Invision Community Blog: Invision Community

O'Reilly Answers community now available

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

O'Reilly Answers is a community site for sharing knowledge, asking questions, and providing answers. The site is powered by IP.Board using creative application of hooks and skinning logic. It also uses the IP.Board OpenID authentication for single-sign-on with O'Reilly. The site is a great demo of what you can do with the new software platform from IPS.

Read the full announcement from O'Reilly

From the O'Reilly announcement:

We're launching the beta of O'Reilly Answers, and I'm inviting you to be part of it. In brief, O'Reilly Answers is a community site for sharing knowledge, asking questions, and providing answers that brings together our customers, authors, editors, conference speakers, and Foo (Friends of O'Reilly).

[b]Why Answers, and why now?[/b]

O'Reilly is at the center of an amazing exchange of knowledge sharing and idea generation. We've created the usual means of facilitating communication between customers, O'Reilly folks, and the outside experts we call "alpha geeks" who contribute to O'Reilly books, conferences, and websites. We can connect through reader reviews, errata submissions, book forums, blog comments, Get Satisfaction, our customer service department, and more. But too much of this conversation is siloed, and not enough is public (e.g., discussions on our internal mailing list for editors, or personal responses to customer questions). O'Reilly Answers will be the place where much of that communication happens from this point forward.

Visit O'Reilly Answers

IP.Content 1.1.2

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

IP.Content 1.1.2 is being prepared for quality assurance testing, and I just wanted to take a moment to let everyone know about a couple of new (but useful) features and changes in this minor point release.

Stability and Performance
In addition to fixing all reported issues, and adding in proper support for our MSSQL driver, we've added many resource improvements throughout the software. Databases and fields are now properly cached, preventing the need to query this data throughout the front end of IP.Content. Additionally, we've added a few MySQL indexes that speed up certain areas of IP.Content significantly, reducing overall overhead and improving responsiveness.

Database feeds
A new feed plugin module has been added to facilitate database feeds. You can create feed blocks pulling content from your custom created databases. Various sorting and filtering options are available when you create database feed blocks, allowing for powerful control of how you display content from your custom databases.

Truncate option for listings
An option has been added when you create or update your custom fields for a database to control truncation of the field content in the listing display. In previous versions of IP.Content, data is automatically truncated at 100 characters for most fields (and certain fields have special behaviors, such as attachment fields displaying a count of the attachments, instead of the normal attachment HTML). Now you can disable this, or change the length to truncate the content at. This can be useful for providing longer previews of an article in the listing, or to display attachments instead of just the attachment count.

Member lookup field type
A member lookup field type (a user AJAX type-ahead field, like you see in the messenger area of IP.Board when typing in a username you would like to send a private conversation to) has been added. This allows you to create fields that directly relate to a member in the IP.Board user database.

Database relational field type
Several requests have been made for a database cross-referenced field type, and you will now have one in IP.Content 1.1.2. Essentially, this field type allows you to create a dropdown field in one database, using content from another database. You define which database and field you want to retrieve content from, and a dropdown menu is created. The user (or admin) selection when saving a new or edited record is stored as a reference to the record in the remote database, so if you update that remote record, it's automatically updated anywhere that it's referenced.

This concept may be a little difficult to understand at first, but an example should help clarify it. If you are creating a database of recipes, for example, every recipe is going to need to reference the ingredients used. With this new capability you could, for example, create one database of ingredients, and then in the recipe database you create, use this new relational field type to provide a select list of ingredients, rather than requiring the user to manually type in the ingredients used. If you find later on that you made a typo in an ingredient, or need to include a registered trademark symbol for a specific brand, you can edit that record in your ingredients database, and subsequently every recipe using that ingredient will be automatically updated.

We hope that these small but useful and oft-requested features will go a long way towards making IP.Content more flexible and customizable for your installation. If you have any questions or feedback we'd love to hear it! Just drop us a comment at the end of this entry. :)

Welcome to the new Blog!

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

We've just upgraded the IP.Blogs application we use on these forums to 2.1.0 beta 1. As you can see, it's a fairly substantial upgrade with many new features and improvements. This blog entry will run through the main ones:

Efficiency
I've added several more caching layers for commonly requested data from blogs and entries. This, along with significant SQL query work makes this version the most efficient yet. The improvements are obvious even here. Pages load much quicker with much fewer queries.

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 experience. I've added drop down menus at the top so that you can quickly access common areas and start new entries where you have permission to. The post screen has been overhauled to add functionality. You should find the new version much easier to navigate and easier to use.

Group Blogs

This is a new feature that allows you, the admin, to set up a group-wide blog. This blog is a normal blog in every other way. For example, you could set up a blog for your staff and everyone in the staff group will instantly be able to start writing new blog entries and managing comments, etc.

Blog This!

This is a brand new feature that adds a "Blog This" button to every post. This allows you to use post content in your blog entry. Furthermore, the relationship is remembered and all linked blog entries appear at the bottom of the topic when viewed.

Pre entry Rating
You can now rate each blog entry rather than just the entire blog itself. The blog rating is still shown on the homepage as an aggregate of all rated entries.

Report Item and Reputation
You can now report an entire blog entry, or just a single comment. You can now also give someone a reputation increase/decrease in comments.

There are also countless other improvements and enhancements. Keep in mind that this is very much early beta software so expect bugs! Please report them in the tracker as usual.

IP.Gallery 3.1.0 now in testing

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that IP.Gallery 3.1.0 is now in the beta testing stage, and has been installed on this board for public testing! This update brings many refinements, performance optimizations, and new features, including:

Friendly URLs
IP.Gallery now makes full use of the IP.Board FURL system. Categories, albums, images and more now have the friendly URL structure you're familiar with.

Image notes
Image owners are now able to add notes to sections of their images, positioning and resizing them to suit. Other members will be able to see the notes when hovering over the image. (An example)

Image rotation
Images can now be rotated in 90

How IPS uses its hosting services to grow and learn

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Origins of IPS offering hosting services

IPS has always considered itself a services company above and beyond a traditional software company. Through the years we have always found ways of providing offerings to our clients from phone and ticket support all the way to our new spam monitoring service and upcoming chat service that extend our software beyond a standalone application.

Soon after IPS was founded we started offering hosting services. We wanted to bring a complete experience to our customers who were interested in both using our software and the advantages of a managed hosting environment that went along with it. The response was immediate and, to this day, IPS hosting provides these great managed hosting approaches to communities.

Over the years IPS grew and we decided it was necessary to stop renting servers from third-party providers. Not only would this reduce our operating costs but, by owning our own hardware, would offer us great flexibility for our service offerings. In 2006 we began leasing space in a quality data center in Reston, VA outside Washington DC and started the process of purchasing, configuring, and installing all the various hardware required. From servers and switches through our core routers and load balancers.

Growth brings us to today

It is now late-2009 and three years after we started, our data center facilities now include:

Fully redundant, multi-honed 10 Gigabit connections to providers such as Level 3, Global Crossing, Nlayer, Savvis, and Cogent.
Cisco 6509 core router
Cisco 3500 distribution switches
Foundry networks load balancing and failover equipment
Internal and external network separated for fast backups and restores

In addition to these capabilities, the facility in which we locate our equipment also features everything one would expect from backup power to high security entry requirements.

Here are a few actual pictures of our racks and servers:

(For those of you interested: The RES.S#### means "RESton" - with the servers at our backup facility starting with a different prefix plus - "S" for server (routers, switches, KVMs, etc. marked differently) and the number is the ID of that hardware. For example, if you're hosted on "server40" here at IPS, that's actually RES.S1048.)

Managing our own network connections, network hardware, and server hardware has allowed IPS to provide everything from shared hosting to high-traffic, load balanced solutions. We have experience hosting everything from fun, hobby sites all the way to highly visible communities owned by corporations with tens of thousands of online users. Today we provided managed hosting and services for everyone from national sports teams to world-famous music artists.

In addition to community hosting, operating our own facility allows IPS to offer additional services to enhance our software. Services like our spam monitoring service and upcoming chat service were made possible for free or low-cost to our customers by leveraging the resources available to us in our own facility.

Enhancing our software by using our software

Above all else the most important advantage of our own hosting facility is constant, first-hand knowledge of our software's operations. Because we host our own software on the order of thousands of installations the performance of the software is paramount. Our hosting staff and development staff constantly work together to target areas of the software needing optimization. We do not resort to the simple approach of telling customers to "add more server power" if they are experiencing performance issues as we know, first hand, how much traffic a server should be capable of handling using IPS software and can advise our customers accordingly.

We run our own company forums on a simple VPS setup without any fancy optimizations like Sphinx search, memcache, and other specialized server software. By keeping the setup simple we can emulate what a customer would have on the average hosting provider and learn how to optimize our software in a normal environment. We certainly could implement multi-server clusters for our own company sites but we think it's important to use our software as others do and learn from that experience.

Over the years, our hosting facilities have allowed us to grow our offerings and learn how to create a software platform that can scale with that growth. We will continue to leverage our unique position to develop software and host it all in one, managed environment. Those clients who choose not to host their community with IPS can always be assured that our constant monitoring and learning process will benefit them as well through our continued software updates.

IP.Gallery 3.1.0 Preview

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:04:00 +0000

Development for the next version of IP.Gallery is well underway and we're excited to tell you about some of the new features you can expect. Please keep in mind that this is only a sample of the new features and not a complete list.

Friendly URLs

Categories, Albums, and images are now integrated into the global IP.Board 3 FURL system.

Category/Album Covers

It is now possible to specify one of the images in a category or album to be the cover of that category or album. If a cover image is specified, it will always be displayed for that category or album, instead of the last image thumbnail.

Sub Albums

Albums now support unlimited sub albums, which work exactly like gallery sub categories.

Profile Picture Album

You can now create a new kind of album, a 'Profile Picture' Album. After this album has been created, any images that you upload to it will be displayed on the change picture page in your User CP, making them easy to select as your profile image.

New Slideshow

The slideshow has been completely redesigned, you can see the new style in the screenshot below:

More to come

We'll have a lot more to show you in the coming weeks, from new features to an improved interface, we hope that you will enjoy this new version!

IP.Blog 2.1.0 Development News

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Works is progressing well on the next version of our blogging software. A lot has already been completed and I wanted to take a moment to share some of the improvements.

Efficiency and Extensibility
I've put a lot of effort into refactoring a few core classes to make them more useful and extensible. The ultimate aim is to remove function duplication and consolidate common actions into single functions or classes.
I've also introduced more caching to lower the query count and remove some of the more intensive queries. This has seen a reduction of nearly 60% of SQL work on a few page views alone.

Categories Return
During the development for IP.Blog we converted the categories system into tags. We felt that being able to apply several tags to a single blog entry was more useful than putting it into a category. This worked well but I felt there was still a need for 'fixed' categories. I've added categories back in and you can select multiple categories to file an entry in as well as as create new ones on the fly.

The following screen capture shows the new interface when making an entry:

This screen capture shows the blog list with the new "Categories" widget showing available categories with the number of posted entries in each.

UserCP Improvements
I've put a lot of work into making the UserCP more functional for the blog. Currently, you can create a new blog and edit its settings.
The new version allows you to do that as well as quickly mass-moderate comments and entries.

This screen capture shows the new UserCP Blog dashboard:

This screen capture shows the new UserCP Manage Comments screen:

These are just a few of the features already completed. We'll follow up with some more next week.

Community Resources Blog Open to Authors

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

We have added the ability for those that submit downloads to our community resources database to submit blog entries on the community resources blog. This new feature will allow resource authors a great place to update users on their work and promote new features or updates. We hope resource authors will take advantage of this new option to reach out to fans of your offerings. You can find the link to submit an entry on the community resources home page.

If you are interested in resources for IPS software, don't forget to track (requires account on IPS forums) the community resources blog or subscribe to its RSS feeds for updates. Also have a look around the community resources section of our site for articles, ideas, and more for your IPS-powered communities!

IP.Downloads 2.1

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 23:03:00 +0000

While upgrading our addon applications for IP.Board 3.0 compatibility, we blogged about the state of the updates and our plans for the future. At that time, we detailed that there wouldn't be many new features in the applications initially, but instead that we would be releasing feature updates for our addon applications later this year.

Development for IP.Downloads 2.1 is well underway and we wanted to take a moment to highlight the new features you should expect to see in the next release of IP.Downloads. These features have largely been decided upon based on suggestions in our feedback forum.

Friendly URLs

IP.Downloads 2.1 will feature friendly urls for the main index page, category view pages, file view pages, and downloading files.

Resume Breakpoints Toggle

Some customers have requested the ability to turn off IP.Download's capability of downloading files in "parts" (this is primarily used by download accelerators that request multiple pieces of a file simultaneously). There will be a setting in IP.Downloads 2.1 to disable this functionality.

Global Settings vs Per-Category Settings

Some per-category settings (specifically: max file size and screenshot dimension settings) can now be configured globally as well. Once a global setting is set, if you do not specify the fields when configuring your categories, the global option will be used instead. This will allow you to more easily control some common settings quickly for your entire IP.Download installation, while still allowing for finer-grained per-category control should you need it.

Download Sessions

IP.Downloads already supports download sessions (which are used to track the number of simultaneous downloads a user has going). We will be expanding upon this to allow for download session urls. When a user requests to download a file, a unique link will be generated and this url will be used to download the file. Once complete, this unique url will be discarded. This feature will help prevent users from sharing direct download urls, and instead require users to visit the file information page before the download will commence.

Major changes to file storage

Presently, IP.Downloads allows you to upload (or link to) a single file and a single screenshot with each record. While generally this works well, many customers need the ability to support more than one file or screenshot for each record. We will be changing how files are stored within the system to accommodate some new features that are not presently possible. These features include:

Use of the flash uploader for file uploads. This will allow for multiple simultaneous file uploads, as well as progress-bar support, when uploading files.
Multiple files per file record. For instance, you might submit "My Home Movie", and then upload "movie.part1", "movie.part2", and "movie.part3" to break your movie into multiple pieces.
Mirror support. Along with multiple physical files, you will be able to submit multiple urls, providing for built in mirror support by linking to copies of the download hosted elsewhere.
Multiple screenshots per record

Thinking beyond the above features, you will be able to use the mirror support functionality for other things as well. For instance, you could submit links to "Related Tools", "Required Files", or "User-Contributed Files". By allowing multiple files and links per record, you will have a lot more control over the grouping of your files and how they are presented to your users.

We believe the above features represent the most requested and most needed features for IP.Downloads, and hope that our customers will be able to benefit from the new functionality. We will post another blog update later on when IP.Downloads 2.1 is ready for beta testing, as well as blog updates about our other applications in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

bbAuthority: "Interview with Matt Mecham"

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

bbAuthority.com has posted an interview with Matt Mecham, CSA and Chairman of IPS:

http://www.bbauthority.com/interviews/interview-with-matt-mecham-founder-of-ipb

CleanCut Skin Updated

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

The CleanCut skin has been updated on our company forums and in the client area under: Downloads / IP.Board / Development Releases

This version will work with 3.0.4 of IP.Board. We hope you enjoy!

New Mobile skin coming soon

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

New Mobile skin

When we developed IP.Board 3.0, we took the decision to keep the same basic Lo-Fi skin that appeared in IP.Board 2.x, but expand it to include the ability to post, which was a commonly requested feature. Since 3.0's release, we've had a lot of feedback requesting that we expand the Lo-Fi skin further, and create a truly mobile experience for IP.Board users. Now we're pleased to introduce the new Mobile skin.

The new Mobile skin provides handy trimmed-down access to almost all areas of IP.Board, including topics, posting, searching and the messenger. Non-essential information and features have been stripped out, to ensure the interface for mobile device users is uncluttered as well as quick to download and render.

The CSS used to build the Mobile skin is minimal, to help keep page sizes down, but we have added a splash a color to enable webmasters to brand their Mobile skin, if they wish. By default, the Mobile skin is traditional IP.Board blue. A GDK for the few images that appear will be released in due course.

We've designed the Mobile skin to be usable on any modern mobile device, such as iPhone and Blackberry. It should look great on any size screen, too.

We'd love to hear your feedback on the new look, and any questions you have! The skin will be available for testing on this forum in the next few days.

Oh, one more thing... it has topic markers :)

Demo Updated

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Good news:

Our demo system has been upgraded to IP.Board 3.0.4 and IP.Content 1.1.0 and the standard time for a demo increased from 8 to 24 hours. Feel free to create an account to have a look. As always, certain functions do not work on the demo system for security and other general oddities can pop up because of the restrictions. Of course you will not have such issues on a real install of our software.

Temporary bad news:

The demo system has been completely overloaded the past few days. We have to limit the number of accounts on the system just because of simple storage space and resources. If you get the "system full" message just check later - accounts are constantly cycled off the system as they expire.

IP.Content 1.1.0 Beta 3 Available

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

IP.Content 1.1.0 Beta 3 has been made available through the client area for users with an active IP.Content license. It has been posted under the "Development Releases" category. Please note that IP.Content 1.1.0 Beta 3 remains unsupported. If you are not comfortable using beta software on your site, we recommend you wait for the final release of IP.Content 1.1.0.

Please see our blog entry regarding Beta 2 for more information regarding IP.Content 1.1.0.

IP.Subscriptions 1.1.0

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

I'm pleased to say that work has begun on IP.Subscriptions 1.1.0, our purchasable subscriptions manager for your community. This continues our commitment to develop and mature the product beyond IP.Board 3.0 compatibility.

Already, the subscription manager has come on leaps and bounds. New features already added include more robust PayPal payments which fully support recurring payments and recurring cancelations. Improved debugging tools and email notifications make managing your payments easier. Huge improvements in the interface on the public and administration sides help elevate the application further.

IP.Subscriptions 1.1.0 will fix any remaining bugs and introduce further Admin CP interface improvements as well as the ability to restrict subscription packages to specific member groups.

We'll bring you further updates over the next week as the release starts taking shape.

IP.Subscriptions is free to all active IP.Board license holders. v1.0.0 is available from your download center now.

Custom Services Directory

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

We have created a new directory for sites that provide custom skin design and/or programming services for IPS products.

Custom Services Directory

If you provide custom skin design or programming services for IPS products please submit your site or service today. It's a great way to increase your business and get more referrals directly from IPS!

IP.Content 1.1.0 Beta 2 available

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

We've been hard at work on our latest version of IP.Content, as we discussed in our last blog entry, and have been testing it with a small group of beta testers for the last week or two now. We have decided to open up beta testing to all customers with active IP.Content licenses.

IP.Content is the new name for Community Content System.

IP.Content 1.1.0 introduces support for custom dynamic databases. You can create databases, manage categories, fields, moderators, records, comments, revisions and more, all from within your admin control panel. You can also allow your users to submit, edit, rate and comment on records in databases, with a plethora of other options available on a per-database level. Please re-read our previous blog entry for a more in-depth outline of the new functionality in version 1.1.0.

If you find any bugs in the public beta, please report them to the bug tracker.

Pricing

Since the introduction of IP.Content we have had a special price of just $35 to purchase. When the final version of 1.1.0 is released, the price will change to $49.99 so act now to secure the special price of $35 before the change.

First Look: IP.Content 1.1.0

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

We've been hard at work on the next version of our Community Content System which we have formally renamed to IP.Content. There are many exciting new capabilities with the latest version of IP.Content that we think you will like.

For the most part, our efforts into 1.1.0 have centered around one new major feature: custom databases. In IP.Content 1.1 you will be able to create an unlimited number of custom databases from within your admin control panel, allowing you to easily organize and manage your data using IP.Content. For instance, let's say you run a site about pets. You might want to create a database that contains records about all the different breeds of dogs out there, another database that contains records about all the different breeds of cats, and then yet another database that users can submit to in order to share information about their own pets. The first two databases you may only want administrators to add records to, and you may want to order by breed name, while the last database you want users to submit records to, and you may want to order by date the records were added to the database. IP.Content 1.1.0 can easily manage all of this.

When you create your custom databases you can decide which permission masks can see and view the database, who can add and edit records within the database, and who can rate records and comment on records within the database. Commenting and rating functionality is built in (if you enable it for the database). You can set whether users can submit to a database (or you can set a database so that only administrators can submit to it), and you can even set a database to be editable in a wiki-like manner (i.e. any user can edit any record within the database). You control the default sorting and ordering options for the database, and you control whether records and comments should require moderator approval before becoming publicly visible on a per-database level. You can also enable revisions for records within a database (that is, when users edit the records a backup of the copy they edited is saved in case you need to review it later, compare it to the current version of the record, or restore an older copy of the record).

After creating a database, you then create each field within the database yourself. IP.Content 1.1.0 supports the following field types: text input, textarea, radio buttons, checkboxes, select lists, multi-select lists, date input (i.e. an input field with a calendar overlay to select the date), WYSIWYG editor areas, and attachments. There are a few limitations on how many and which fields you can add (for instance, you can have as many WYSIWYG fields as you want, but you may only add one attachments field per database), but for the most part the number of fields and specific configuration is up to you. The field types framework is extensible, so developers can easily add new field types in the future simply by uploading a single file to a specific directory.

You can create unlimited categories and subcategories on a per-database level as well. Note, however, that you are not required to create and use categories should you not need to. When creating categories, you can opt to simply honor the database's permission settings, or extend those permissions - that way you can have some categories that are available to all users, and some categories that are only available to VIP members, or staff members, for example.

You also control moderators on a per-database level, with support for both member and group moderators available. You can control whether moderators can approve records, approve comments, edit records, delete records, delete comments, pin/unpin records, lock records, and unlock records.

This leads us into how records are handled and the functionality available for them. You can add, edit, delete, approve/unapprove, pin/unpin, lock/unlock, sort and search for records all within the ACP if you like. Full ACP management is available in 1.1.0. You can also manage comments for records within the ACP, allowing you to view, edit and delete the comments without having to view the record on the public side. Additionally, you can view all revisions of a record, and even run comparison reports to see exactly what has changed between each revision if you wish. You can restore a specific revision at any time, should you have a need.

From the front end, users with appropriate permission can add and edit records as well. Users can also rate each record, and even comment on the records, if the features are enabled and the proper permissions are set. Sorting and filtering from within CCS is fully supported, allowing users to control the order of results, how many are listed per page, and allowing users to search through those results to return more relevant results. Users with appropriate moderator permissions can delete, approve/unapprove, pin/unpin, lock/unlock records, and delete and approve/unapprove comments from the front end as well.

Navigation support is built in, and databases can be embedded into any new or existing page, allowing you full control over the layout of the entire page. Plugin callback functionality is also possible, allowing you to write your own custom code to extend certain database actions (on a per-database level) should you need to. Additionally, "item marking" support is built into IP.Content 1.1.0, allowing your users to easily see which categories have new information they haven't yet read, and easily identify the articles within the listing that haven't been viewed yet. The category view, listing view, and record display templates can be shared across all databases, or can be customized on a per-database level, allowing you fine-grained control over how your content is displayed to users.

We've recently moved over our resource site into the new IP.Content 1.1.0 framework here at http://community.invisionpower.com/resources. You can see a live demo of the new features by browsing our custom databases.

Articles
Our articles section, which contains user submitted tips and documentation, highlights many of the capabilities of IP.Content 1.1.0. Wiki-style editing (and revisioning) is enabled, allowing users to self-manage a repository of information for other users to take advantage of. Commenting and rating is also enabled for the articles, and a category structure including subcategories is utilized to help organize the information. Articles use stock templates, giving you an idea of how content will be displayed if you do not customize the default database templates.

Links
The links section displays customer-submitted links that users can visit. The links section also uses categories to organize data, and also supports commenting and rating. Only the original submitter (and moderators) can edit records, however. Custom templates are utilized to make the links database look a little more unique, compared to the other databases.

Error Codes
Our error codes database lists all of the known error codes that can be generated by IPB (and the first party addons such as Gallery and Blog). Similar to the Articles database, stock templates are used, however commenting and rating are disabled. While the articles database orders articles by "last updated date", the error codes database orders records by the error code itself.

Guides and Tutorials
This database of official IPS guides and tutorials houses official documentation that we at IPS have written and will maintain. Customized templates are used to control the output, and ratings and comments are enabled.

(If you are familiar with SQL already, consider a "database" in IP.Content to essentially be a "table", while "fields" are "columns" within the table, and "records" are "rows" within the table.)

As you can see, the features new to IP.Content 1.1.0 can allow you to greatly extend and much more easily control custom data on your website. Users can practically create entire applications through a few clicks in the ACP, giving you a lot of power. We are excited about this new functionality, and can't wait to see how our customers make use of it. While the first release of IP.Content focused largely on static content (allowing dynamic content through custom PHP code), IP.Content 1.1 focuses on the dynamic features that many users need to manage their websites.

New Resources Sections

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

We have made two sections of resources available on our site: Official and Community.

Official Resources

These are resources made by IPS staff and include everything from getting started guides to developer documentation. We are still populating our database of documentation and appreciate your feedback on what sort of information you might be looking for. What seems easy to IPS staff can often be confusing to those not living our products daily as we are so please speak up regarding specific areas you need to have better documentation. Thanks!

Community Resources

Made by the community of IPS customers and include tips, skins, hooks, applications, and more. There is a great number of interesting articles and fun downloads to choose from there. Try one our or submit your own.

Visit: Customers Resources

bbAuthority: "If you haven't quite given IPB a go just yet, I'd strongly recommend doing so"

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

bbAuthority.com, a resource site for forum administrators has posted a review of IP.Board 3:

http://www.bbauthority.com/forum-software/invision-power-board-3-an-insight

Thanks bbAuthority.com for the review! Always great to see how others react to IP.Board 3's new capabilities!

Customer Access on Forums

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

We are working on making customer access here on our company forums work better. During our changes some clients may have been removed from Customers group and put in the Members group.

If you are experiencing issues please first try this:

The most common issue we have is with customers not logging in with the email they use in the client area. If you are still having trouble please submit a ticket.

[*]Log out of the forums [*]Log back in with the same email address and password you use for our client area

CleanCut Skin Beta

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

The first beta release of the CleanCut skin is now available in the client area under the Development Releases section of IP.Board.

There may be issues with the skin so please test it before using it live. Report bugs in the CleanCut section of our bug tracker.

Enjoy!

Community Skins Preview

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Since IP.Board 3.0.0 was a brand new release, it shipped with a brand new design. This design was intended to be easy-to-use, whilst looking as attractive as possible. However, some may prefer the older versions and this is where our newest community project steps in.

For the past few weeks, the skinners from our Community Developer team have been hard at work reviving three classic skins from the IP.Board 2.x range. These are: IP.Board Classic Blue, IP.Board Pro, and IPSBeyond. Each skin has been ported to successfully work with IP.Board 3.0, whilst keeping the look and feel where possible, of IP.Board 2.3.

All three skins have the appropriate templates for all the addons, and are available for preview right here on the company forums! Please be aware that this is a preview and there will still be small issues with the skins, try to think of this as a pre-beta. For the IP.Board Classic Blue and IP.Board Pro skins, the button icons have not been finalised and will change between now and the beta.

We are hoping to have this preview available for around a week, and expect a beta to follow shortly which you can all install on your own forums and help us find any remaining bugs. We have set up a new forum for questions on this new community project, and there is also a new bug tracker category set up for reporting bugs.

This is just the start of the Community Skins project, and we hope to be able to bring you quality, free skins in the near-future. Finally, hats off to the Community Developer team for creating an amazing new project.

Spam Monitoring Service Update

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Our new Spam Monitoring Service is being adopted by thousands of IP.Board owners all over the web and we are starting to see the system "learning" about spam accounts and blocking registrations from all the incoming reports. It's great to see the community of IP.Board owners working together to help combat spam.

We are noticing that some clients are not properly using the service because of domain mismatches. To see if your service is working properly the easiest thing to do is check the logs in the AdminCP under Logs -> Spam Service Logs. If you see a bunch of "0" response codes then there is a problem accessing the service.

Go in your client area and be sure the license URL is accurate and change it if needed. Also be sure you use the Request Spam Service key and input that as your key - not your license key. We have also seen some clients running their forums under forums.example.com but have entered example.com as their license key URL. Be sure to update that to forums.example.com for everything to work properly.

Finally, be sure you are using the "mark as spam" feature in IPB. Not only does this automatically shut down the spammer's account and hide all posts they have made but it also automatically reports that back to IPS as a spam account. This not only helps you but every other IPB owner fight spam registrations.

We hope everyone is enjoying the free Spam Monitoring Service for IPB service license holders and IPS Hosting clients. We have already blocked hundreds of spam account registrations and are very happy with the performance of the service. Enjoy!