to create friendly URLs for categories, albums, and images. Category/Album Covers
When viewing an image, you will have a new option to set that im…
As we near the release of IP.Blog 2.1.0 final, I wanted to run through some of the new features you can expect to see after upgrading. This is a very substantial upgrade that gives your blog a major facelift as well as drastically improving functionality. User Interface
The user interface has had a complete facelift to bring it up to standard. The new look feels more 'bloggish' and enhances the …
As we near the release of IP.Downloads 2.1.0, we wanted to take a moment just to summarize the changes in this release and to point out the new features you can expect to see upon updating. Friendly URLs
Friendly URLs have been implemented into IP.Downloads starting with version 2.1. Ability to shut off "Resume breakpoints"
Most download accelerator clients support downloading multiple pie…
Earlier this week we discussed some of the changes you can expect to see with regards to search engine optimization in IP.Board 3.1. Mostly, the changes are basic tweaks that will have great impact. These are the best kinds of changes.
Based on the feedback received, we've implemented a few other changes related to optimization of your site for visiting search engines. As before, most of thes…
Many of our customers have expressed interest in optimizing their forums for search engines, and to that end IPB 3.0 introduced many great features to facilitate this. You may recall from our blog entries leading up to 3.0 that we introduced friendly urls, canonical tag, dynamic meta tag support, and many other useful changes to make indexing your website easier for search engine spiders.
Here …
