Invision Community Blog: Invision Community

Resource Improvements for 2.3

Thu, 10 May 2007 18:36:00 +0000

One of the driving focuses for IP.Board 2.3 was resource usage. We wanted to spend some time on improving the underlying operation of IP.Board, even if this meant not adding a lot of new features on the surface. As with most applications that develop beyond a few releases, over time so many features have been stacked into IP.Board that, while not necessarily ineffecient, we felt we could revamp some of the underlying code to make IP.Board run even better.

We wanted to highlight a few of these changes for those who are interested.

The parse_member method of topics.php has been moved to ipsclass.php to make it more centralized, as it's used by many various classes in IP.Board.
Similarly the member_set_information method out of profile.phpand into ipsclass.php as well.
We've added a new feature that allows skin template bits to be shared across different skin files. With 2.3 you can now simply edit the some template bits and automatically update all skin files where those bits are used. There are several template bits making use of this functionality to help reduce the number of skin files loaded on any given page view.

If you would like to make use of this functionality (for example, with a custom modification), you can select to share a template bit to another skin file by going to Look & Feel -> Edit Template HTML for the skin -> (Select a skin group) -> (Select a template bit). Click the drop down button where you would normally edit the template's incoming data variables, and hit "Edit Cache Settings". You can select (or review) secondary skin cache files that will share the template bit you are viewing.
We've added a few more database indexes based on our analysis of some common database queries that IP.Board runs.
With 2.2, we introduced the new profile portal functionality in IP.Board. This uses an iframe to load center content, which requires a second call back to the server to load the center column content. In 2.3 we've pre-loaded the first tab's content to prevent this second request (on the initial profile page load) from being required.
For 2.3 we've added a setting in the Admin CP under CPU Saving and Optimization labeled "Use multi-byte safe wordwrap". International users can continue using the word wrap function more suited to matching 2 and 3 byte character sets, while users with only English text on their forum can use a much more effecient word wrapping function that doesn't need to take multi-byte characters into account.
We've also added a setting in the Admin CP under CPU Saving and Optimization labeled "Disable Topic Summary". Setting this to Yes will turn off the topic summary displayed at the bottom of the Add Reply page. This setting is Off by default (the summary will still display unless you turn it off).
We've disabled the custom error handler by default in IP.Board 2.3, which prevents our custom error handling function from being called with every PHP Notice (which are not displayed). If you'd like to revert this functionality, just edit init.php and change
```
define( 'CUSTOM_ERROR', 0 );
```
to
```
define( 'CUSTOM_ERROR', 1 );
```
We've optimized our post parsing routine by preventing two expensive usort calls from being required, as they are already run when the associated data is saved in the admin CP.
We've enhanced our MySQL database driver when doing field_exists and table_exists method calls by
- Using a 'SHOW FIELDS' query rather than a 'SELECT COUNT(col)' query to determine if a database field exists
- We cache the fields in a table, and the tables in a database, the first time a field_exists or table_exists query is run to prevent having to query the database for the same data later during script execution
Announcements, Private Messages, Calendar Events, and Topic Posts are now parsed entirely on save, rather than when displaying the data (or in the case of topic posts, half on save and half on display). This prevents the parsing from running on display, and prevents having to load several parsing libraries and associated caches when displaying the data.

We've enhanced the rebuild posts tool to also support private messages, calendar events, and announcements for users who will upgrade and need to rebuild the content (to parse html and custom bbcode appropriately). Rebuilding posts will be necessary after upgrading in order to ensure all custom bbcode is parsed, however upon doing so we will be saving many resources at run time, which is by and far a more important consideration.

I hope this helps detail and clarify some of the resource improvements made for 2.3. The good news is that if you didn't notice any of these things already here on the company forums, then our changes are working exactly as we had hoped - same surface functionality, a much stronger backend to handle it.

IP.Tracker Now Available

Fri, 04 May 2007 19:02:41 +0000

We're pleased to announce that the first release of the bug tracker, now known as IP.Tracker, is available for download at IPS Beyond. We'd like to thank Michael, C_ind, and Krocheck for doing such a great job getting this first release available. We'd like to encourage everyone to stop by the tracker forum and post your feedback, as well as submit your own code for inclusion into IP.Tracker.

Download Link: http://www.ipsbeyond.com/forums/index.php?...p;showfile=1043
Support Topic: http://www.ipsbeyond.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=22774
Suggestion Forum: http://www.ipsbeyond.com/forums/index.php?showforum=76

We're very excited to see how the Tracker will evolve and plan on creating more projects like this in the future.

Please note that this free module is not included in your IPS support, if you need any assistance please use the support topic linked above.

New Supported Skins

Fri, 04 May 2007 18:12:00 +0000

As many know, we are in the process of revamping IPS Beyond. Along with that, we will be offering many more supported resources from IPS.

The first will be a new supported skin that will be offered as a secondary default skin to the board. This first skin will be designed as a very basic skin (no gradients for example) thereby allowing for much easier color changes and such when you want to match it to your site. As a supported skin it will be updated between versions of our software.

We will be previewing the new skin on our company forums in the next few days and it will be available along with IP.Board's 2.3 release.

Food Good

Fri, 04 May 2007 15:49:25 +0000

We just wanted to thank BoxerPals (http://www.boxerpals.org) for sending us that lovely box of cookies and fudge. You know how to go straight to our staffs' heart.

We occasionaly get thank you gifts from customers and it's always appreciated.

Bug Tracker Update

Tue, 10 Apr 2007 18:41:44 +0000

I have a quick update for you on the bug tracker project now. I'm happy to announce that Michael and C_ind of IPS Beyond will be leading the bug tracker project. They both have a great track record and have been a huge benefit the the IPS Beyond community and we're very pleased to have them working on the bug tracker. We'll be delivering the code to them tomorrow, and then work will begin on getting the bug tracker into a releasable form.

They'll work on cleaning up what we have and getting an initial release out to the public. From there everyone will be welcome to submit code contributions to them and they will decide to include them or not. I know they have a lot of great ideas themselves, which I'm sure they'll post about soon.

We'll have more information on this soon, if you have any questions please ask in the comments and we'll do our best to answer them.

Free Bug Extermination

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 13:40:54 +0000

One of our major goals is to support our modification community and today I'm excited to tell you about a new venture to help the mod community. As many of you know we have our own internal bug tracker that we use on these forums. We've had numerous requests to release it and now we're ready to do just that, at no charge to our existing customers. The bug tracker will soon be released to IPS Beyond for everyone to download.

This is going to be a unique project for us, we're going to have the IPS Beyond community run the bug tracker project. We'll be selecting a few IPS Beyond members to help us manage this project, they'll be responsible for reviewing and integrating community code contributions. Everyone will be welcome to submit a code contribution for approval.

We're really excited about this project and hope that all of you are too. There will be more details coming soon, such as license, availablity, and who will be heading up this project. We're still considering people for this, if you're intersted feel free to email me at josh@invisionpower.com, please include both your IPS Forum user name and your IPS Beyond user name. Please note that I may not be able to respond to everyone, but we do appreceiate anyone that offers their assistance.

This is just the first in a string of changes to both IPS Beyond and IP.Board that we hope will further energize our already great modding community. Keep checking this blog for news on future changes, they aren't far off. We'd also love to hear your feedback on this and any suggestions you have, please leave a comment and let us know what you think!

Brandon Farber is now a ZCE

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 14:13:20 +0000

Zend, the company that makes the PHP engine, offers certification for users who are interested in measuring their PHP expertise and qualifying their PHP skill level. From Zend's FAQ:

Becoming PHP certified is a measure of your experience in the world of PHP. The goal of the Zend PHP Certification program is to allow PHP professionals to attain the "Zend Certified Engineer" designation. This is identical in concept to other well know certification programs such as "Microsoft's Certified Professionals (MCP)" and the "Sun Certified Java Programmer (CSJP)" programs.

The Zend PHP Certification program aims at creating a measure of distinction that employers can use to evaluate prospective employees. Becoming a Zend Certified Engineer will not make you a better programmer, however, it will most likely improve the chances of your resume standing out from among other applicants vying for the same position.

http://www.zend.com/education/zend_php_cer...tion/faq#root_4

You are tested on your fundamental knowledge of the PHP language, as well as various classes used in PHP and design patterns PHP developers should be aware of.

I took the certification test this past Monday and passed the examination. I am now officially a "Zend Certified Engineer".

Evolution of a Feature: The Attachments System

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 13:45:00 +0000

A lot of the time a significant portion of development time is spent working on items that the end user will never get to see. A case in point is the attachments system.

The attachments system was introduced back in the early days of IP.Board. During the development of IP.Board 2.2 the attachment system came under focus for two reasons.

The first reason was that we were already testing the 'new' attachment system in IP.Dynamic (as shown in this movie) and we wanted to introduce that into IP.Board. The original system forced one to wait for an entire page reload before continuing with a post. The new version used a fancy concoction of javascript and iframes to upload data 'inline' - that is, without a page reload. Naturally, AJAX (XMLHttpRequest) would have been an obvious choice but it is impossible to upload data using current XMLHttpRequest methods.

The second reason was that the code was due an overhaul because it was originally developed long before we had our components system in place. This made the original system inflexible and not very extensible. Infact, Remco had to maintain his own attachments system for the IP.Blog component which duplicated PHP code, HTML templates and SQL information.

With this in mind, we abstracted the code into component friendly modules. This allowed one to simply create a new module to manage the component's settings and upload paths. The main attachment class handled the rest. This saved us a lot of code re-use and allowed us to store attachments from several components in one table.

We think the new interface alone is a marked improvement over the old system. It's much quicker and allows one to upload several attachments quickly.

We have plans to further abstract the attachments system in a later version of IP.Board to allow attachments to be saved and retrieved in different formats.

This rather minor feature really highlights how new web technologies and ways of thinking can push even a secondary feature further along and how we're always looking to improve the efficiency of IP.Board and its components.

Evolution of a Feature: The New Profile

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 15:22:00 +0000

Last time I talked in very broad strokes about how we developed IP.Board 2.2, today I'm going to go into detail on exactly how the new profile system evolved from concept to the finished product you see today.

Our initial goal was to bring some of the social network concepts to the profile system, without going overboard and turning it into a myspace clone. This is a fine line we walk in adding any new feature, how do we make this useful without going to far? We knew that we didn't want to let users customize the CSS or HTML for their profile image, that introduces any number of security and other technical concerns. We thought about letting users move blocks around, to give them some amount of customization, but in the end that was dropped due to the time involved. Here's a portion of the spec we came up with this for this feature:

Enhancements to the profile screen to include:

- Option for user to add a short bio

- Ability for other users to add comments

- Greater integration with Blog/Gallery/DL Manager/Wiki if installed

- Options to turn off all new features if board admin does not want this type of layout

- Multiple personal photos

- Enhance buddy/friends list and display along with profile view

- User ratings

Member list enhancement where you can search for a member in greater detail via custom fields and such.

From that basic spec, Rikki created this mock up:

This is generally how we work with a major feature, we create a rough outline of the features we want to include and then create a mock up to make sure everyone is on the same page. This mock up is quite a bit different from the final product, but you can see most of the elements of the final profile in it. A lot of things changed, the location of the profile picture for example. While this design looks cleaner, it's also less flexible, what if the user wants larger images? With this mock up there isn't much room for that. Also the tabs are clearly different, while we liked these tabs, they did not really fit in with the overall design of IP.Board.

Here's an early shot of the profile system actually running:

This has much more of the final functionality included, even if the design is not quite there yet. You can see that we've already changed how the profile picture looks, as well as how the tabs look. Another major change is that the comments are displayed below the main content area, rather than on the right where they eventually ended up. This change was made for a number of reasons, if the main content area had a lot of information, you'd have to scroll to find the comments and could easily miss them. So we moved them, but added a tab to the content area so that you could view them there if you want.

This screenshot shows a few more changes, you can see the options to edit gender, location, and birthday inline with the profile view. You can also now rate the user as well as see their gender icon next to their name in the visitors/comments/friends block. The options drop down was also added to the top right of the name block, although it would eventually move to the left hand menu.

And here's the final result: My Profile

Through the entire process our staff is constantly reviewing the latest build of the profile and making suggestions. We also brought our test group in around the second screenshot you see, they provided valuable feedback that helped a lot in shaping the final product. They were given a few different builds that included the profile, before we announced the feature to the general public.

Not everything that we wanted made it in to the final product, that happens with essentially every single feature. For example, multiple personal profile photos did not make it, even though we really wanted that. You have to know when to call it a day though, or you'll never be done. We decided that the particular feature did not offer enough of an improvement over what we already had with gallery integration, so it was dropped.

That was another important concept for this feature, we had a lot of user information out there via our various components. We wanted to pull all that data into a central location, to provide much tighter integration and a better overall flow to our products. We also wanted to give mod authors the ability to easily add their mods to the profile tabs.

So to wrap this up, we wanted to bring a fresh look to the profile and at the same time move IPB forward by bringing in social networking concepts where appropriate. I personally think we did a pretty good job of this and we all hope that you agree. If you have any questions or want more info, please ask and we'll do our best to answer.

How we designed IP.Board 2.2

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 13:59:00 +0000

I see this question come up once in awhile on the forums and I thought it would be nice to give you a little behind the scenes information on how we designed IP.Board 2.2.

When we map out a new release, we usually have a specific goal in mind for that release. This can be anything from increasing security, reliability, new features, or some combination of the three. For example, when we started mapping out IP.Board 2.2 the overriding goal of the release was to streamline the software and make it easier to use. We didn't want to focus on adding a lot of new features, we wanted to improve what was already there.

We spent a lot of time looking over every section of the forum and figuring out how we could make everything easier to use. We already knew most of the areas that needed improvement from our day to day customer service issues. We ended up with a huge list of tweaks, enhancements, and minor features that we wanted to include in 2.2.

With development of 2.2 now underway, we began discussing adding one major feature to the release to add a little flavor. We decided that the profile could really use a overhaul, it really had not changed much since 1.0 and was one of the more stagnat portions of the forum. In fact a new profile system was something we had discussed off and on for a few years and with social networks on the rise, it seemed a good time to finally make those changes to IP.Board. Also, while the profile system was certainly a massive change, it still was more or less inline with our goal of improving existing functionality.

We also selected a small group of customers to test 2.2 as it was developed and give feedback on the changes we were making. They were shown the profile system in a few different stages and their feedback was instrumental in the final profile.

All the while this is going on, we continue to closely monitor the feedback forum and keep an internal list of features we want to add to the board. This list basically breaks down into three sections: Include in this release, would be nice in this release, and to be included in a later release. Anything that fit in with our goals for this release found it's way onto one of the first two lists. Anything that did not, but was still a good idea, found it's way onto the third list. After 2.2 was feature locked, everything left was moved to the last category.

That's obviously a pretty broad overview of the process, but I think it gives you a good idea of how we handled 2.2. I plan to go into more detail on some of these points in the next couple weeks. If you have any questions about our development process, feel free to post them here and we may blog on it in the future.

We're still here

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 18:54:14 +0000

Everyone has actually been quite busy lately even with the lack of Blog and News announcements. We thought it time to post something here so you knew we had not all decided to take a month off or something.

After any large release there is a lot of "clean up" work to do like starting on small updates to fix issues or going back to some neglected projects and finishing them up. Our staff has been working hard to do just that and are nearly done and ready to move on to more exciting things.

As stated in a previous entry: we are working on the IPS Beyond enhancements and are quite excited about getting IPS Beyond upgraded. More on that in the coming weeks.

Don't forget that we are hiring! See the job postings announcements for details.

There is a lot of development resources being focused on the IPS Business product line. We will be posting the first official preview of this product line in the coming weeks. We are extremely excited about our approach to business services and are looking forward to releasing this entirely new product line.

Thank you to everyone who has given feedback and noticed our recent customer service improvements. We have another round of customer service improvements that will be phased in soon so expect things to continue to improve. We will also be posting a survey next month for existing customers and hope you can give us ideas.

That's all for this update - we will be posting again soon. Thanks!

Support Responses

Wed, 13 Dec 2006 01:33:34 +0000

Just a quick note on support response times for those not on a guaranteed SLA:

We recognize and apologize for the recent slower than normal response times to support tickets. The release of IP.Board 2.2.0 is causing a huge increase in volume.

The influx of new tickets is starting to calm down and things should be returning to normal soon.

To speed resolution for your support tickets please be sure to include your login information in your original ticket. If you do not, the tech support team is forced to move on to another ticket which slows down the whole process.

Thanks for your understanding! We're working on catching up now.

As an example: from the date of this post, in the last 24 hours the tech support team has sent out 731 replies.

IPS Beyond

Tue, 12 Dec 2006 00:27:46 +0000

Now that IP.Board 2.2.0 is out and being well-received we are going to turn our focus to IPS Beyond. If you are not familiar with IPS Beyond already it is our official customer resource site.

At IPS Beyond customers can enjoy an informal atmosphere in which they can receive customer-to-customer technical support, chat about the products, share tips and tricks, and more. There are also modifications available for download to extend the feature set of your boards.

Many ask why they should use IPS Beyond when tickets are available and the short answer really is: it's up to you. You can certainly use our ticket system if you want the response times quoted under your license type or if you prefer your assistance made in private directly with our staff. IPS Beyond is great for people that want to take our products beyond (har har) what they would normally do or need help in areas not covered by our official support.

Ok, definition done, now here are the upcoming plans:

The web site will become... a web site, so not all the features are interlinked with the forums
Components provided directly from IPS! Some free some low cost.
Premade skins directly from IPS to start off your forum customizations
Greater recognition and rewards for those active members of our community who help others and provide modifcations/skins.
Tighter integration between IPS Beyond and our company forums

Work has already started on the revamp. We will keep you updated. There are lots of details we are still sorting out so give the IPS Beyond team time to get the pieces together... you should be quite pleased.

How very exciting

Fri, 08 Dec 2006 22:02:45 +0000

After literally years of paperwork and waiting on the government's United States Patent and Trademark Office to do its thing we have, at long last, a registered trademark. While our logo and name were always a trademark in the sense they are now a registered trademark in the full on always fun

Alex's CSS guide now available

Fri, 08 Dec 2006 15:39:22 +0000

Just a quick note to let you know that Alex Duggan's excellent CSS guide has been updated for IP.Board 2.2, and is now available on the site :) You can download it as a PDF, or use a web-based version. Both are available at:

http://community.ipslink.com/board/documentation.html

Thanks to Alex for his hard work on putting this together again, we know the community appreciates it!

Rikki

IP.Dynamic Development Update

Fri, 08 Dec 2006 10:22:35 +0000

Laurel resting is an activity that is banned at IPS and for good reason.

While Brandon was busy working on the bug reports for IPB 2.2.0 back in the release candidate stages I managed to tick off another bunch of items from the IP.Dynamic to-do list. Here's a round-up of the latest features to be added.

Staff Calendar

We use an online calendar here at IPS to organize ourselves and to schedule meetings and other events and I thought that most other organizations would likely do the same, so it made perfect sense to add one into IP.Dynamic so that you can keep everything within one application.

4.5mb Quicktime Movie

Task Manager

Maintaining a website is a large and complex responsibility especially when shared with several other people. Some kind of task manager was a must to help keep staff on track and on schedule.

4.6mb Quicktime Movie

Personal Topics

This is like private messages, but better! The private message implementation found at IPB emulaltes the email system. You can PM one member and CC in others. The problem with that, like email, is that there is no real way to have a discussion with more than one person without a lot of copy and pasting.
Enter Personal Topics. They behave in a similar manner to IPB topics with the topic starter becoming the moderator for the topic giving them the power to remove and block members from the topic.

6.4mb Quicktime Movie

Content Versioning

Every good CMS must be able to store versions of content and even more importantly roll back to them even when they've been deleted from the content repository. Unfortunately a lot of so-called CMS software doesn't have this functionality.
Fortunately, IP.Dynamic isn't like most other CMS software! IP.Dynamic versions pages, system templates, content templates and content blocks. It's a modular system so one can write ones own modules to add versioning to any area of IP.Dynamic.

9.6mb Quicktime Movie.

The fun doesn't end with 2.2

Fri, 08 Dec 2006 03:58:49 +0000

If you're like many readers, you likely think that now that the 2.2 and site launch is complete, we're going to simply sit in our cushy executive chairs, ending our hunger for world domination. Oh how wrong you are for we at IPS are never satisfied!

To the contrary, we've been working on several new things behind the scenes. Some you may not immediately notice, such as the addition of new employees and behind the scenes planning, developing and testing of upcoming products and services. Others you will soon notice with the introduction of services tied to our new state-of-the-art datacenter.

For many years we've leased rack-space, servers and equipment from various third-party
providers and while, on the whole, this has served us well, we've simply outgrown the server leasing model. To that end, we've secured and built-out space in a facility not far from us in Reston, VA. We now own everything, from the rack to the core routers (Cisco 6500's for those techies that are interested) to the servers themselves. This has allowed us to offer much more flexible solutions across the board, which you will soon find more details about on this very blog.

I'll refrain from boring you excessively, but suffice it to say we have a 10 meg, multi-homed redundant uplink to various transit providers including Level 3, AboveNet, BTN, GlobalCrossing and Cogent. If you've noticed, the IPS sites and forums have never been faster since we migrated our corporate servers to this new facility.

That's just a brief overview of what we've done. Wait until you see what's next. VPS anyone?

Tickets, tickets, and more tickets.

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

So Charles doesn't feel so lonely here, I've decided to post an entry...

These past two days have been quite the change from what it has been recently. The number of tickets per day has honestly increased tenfold. But that is expected with a new release, right? Almost every ticket is getting a response within the first 24 hours of being opened, which is an amazing feat itself. We have knocked down the tickets over 50% from what they were this morning, but there is a steady flow of them coming in.

This has been one of the smoothest releases since I've worked here - most of the issues we are seeing are either server issues, or other issues that could have been avoided. That brings me to a couple of reminders.

See: Charles' post below.
There is a lot of confusion on the upgrade system. Particularly one setting that allows you to run the queries manually. It seems some users are selecting this, but not running the queries. This causes the board to think it was upgraded, when it actually wasn't. This can cause you to get 'IPS Driver Errors'. If you are comfortable with databases, you can fix this by removing the 2.2 upgrade rows from the ibf_upgrade_history table, and rerunning the upgrade without checking the box to manually run queries. We are working on ways to make this not an issue for future releases.
Be sure to check out our Knowledge Base.
We have been adding patches/information in that as we find issues. We also have a bunch of articles on pre-2.2 issues. So if you have an issue, please see if it is covered in the Knowledge Base. Most articles include patches that you can even apply yourself, so there will be no delay getting it fixed.

Well, that is about it for now. To everyone who has submitted a ticket - we haven't forgotten or lost your ticket. We are going through them as fast as we can, and you will get a response as soon as possible. Thank you for patience with this during this busy time.

Off to go answer some more tickets. :)

IP.Board 2.2.1

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 19:53:08 +0000

Already? Didn't we just release IP.Board 2.2.0?

Yes and yes. Ah, the nature of product development. We knew we would have to do an IP.Board 2.2.1 release right after releasing 2.2.0 so it is no surprise. Although we tested IP.Board thoroughly before release there is never a way to know what will happen once a product is released out into the world.

On the whole it's been very stable and we are quite pleased. Lots of odd little errors or issues specific to special server configurations. Some patches for specific conditions (like running on PHP 5.0.4) have already been added to our knowledge base. We are also going to add more clarification in 2.2.1 for frequently asked support questions that are not bugs but just confused areas.

While 2.2.1 isn't exactly an emergency we will die if it isn't released sort of thing, we will probably release it sometime during the week of Dec 11 so those people with the "odd" issues can be sorted. Also, the technical support team would probably welcome some integrated help on areas that are confusing some users :)

And speaking of support: the flood of requests with the release is starting to calm down so if you are waiting a bit longer than usual for ticket replies that should start to show improvement very soon.

Upgrade Confusion

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

We had several meetings over the last couple months on improving the upgrade system for IP.Board 2.2 and it certainly has improved. The system is generally safer and warns you if something doesn't go right. Not to mention IP.Board itself will scan your database and report problems in the admin area.

Now that IP.Board 2.2 is released we are finding that although the upgrade routine works there is still some confusion. Particularly the manual upgrade routine.

So... note that if you check the manual upgrade option when running the upgrade system, the upgrade system will tell you what SQL queries to run. It will not run those queries for you as you told it you wanted to do them manually :)

Keith from the tech support team and Brandon from the development team will be getting together tomorrow and work on better explanations of the difference between the manual and automatic upgrade modes. The current plan is to implement the changes to the upgrade as a hot fix to 2.2.0 as the changes will just be instructions (not code changes) so no bugs could be introduced.

We always ask you to report bugs you find in our software but feel free to report things that work but are just a little confusing in our feedback forums. Part of making good software is also making it friendly to manage :)

Welcome to the new... everything

Wed, 06 Dec 2006 21:58:24 +0000

As most of the world now knows, we have released IP.Board 2.2.0 along with all its components (IP.Gallery, IP.Blog, IP.Downloads). The latest rounds of releases took a bit longer than the previous round as we took extra time in beta testing and being sure all of our proverbial avians were in an ordered queue. We think taking this extra time has paid off.

In one day we did all this:

Released IP.Board 2.2.0
Released IP.Gallery 2.1.0
Released IP.Blog 1.3.0
Released IP.Converge 1.0.0 PB 1
Launched our brand new web site
Updated our IP.Nexus-powered client area
Released the new IP.Board documentation
Managed to keep our sanity during the process

We decided this time to release the products "silently" the night before the official release day so those people who frequent our site and forums would get a jump-start. Of course it took all of 30 seconds for everyone to notice it was out. And people wonder why we do not publish release dates :).

So far probably our smoothest release especially considering all that happened in one day. Good work to all the IPS staff involved.

It's our goal to keep this company blog up to date between official announcements so everyone knows what is going on. We will also publish sneak peaks of upcoming software and services. Thank you for your business and interest!