We are preparing the first public preview of IP.Board 3.0.0 alpha and look forward to everyone's feedback and help in testing. It is our current plan to preview IP.Board 3.0.0 alpha the second half of next week (around Nov 10 2008 +/- a day or two). As promised, those in the customer group on the IPS forums will receive the preview a bit earlier. Keep an eye on our company blog for updates. The p…
We've been blogging for a while about some of the bigger changes you will see when IP.Board 3 is released. Things like enhanced bbcode management, hooks and plugins, and personal conversations, for example, tend to be a bit more interesting to read than smaller features. However, we wanted to take a moment to discuss some of the other smaller features being added to IP.Board that we haven't talk…
With the upcoming release of IP.Board 3, we will of course be updating our first-party components to be compatible with the new architecture. Releases of IP.Blog, IP.Gallery and IP.Downloads will be available alongside IP.Board 3.0 so that you can update everything at the same time and not have to worry about when your components will be ready. We are working with the community project teams to…
Introduction Administration is an important part of running your site. You need to be able to control your site the way you want to, and you need to be able to do it as quickly as possible. Not everyone has an hour or two to hunt down a setting, after all. Once you start to factor in the fact that other applications (such as IP.Blog, IP.Gallery and IP.Downloads) can integrate into this same ad…
Since IP.Board 2, we've had a "kernel" of classes which IP.Board uses but do not depend on IP.Board to use. A selection of these kernel classes includes DB management, file uploads, emailing, RSS parsing and reading, XML parsing and reading and our proprietry archive format XMLArchive. For example, you could use "classUpload.php" and "classImage.php" in your own modifications or extensions to ha…
We receive requests quite frequently to "add SEO to IPB". This is a very difficult request to quantify and to fulfill. What is SEO? What is wrong with IPB's positioning to search engines presently? What can be done better? We've seen some suggestions over time that make sense, and some we feel would be better left to modifications. While we are not jumping full force into the "SEO" arena …
Brandon blogged a while back about IP.Board's integration points. I wanted to spend a moment discussing the features within IP.Board 3 that all you integrate the board with your website and to create your own network. Member Management Since IP.Board 2, we've had, what we call, "Log In Modules". This is basically a mini-framework to allow custom code to be used easily when authenticating and r…
Around ten years ago, I was hard at work on one of the first 'Private Message' modifications for a board that has long ceased to exist. At the time it was an exciting novelty to be able to message another board member. These days it's an expected feature for any seriously considered forum software. Not much has really changed with messaging's core features. Sure, the interface has become a littl…
As we get further along in the development cycle for IP.Board 3 an obvious step that we will be taking on soon is general testing of the new codebase. While this happens with every release, both internally and publicly, it is even more important for a release as immense as IP.Board 3. The entire underlying codebase has changed and vigorous testing will be needed to iron out all of the issues us …
Possibly the most often requested feature we've had since the very first version of IP.Board is 'friendly URLs'. Although this sounds like you'd expect your URLs to greet you with a self-empowerment phrase first thing in the morning, it really relates to making the board generated URLs a little more attractive to both humans and search engines. I am being very careful to avoid the phrase …
It is necessary in any application to handle error situations. The most common method of handling such a situation is to issue an alert to the user so that they know an error has occurred. While this is sufficient in most cases to resolve the problem, we wanted to address IP.Board's error handling routines a little bit with the upcoming release to try to make them a little more useful. F…
Topic markers have evolved quite a bit over the past few years. What started out as being an almost secondary concern has become quite an important part of the user experience. A Very Brief History Early versions of IP.Board relied on cookies to track read topics. This worked fairly well but it wasn't without problems. Anything to do with cookies is always a little flaky. There is a very finite …
We wanted to use this blog entry to bring you an update on the brand new IPB3 skin. In my previous entry, I didn't go into any detail about the skin itself, but I did introduce the Style Guide and some goals/ambitions for the front-end interface. We're now at a stage where we can talk about the skin itself. Whereas most of our other entries explain one particular feature in-depth, this post will …
Way, way back in the early days when we were planning IP.Board 3, a primary consideration was to completely overhaul the output engine to add several new features and to increase extensibility. Out with the old... The system in IP.Board 2.x is really just a perfunctory "engine" build around a few methods in a class. There was no real cohesive structure with many different files and functions acce…
One of the most requested features of the past few years has been for a reputation system and we've already announced that it will be included in IP.Board 3. We're very excited to finally be releasing the details of this new feature and hope that you will enjoy this new feature! A user's reputation will be displayed on their profile and is based on the number of points that user has. You can conf…
Many of you have been waiting for this blog post, and I can assure you we've been equally as anxious to get it out to you, but we wanted to ensure the bulk of the system was in place first before releasing anything we had to pull back on. General Overview First, as used in this blog entry, the definition of a "hook" is a point in the code execution where a modification author can tell IP.Bo…
Managing reported content in IP.Board 2 and our first party applications for IP.Board 2 is decentralized. When a user reports a post due to inappropriate content, moderators assigned to the area in question will receive either a private message or an email to alert them to the post, and it is then expected that a moderator address the inappropriate content. It can become difficult to track who h…
IP.Board has grown a lot over the years, however at the core of it, addons have always been just that - additional software layered onto IP.Board. Some points of integration have existed to allow things to work smoothly together, but code separation has forced most functionality in IP.Board and components to also remain separated. One of our primary goals with IP.Board 3 is tighter integrat…
When we began planning IP.Board 3, the global search system was one of the first features that we decided would be essential. We've already talked about the global search, now we're going to tell you about the permissions system that makes the global search and other features possible. In previous versions of IP.Board, every application had to maintain it's own permission tables and database inf…
During the initial design phase for IP.Board 3, one of the first areas that we identified for a major overhaul was the search system. In IP.Board 2, each application is required to have it's own search engine, which creates many silo's of data that can not be easily searched. IP.Board 3 will introduce a new global search system that will make all of the content of your community easily searchabl…
Over the past few years our international user base has grown by leaps and bounds, and we want to do our best to support those users and make sure that IPB is a great solution for them. Toward that end, one of our goals for IP.Board 3 is to dramatically improved our language management system. So today I want to introduce you to a few of the upgrades that you can expect to see in that system. F…
A while ago, I posted about the new template tags system in IP.Board 3.0.0. After some initial feedback on the syntax and having developed the system further, I felt it was worth revisiting in our blog. The template tag system is still based on PHP classes (extends and implements, PHP5 fans) which act as plug-ins. These plug-ins are only run when the templates are cached which makes the system v…
We are pleased to announce that the beta releases of IP.Shoutbox 1.0.0 and IP.Tracker 1.2.0 are now available for immediate download! IP.Tracker IP.Tracker is a bug/issue tracking system, it allows members and staff to track certain issues, for examples, bugs within a project you are working on, or even building a house! IP.Tracker supports statuses, severities, and much much more to bring you an…
In a previous blog entry on IP.Board 3.0's new framework, I mentioned that at the core of the new framework is something called 'ipsRegistry'. This blog post will go into more detail and will be of interest to modification authors. Overview IP.Board, like most complex applications, has a need for 'core' data, like settings, session and input data ($_GET, $_POST, etc). There is also a need for a …
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