Invision Community Blog

IP.Board 3.4 Dev Update: "Best Answer" Feature

We're always amazed at how diverse our customer base is and how many different uses customers find for their IP.Board. Many customers, ourselves included often have a forum that invites questions such as pre-sales or support forums. These forums often generate a lot of topics with many replies and it can often be confusing for other readers to know which reply definitively answered the original question.

The Best Answer Feature
IP.Board comes with a brand new 'best answer' feature. This enables the topic starter (when allowed), moderators (where allowed) and super moderators/admins to mark a post as the best answer.

This screen shot shows a typical question topic and the best answer has been flagged. You'll also notice that at the top, a small excerpt of the post is shown with a button to go and read the full post. This is useful for when the best answer may be on a different page to the one you're viewing.

Looking at the forum view, you'll see that the answered topic has a badge that when clicked takes you to the flagged post.

You can also quickly filter the forum list to remove answered or unanswered topics. This will be handy for forums that have staff answering questions!

As you'd expect, this can be enabled on a per-forum basis and you can choose whether the topic starter can flag a topic or not on a per-forum basis. There is also a moderator toggle to empower moderators to flag a topic as the best answer. This enables you to retain as much control over this feature as you need.

We hope you enjoy this feature new to IP.Board 3.4. We know that it's been requested many times and we're very pleased at being able to include it!

39,909 views

Matt

September 18, 201213 yr

Introducing IPS Backup Service

The new IPS Backup Service is our latest addition to our Community Enhancements services being introduced in IP.Board 3.4. This service allows for remote-backups of your community database processed constantly without any work on your part.

How it Works

The service works by logging all "write" queries to your database that are processed by the IPS Community Suite. What this means is that any time a database entry is inserted, updated, or deleted a log of that action is created. We ignore what we call transactional tables like sessions and topic markers that are updated often but if you were to lose those tables it does not really matter to your community. When you first activate the service it populates an entry in this log table for all existing items in your database to start the process fresh.

The Suite then takes these logged queries and, every so often on a task, will collect a certain amount of the oldest queries and send them to the IPS Backup Service servers (over a secure connection of course). It limits how many it sends per-cycle to ensure we don't run out of memory or reach any post limits. Once those queries are successfully sent to the remote server it will delete them from the log.

Using this method we do not have to create huge database dumps of your community which can cause all sorts of issues with timeouts, disk space, bandwidth requirements, and general hosting problems.

Security and Protection

When your data is sent to our servers it is stored on what we call our Internet gateway server. This server is a sort of dumb system that just accepts the incoming data and temporarily stores it for later processing. The "real" storage servers that permanently process and store your data are not even connected to the Internet. Of course we also implement other security measures that we will not get into but by starting with this very basic approach of not even being on the public Internet you can imagine that we take security seriously.

Your data is stored in three states: active, archive, and snapshot. Active is your database that exists as it processes the incoming data. It's always the most recent copy. Of course the problem with this is if someone were to get into your community and prune all your posts that prune action is also sent to our backup servers meaning that your remote backup would also be pruned. Obviously that's an issue.

To mitigate such risks we also automatically take a weekly archive of the active backup. We keep two of these archive backups (two weeks) at a time. This means that if someone were to do a prune of your topics or, for example, actually just shut off the backup services in your AdminCP you would still have a recent archive on our systems. The snapshot state is basically the same as an archive but it's one that you can manually request in the Client Area that's taken when you tell us.

Failure Support

At any time various things can happen that might make your remote backup no longer be of any use to you. Maybe there was an issue in your IPS Community Suite that caused an important query to not be logged. Perhaps you manually ran a query outside of the Suite. Maybe our remote servers suffered an issue. You never really know and that's why the system has two-way failure support.

If the backup processing on your install has issues, or you manually do something, you can request a reset of the service in the AdminCP. This will basically start you from scratch and empty your remote backup to start from the beginning (note that archives are kept to keep this from being used maliciously). On the other hand, if our backup service has a fault (or it detects that there is some mis-match with your data) the service will do the reverse and self-delete then tell your Suite to restart from scratch.

The idea here is to think ahead and recognize faults can happen and have the ability to both manually and automatically refresh a backup as needed.

Accessing Data

The last step in the process is of course accessing your backed up data whenever you may need it. We employ a dual authentication process to protect you: [*]Later when you might request to access your backup an email is first sent to the stored email address in step 1 with a download key. [*]Once the backup is ready a second email is sent to the current email address on record on your client account with a download link. [*]You need both the download key and the download link to access. So why do all that? The scenario we are concerned about is if someone were to gain access to your client area account on our site and change your email address to their email address. In that case they could download your whole database through our system. However, since we store your old email address that cannot be edited this makes it so they cannot access as they need to be able to check that email account too. If you lose access to one or both email addresses we will have alternate procedures in place. Of course this is not a 100% solution, nothing really is when dealing with account security, but we think it's a great extra level of protection for you. Pricing and Service As you can imagine this sort of service will require a lot of fine-tuning and will also become a mission-critical component of your community so we want to be sure we get it right. Therefore, we will initially be launching the IPS Backup Service as a beta service and there will be no cost to use it. The service will improve over time while in beta based on your feedback and, once we are comfortable that we can stand behind it and you can trust it, we will be able to announce pricing and full support. During the beta stage will be engaging our clients who are comfortable with database management to simulate failures and restores to confirm the viability of a backup. This service is very important so it's also important we check every angle possible. We are very excited and hopeful that the IPS Backup Service will be a welcomed addition to the IPS Community Suite. The service was created because of the sometimes heartbreaking situations we see in technical support from people who lose years of community data because their host fails. We really hope that this service will help people out in those horrible situations. Note that if you host your community with IPS we already perform backups for you.
[*]When you first activate the IPS Backup Service your current client area email address is stored.

23,329 views

Charles

August 29, 201213 yr

Switch to IPS

IP.Board 3.4 is approaching and will be released soon with all sorts of great enhancements such as SEO improvements, upgraded editor, login enhancements, core performance improvements, lots of minor changes from feedback, and more still to be announced.

This is a great time to take a look at IPS if your community might still be running another software. Perhaps you have a friend or a site you visit frequently using another software and you want to encourage them to switch to the IPS Community Suite. By starting the switch process now you can have your community ready to go, be familiar with IPS software and services, and have any questions answered so when IP.Board 3.4 is released you can jump right on this new version!

Advantages of IPS

IPS prides itself on a few key points that have driven our success for over 10 years making community software. While there are many points these are the key factors:

Our staff is engaged in the community

We use our own software

Great customer service

Active, responsive development

Switching to IPS

If you are using another software provider and are ready to switch to IPS please check out our converter page on our site. We offer a free converter script that supports many existing packages. If yours is not listed please contact us and we will do our best to assist you. The converter script is very easy to use and makes a copy of your old data so you are free to try a few test conversions before going live. That's a great way to be sure all is well as switching software can be disruptive to your community so the more careful you are the better.

Depending on what software you're switching from, our converter scripts can convert various data in your community. For many software packages we also offer 301 redirection scripts so your old URLs will automatically redirect to their new location. This allows for as minimal an impact as possible to your SEO and search engine exposure. Of course changing software will always have a short and medium term impact to your visibility but these scripts are a great way to help mitigate that.

Ask Us or our Clients

If you have any questions, need some advice, or want to get first hand experience just email sales and we will be happy to help. You might also consider posting in our pre-sales forum where you can get first-hand information directly from IPS clients. By talking to IPS clients directly you will get a realistic view of what's involved from others who have done it. There's no better way to decide if IPS is best for you than to talk to clients who use our software and services.

Special Promotion

We are running a special promotion now through 1 October 2012 for anyone wanting to switch to IPS Community Suite. Use the coupon code SWITCH at checkout to receive 10% off your entire order. This is in addition to the existing bundle discounts you get when purchasing multiple IPS apps!

Take this great opportunity to have a look at IPS Community Suite. Tell a friend or convince a web site you visit to have a look. Try our free demo to experiment with our Suite for a few days. Ask our sales team questions or post in our pre-sales forum to get information from existing IPS clients. Our community and staff are welcoming and here to help!

Current IPS clients can also use our SWITCH coupon code. It's a great time to get another license...
We talk to clients, joke with clients, and listen to feedback. Sometimes we cannot implement every bit of feedback we receive (image the chaos if we tried!) so we try to spot trends to pick out what is clearly a must have change.
Both on our company forums and our own web site we use what we make. Nearly all of our staff comes from a background where they also ran their own community giving us a unique perspective as both creators and consumers of our services.
The technical support services we offer are second to none and any IPS client will tell you that we always do our best to help a client out with technical problems as quickly as we can.
Perhaps our biggest advantage and difference is our continual development and improvements. You will never see us sitting around idle. There is always something new in development or something old getting improved. Sometimes these are big changes and sometimes they're small but we are always doing something behind the scenes. We never abandon our clients and allow our software to stagnate.

12,717 views

Charles

August 27, 201213 yr

Introducing IPS CDN Service

A Content Delivery Network, or CDN is a distributed system of servers to provide high-availablity and high-performance. For example, rather than serving your CSS, images and Javascript from the same webserver that PHP and the rest of your community runs on, these are loaded from a network of servers, improving performance and reducing load on your server.

Having a CDN can improve your community's quality, reliability and scalability, as well as reduce your hosting costs. By offloading the serving of images, CSS, Javascript, etc. you free up your system resources to serve the real content which makes for a better experience. Some say that there are also SEO advantages o CDN use.

The IPS Community Suite has supported Content Delivery Networks for some time. However, they can be expensive and difficult to set up. Many clients want a CDN but do not know where to go and we hope to help them out.

We are pleased to announce a new service, IPS CDN, which will allow you to quickly, easily and inexpensively start using this important technology on your community.

How does it work?

The IPS CDN service will be supported in IP.Board 3.4. After upgrading, you'll notice a new section of the Admin Control Panel called "Community Enhancements" - one of the options available here is "IPS CDN".

On this page you'll be able to enable the CDN, which will take you to a new page in the client area where you can purchase credits:

Note that the packages shown in this screenshot are examples only.

As you will notice from that screenshot, you can purchase credits for your CDN account as and when you want, and optionally set up your account to automatically top-up as you run low on credit.

Once this is done, your community will automatically start using the CDN service. If you do not set up automatic top-up, we'll send you an email when your account is running low on credit (when you go below 10GB, 5GB and 1GB). If your credit runs out without you topping up, your community will automatically stop using the CDN service - there will be no interruption to the running of your community, it will automatically notice there's no credit remaining and go back to serving resources locally. If you top up again, it will automatically enable itself again.

One problem of using the IPS Community Suite (or indeed any application) with a CDN is that when a resource is changed locally, the CDN needs to be recached to notice the new changes. Unless the CDN is notified of a change it will keep serving the old copy of the file - sometimes for up to 24 hours. This can cause much confusion to you and your visitors.

To remedy that problem: since editing skins and the CSS is done from the Admin CP, the system will automatically call the CDN service to recache resources as and when you change them, so you don't need to worry about this.

You can keep track of your usage in the Admin CP, where you'll be able to see a graph with your usage over the last 7 days. You'll also be able to buy more credits, disable the system, and manually recache.

How much does it cost?

The service will be based on "Pay As You Go" pricing. Meaning there's no minimum sign up fee - you simply purchase credit on your account and that credit is good for an amount of data transferred through the service. As you use the CDN, your credit will decrease and you can top up with more.

The base price for the CDN will be at or around $0.18 per GB of bandwidth served through the CDN and may drop as you reach higher levels. We realize this is rather unspecific right now but we are negotiating with CDN providers to get the best bulk pricing. It will be our goal to pass any volume savings we receive on to our clients as we look at this service is a great way to enhance our client's experience and want to encourage its use.

Everyone will however be offered their first Gigabyte for free to try out the service before purchase.

Of course if you do not want to use the IPS CDN service and want to use another provider you can certainly do that. We believe the click and go setup for the IPS CDN service will encourage usage and benefit all IPS Community Suite users.

Future CDN Integration

Right now the CDN is a basic "pull" implementation whereby it simply pulls data from your live server then serves it via its cache. In the future we hope to implement storage services. This would mean that uploaded files would be stored on the CDN rather than your local computer. This is great to reduce storage costs on your hosting and also means that, other than the actual processing of data, your community's files are geographically distributed. For our power users this would also mean even easier cluster/cloud hosting.

Storage and other CDN integrations will come in future versions of the IPS Community Suite so for now enjoy the current features while we work on even more great additions!

30,447 views

Mark

August 23, 201213 yr

IP.Board 3.4 Dev Update: VigLink

VigLink is a service which works with a number of affiliates to provide you commission when a user visits the affiliate from your website.
So, as an example, let's say someone posts a link to an Amazon item on your community, with VigLink integration, you'll be provided with compensation every time a user purchases that item if they bought it after following the link from your site.

VigLink, and services like it, have been a popular addition for many of our clients and we have received requests for built in integration. Monetizing your community is something IPS has been working to enhance support for over the recent years. From ad code integration spots to our full commerce system IP.Nexus our clients who are interested in monetizing their community have benefited greatly. The addition of VigLink enhances those offerings.

This video provides more information on how VigLink works:

We've been working closely with VigLink to provide direct integration with this service in IP.Board 3.4.

Setting it up couldn't be easier - we've built a new page in the Admin CP called "Community Enhancements" which lists all of the services we integrate with. You simply click on "VigLink" in this page and you'll be taken to the VigLink site where you can either sign up, or log in with your existing VigLink account, if you have one:

Once that's done - you're all setup. You don't need to copy and paste any code - the integration will be enabled for you, and you can now track your usage through your VigLink account.

There's a number of settings you can configure for finer control over how the system works. You can set which users VigLink applies to (both in terms of who gets redirected through them and whose posts get VigLink enabled) and you can disable the system on a per-forum basis:

We'll also be releasing an update to our iOS app around the 3.4 release to support this integration too. IPS benefits financially through a reciprocal marketing agreement when someone uses VigLink through our software however we do not take any cut of the commission offered from VigLink to you. Anyone familiar with IPS knows that taking a cut is not how we would operate :smile:

Community Enhancements Section

Mentioned earlier in this entry, the AdminCP has a new section called Community Enhancements. This area contains all the various external services that your IPS Community Suite can use to enhance your community. It's not all new though: we have moved services like our Spam Monitoring Service to this section as that too is an external enhancement to your community.

We are also introducing some new services that will integrate with your community in this section! Certain services are from external partners, like VigLink, that clients may opt to use and some are new IPS-created services. Some services are free and some carry a small cost depending on the nature of what's being offered. They are all of course optional and if you do not enable them they do not execute or engage any resources in the Suite.

Keep an eye out for future blog entries introducing these new Community Enhancements!

39,866 views

Mark

August 22, 201213 yr

IP.Board 3.4 Dev Update: SEO Improvements

As part of our regular SEO round-up when developing a major new release, I'm happy to run through the latest SEO changes we've made for IP.Board 3.4.

Friendly URL Changes
After much research and discussion with other SEO focused forum owners, I decided to revamp the FURL structure when handling additional page parameters.
The existing format uses the following structure:

board.com/topic/123-title/page__foo__bar

This is then parsed as foo=bar when converted to a normal query string.

The problem with this is that it confuses search engines because it looks like another page rather than just a variant of a single page. We have a canonical tag which helps to reduce confusion but it's still not perfect from an SEO perspective.

With that in mind, the new format is:

board.com/topic/123-title/?foo=bar

Now humans and search engines can quickly see that these are additional parameters of a single page. The canonical tag now backs this up and there is absolutely no confusion!

New page parameters
Another item that often came up when discussing URL structures and best practises was the current pagination method which is:

board.com/topic/123-title/page__st__30

This is then parsed as st=30 when converted to a normal query string. This tells IP.Board to start from the 30th post in that topic, which is page two if we have 30 posts per page.

This was less than optimal because some search engines had trouble understanding this was an additional page of the same topic.

I've made this more explicit by making use of a special page parameter:

board.com/topic/123-title/page-2 board.com/topic/123-title/page-2?foo=bar

The eagle eyed will notice that there no additional slash after page-2. This means that search engines (and humans!) will identify the root page, a page with parameters and a page of a topic:

board.com/topic/123-title/ board.com/topic/123-title/?foo=bar board.com/topic/123-title/page-2 board.com/topic/123-title/page-2?foo=bar

In this case 'board.com/topic/123-title/' is the root page.

Of course, IP.Board will happily 301 redirect visitors using the old st=x method or the old page__x method.

Unread Topics
In IP.Board 3.3, there was a special 'unread' folder added to topic links on the board index. This was often confusing as it seemed like yet another page from the root topic. In 3.4 we're using:

board.com/topic/123-title/?view=getnewpost

This explicitly states that it is simply another way of viewing that single topic.

Statuses
In IP.Board 3.3, each status update from a member was given a new page, like so:

board.com/statuses/id/12345

During Google's Panda update, websites with 'thin' content could be penalised. It could be determined that these status update pages are very thin and a moderately busy board could generated thousands of them.

In IP.Board 3.4, we use the new FURL format:

board.com/status/user/1-matt/?status_id=12345

As you'd expect:

board.com/status/user/1-matt/

This URL shows all of the user's status updates.

Multiple SEO Titles
I've improved the SEO URL builder to allow for multiple 'seoTitles'. Right now, IP.Board 3.3 is limited to just one, so you can only create FURLs like so:

board.com/topic/123-#{title}/

Multiple titles will allow you to create complex titles like so:

board.com/#{title-1}/123-#{title-2}/

In addition to the bundled inclusion of the old IP.SEO, this wraps up most of the big SEO changes coming in 3.4. I'm confident that the new pagination and new FURL structures will clarify your site's structure to search engines making it easier to spider and associate content without being penalised for thin content.

Of course we're always open to well-constructed feedback on SEO improvements. Everything you see in this blog entry was implemented from feedback. Please start a topic in our feedback forums if you have SEO suggestions not directly related to the content of this blog entry.

22,035 views

Matt

August 15, 201213 yr

Nominated Charities

IPS is introducing a program whereby we nominate a charity to receive our attention and support. These nominated charities are chosen by IPS for the work they do and how they might impact us personally.

The first nominated charity is Autism Speaks. You can find out more information on our charity page.

IPS and our Client Community

It is our goal to expose various charities to our client community and organize our many thousands of clients to do something good. We make community software and sell that software to our clients who use it to create thriving online communities. We believe that IPS and its clients share a common goal of communication and conversation - be it online or offline - and can work together for a greater purpose.

Every so often we will change up our nominated charity to spread around the good will of our client community to other worthy causes.

Please consider donating to this or other charities we may nominate in the future. We will collect all funds and distribute them to the charity and IPS will also donate funds as a company.

6,352 views

Charles

August 10, 201213 yr

IP.Board 3.4 Dev Update: IPS Connect

The IPS Community Suite provides a fantastic community solution for all kinds of websites.
For many of our customers, the community is just one component of their site. Many of these customers utilise single sign-on systems for integrating the community with the other areas.

At IPS, we get requests for this on a regular basis, and over the years, I've worked on many of these solutions as part of my day-to-day workload.
Companies like Evernote and Roxio have created a single sign-on solution with the IPS Community Suite and their existing user databases.
Other companies which manage large numbers of communities like the NFL and the NHL have created a single sign-on solution allowing all their communities to share the same user database.

Creating these systems can be quite arduous though. Every setup has different ways of handling data and systems must be created bespoke to each situation.

6 years ago, we had an idea to simplify this. What if we could create a solution that would allow a network of web applications to share user information? We created a solution and called it IP.Converge.

Over these 6 years though, the internet has changed. IP.Converge was designed to be a "master" in a network of "Converge compatible" applications. This approach had two main shortcomings: firstly, it is often the case that our software needs to be the "slave" in a single sign-on network, secondly, the approach was too general which made both facilitating full single sign-on (where users are automatically logged into all applications after logging into one) was difficult, and making non-IPS software compatible with Converge was extremely difficult.

Fortunately, we think we've come up with a better solution. As of IP.Board 3.4, we are completely removing support for IP.Converge, and have developed a new system, which we're calling IPS Connect.

IPS Connect has no central application. In an IPS Connect network, one of the applications will serve as the master, and there will be any number of slaves working off it.
When writing IPS Connect, we had three main objectives: So what does this mean? As of IP.Board 3.4, it will be easy, and completely seamless to create a single sign-on network between 2 or more IP.Boards, and 3rd party developers will also be able to write support for any other web application to join in in the network. How does it work? For the simplicity of this example, let's say you're networking 2 IP.Board installations. The "master" installation has a secret key which will be given the "slave" installation. When a user visits the "slave" installation, IP.Board will check if they are logged into the "master" installation - if they are it will log them in automatically, creating the account if necessary. If they're not logged in, but then choose to log in on the "slave" installation - they will automatically be logged into the "master" installation. This happens transparently, without the user leaving the "slave" installation. When a user registers or updates their account, the "master" application will be pinged and updated. Again, this happens transparently. How simple is it to write support for my custom web application? Really simple! If you want your application to be the "master", all you need to do is create a single php file which "slave" applications will send requests to. This needs to do things like facilitate log ins, account registrations, etc. If you want your application to be the "slave", you simply ping that file on the "master" application when stuff happens. We've created 2 completely functional example websites which demonstrate exactly how to do this, which will be available to download when 3.4 is released.
[*]Single Sign-On must be completely automatic and effortless. After logging into any application in the network, the user should be automatically logged into all others. And similarly, after logging out, the same. [*]The process should be completely transparent to the user. The user should be able to register an account, or update account information on any application in the network, and these changes should be pushed transparently to the other applications. [*]It should be easy for developers to make their web applications compatible with IPS Connect - and they should be able to make their web applications serve as either the master or the slave.

39,060 views

Mark

August 9, 201213 yr

IP.Blog 2.6: Moderation, Interface, and Odds & Ends

Custom Sidebar Blocks and Profile Photos
Since the IP.Board 3.2 update, the look & feel of content blocks and sidebar widgets has been somewhat left behind in IP.Blog. Inconsistent avatar image sizes and design decisions that were made for IP.Board 3.1 have left some areas of IP.Blog looking dated and disconnected from the rest of the suite.

For IP.Blog 2.6 these sidebar blocks have been given an overhaul and brought up to date with IPB 3.3.

In addition to this, the much loathed pink Twitter block has finally been replaced by a more modern and clean look;

vs

Inline Moderation
Moderating blogs from the front end has become somewhat tedious over time. With this release the moderation tools have been updated and now use the much more friendly popup style as seen in the forums. Furthermore, moderation now works across pages. No more selecting multiple items only to move to page 2 and see your options removed for you to start over.

This inline popup is also context aware and only shows those options that are relevant to the selected items.

Managing Categories
Another source of frustration for Blog users and an issue that comes up often is the inability to edit individual blog categories. Many users have spent time setting up categories only to discover they cannot be renamed and must be removed and then re-added causing the blog entries to have to be recategorized. Thankfully it is now possible to edit these category names inline on the front end with the changes automatically assigned to entries.

Wrapping Up
Continuing to ensure the look & feel of all IPS products remains intuitive and consistent is a key goal. We hope that these small changes will help refine the end user experience in IP.Blog adding to the already feature rich options.

Whilst it's not always possible to release with no outstanding bugs, I'm also pleased to say that all confirmed bugs reported to the tracker have been fixed for IP.Blog 2.6 in time for QA testing.

7,735 views

Andy Millne

August 8, 201213 yr

License Changes Live

The license changes that we blogged about back in May are now live!

License Structure Changes

The main change is that IP.Board is no longer be the "root" license item. You now have a license to the IPS Community Suite and will then have the various applications as additions under that root license. Anyone with a current IP.Board Standard License or IP.Board Business License will see this change happen automatically in their client area in the coming weeks. There will be no change to your services of course. Those with an IP.Board Business License will see a new Priority Support package listed.

Here is how licenses worked before today:
IP.Board Standard License
IP.Blog IP.Gallery IP.Nexus IP.Content etc.

Here is how licenses now work:IPS Community Suite
IP.Board IP.Blog IP.Nexus etc.

Renewal Consolidation

We have also consolidated renewal dates on your packages. It was very cumbersome for both IPS and our clients to have the various apps under a license have different renewal dates. So we have changed this to prorate purchases so they all have the same renewal dates. Of course the renewal frequency and amount will not change from how it is now. For example, if you choose to add IP.Nexus to your existing IPS Community Suite license the order system will automatically give you a credit based on the number of days until your next renewal cycle so everything balances out.

When we switch over to this new setup your existing purchases will also be prorated and your renewal date for your licenses will adjust based on a formula that gives you credit for all days remaining on all of your licenses. This means your renewal date will change slightly as the system gives you credit for prepaid renewals.

If your license is currently expired then you will still be put into this new structure but just in an expired state so nothing will change. Legacy license holders will see no change to their license terms but will also see an adjustment in the structure shown here.

FAQs

What if I don't want to renew a particular app?
No problem! Just log into the client area, click the app you don't want to renew and then click Cancel. This will cancel the renewals on that app and adjust the renewal rate on the IPS Community Suite license.

How do I cancel my IPS Community Suite license?
There is no need to cancel the IPS Community Suite license as it does not have renewal charges unless you have an active app under the license.

If I do not renew one or all of my apps what happens?
If you do not renew you will lose access to support, upgrades, and services related to the applications you chose not to renew. It's of course in your best interest to keep up to date with our latest releases for performance, features, and security plus access to our great support services. If you let your services expire you can of course renew them at any time by going to the client area, clicking your expired package, and then selecting Renew Now.

What happens when I purchase a new app?
If you want to extend the capabilities of your IPS Community Suite by purchasing a new app you can easily do this in the client area. Just order the app as normal and then you will associate it with your Suite license. Your purchase price will be automatically adjusted to account for the next renewal date on your license to keep everything in balance.

Why the change?
Not only is this structure easier for everyone (just one renewal date for everything) but also goes along with our future plans of releasing all of our products as one Suite rather than individual apps under IP.Board. It's an exciting project and we cannot wait to roll it out over the next few releases.

12,909 views

Charles

August 7, 201213 yr

IP.Board 3.4 Dev Update: Editor improvements

With a product history of over ten years, it's quite often a challenge keeping the product right on trend. Old technologies go and we make provisions to remove them and likewise, we make provisions to incorporate new technologies.

For example, IP.Board was the first bulletin board to incorporate Ajax functionality all the way back in IP.Board 2.1 back in 2005. We were also one of the first boards to add in 'WYSIWYG' editing to make constructing styled posts much easier. Of course, this was long before jQuery and Prototype frameworks make writing javascript easier so we hand-rolled our own editor. This was eventually replaced in February 2011 with the arrival of IP.Board 3.2 in which we used CKEditor.

However, the underpinnings of the editor remained unchanged which lead to some challenges. For example, the actual post was saved as BBCode in the database. This meant that the post had to be converted into BBCode before saving and then converted back into HTML before editing or showing the post. This lead to some frustrating due to inconsistencies with this process.

Happily, the underpinnings to our editor have now been completely rewritten to increase stability and to remove these inconsistencies. Now, the post is actually saved as cleaned HTML (via the excellent HTMLPurify) which means it does not have to be converted between states. You can still edit the BBCode manually if you wish, but this is handled by a single BBCode plug-in for CKEditor. This is very exciting because it frees up IP.Board from having to deal with BBCode manually saving hundreds of lines of code.

Of course, your custom BBCode will work normally and because of built-in legacy functionality you won't need to convert your posts to the new format as this is handled 'on-the-fly'.

We've also taken the time to improve several other elements within the editor:

Code Boxes
The code box has been improved to allow you to select the code format (HTML, Javascript, PHP, etc) and a starting line number. Tabs and spaces are also preserved correctly.

Live Previews
When adding quote and code boxes, the editor will preview them live, like so:

The code box when rendered fully contains striping and line numbers which makes it easier to read the code:

We're confident that by rewriting the editor and parsing engines, the editor in IP.Board 3.4 will be much more stable and reduce those annoyances which can sometimes crop up when writing complex posts.

36,191 views

Matt

August 2, 201213 yr

IP.Blog 2.6: Audience Building and Promotion

Another of the goals for IP.Blog 2.6 development was to increase the level of user engagement, both from existing on-site users and from elsewhere.

Auto Share on Content Creation
To complement the existing share links which appear alongside blog entries, it is now possible to automatically share Blog content with Facebook and Twitter at the time of posting. This is possible even if the content author has not yet linked their account with the sharing services. If a user has not yet authenticated they will be prompted to do so inline, provided they have opted to share and auto share has been enabled by the administrator.

This significantly reduces the barrier to sharing that now exists.

Share Images
When sharing content with Facebook the page is checked for Open Graph meta tags. By default a tag is added to your logo for the purpose of displaying an image alongside the shared content snippet at Facebook. Starting with IP.Blog 2.6 we've included additional tags for all attachments that have been added to your content. It is therefore now possible to select a specific image which more appropriately matches what you are sharing.

Auto Follow
In previous versions of IP.Blog, it has been possible for Blog owners to optionally choose to be subscribed to all comments made on their blog via the per blog settings. The problem with this approach is that the option defaults to off and as many blog owners never revisit this settings page after the initial blog creation, it often goes unnoticed.

In the forthcoming 2.6 release this setting has been removed and instead replaced by a checkbox presented when posting individual blog entries.

This has two major benefits over the existing implementation. Firstly the checkbox is placed in a more prominent position and secondly it allows more granular control over the content notifications are received for. Additionally, the setting now defaults to auto follow in line with the rest of the IPS suite which should result in greater Blog participation.

Reputation
As of IP.Blog 2.6 it will now be possible to view the reputation or likes both given and received in a user's profile in a similar fashion to content in other applications across the suite.

Blog related reputation will also appear in the global "most liked/highest reputation content" section of IPB bringing further emphasis to this application.

Quick Nav
The quick navigation feature within IP.Board allows an at a glance overview of the most important sections within IP.Board. This functionality now extends to IP.Blog showing featured blogs and the logged in user's own blogs.

These areas of IP.Blog can now be reached in the fewest number of clicks in a consistent manner from whatever your location on the site.

6,542 views

Andy Millne

August 1, 201213 yr

IP.Blog 2.6: SEO Improvements and Microformats

With the recent IP.Board 3.3 update much emphasis was placed on search engine optimization. Many areas were found where a small change would make a big difference in preventing duplicate content, reducing crawl errors and ultimately resulting in better rankings. One of the goals for IP.Blog 2.6 was to continue this trend and identify potential improvements.

Duplicate Content
Recent algorithm changes used by the major search engines have highlighted duplicate content as a particularly relevant problem. With modern web applications such as IP.Blog it is often possible for interface elements to cause genuinely unique content to unintentionally fall into this trap.

One such area we have addressed in IP.Blog is the filtering of blogs on the index page. By filtering and sorting the content on these pages, the same content can be displayed in slightly different ways. Canonical tags have now been added causing content to be attributed to the single canonical URL regardless of the URL search engines use to enter the page.

Page Titles
When viewing individual categories within a blog the title shown was always that of the blog itself. For IP.Blog 2.6 we have tweaked these titles to also include the category name in the format;

Category Name - Blog Name - Site Name

Additionally, canonical tags have been added to these pages to prevent further problems with duplicate content.

Dead End Links
With IPB 3.3 we introduced changes to the way user profiles were linked. In cases where site owners disallowed profile viewing for guests, there were still numerous links to profiles throughout the site that resulted in permission denied error messages being served to search engines. Now, if you don't have permission to view a profile, then the username and profile photo are no longer hyperlinked. This functionality has been extended to IP.Blog for the 2.6 release

Microformat and Schema Updates
As well as improvements made to help your site rank higher, making those results also stand out is an increasing concern for site owners and webmasters. With IP.Blog 2.6 we've introduced two such changes to further expand your audience.

Links to user profiles from blog entry pages now include the rel="author" microformat tag. This tag, when combined with a link to a compatible social network in the user profile, will allow search engines to identify and display author info directly in search results like so;

Additionally, blog entry ratings have now also been tagged with appropriate schema data so entry ratings will display alongside search results further highlighting those entries.

The addition of these small changes both assists search engines in finding relevant content and at the same time improves usability for the end user.

It is also worth noting that the majority of these changes have come about as a direct result of user contributed feedback in the IP.Blog Feedback forum. We're very excited that we are able to continually act on readily shared experiences in this way and welcome any further comments you may have.

5,982 views

Andy Millne

July 31, 201213 yr

IP.Board 3.4 Dev Update: IP.SEO

IP.SEO is a popular free add-on for IP.Board which provides many additional SEO features for your community.

IP.SEO has proved so popular since it's introduction that as of IP.Board 3.4, we're going to be moving it's features into the core of IP.Board meaning that a separate application will no longer be necessary.

If you're not already familiar with IP.SEO, here's an overview the features it provides, all of which will be included in IP.Board 3.4:

Sitemap

XML site maps provide a great way to show search engines the content on your community. All IPS applications are supported, and third party applications can also add their own support.

You can even specify a "priority" for each forum and other areas of your community to tell search engines which content is more important.

IP.Board will automatically update your site map as new content is generated and will automatically ping search engines to let them know your site map has been updated.

SEO Advice

A new screen in the Admin CP will provide advice on areas of configuration which can be adjusted to provide the best SEO.

Search Activity

You will now be able to view graphs showing the visits your community has received from search engine spiders, and visits received from users who found your community via a search engine.

You can even see the term that users searched for which led them to your community.

Meta Tags

You can now edit the page title and meta tags for any page on your community. You can also use a "Live Meta Tag Editor" which will allow you to browse your community, adding tags to the pages as you visit them.

Miscellaneous FeaturesIP.Board will now be able to automatically ping XML-RPC ping services whenever a new topic is created. You will now be able to select a particular skin which will be used by guests. You can add Google Analytics tracking code through a setting in the Admin CP to integrate with the Google Analytics service.

More to come on SEO... this is not the only SEO change being made in 3.4 so keep watching our company blog!

42,824 views

Mark

July 24, 201213 yr

IP.Gallery 5.0: Some Further Changes

Development of IP.Gallery 5 continues, and today we wanted to blog about some additional changes you can expect to see in the next release. These changes are unrelated to one another, however they collectively will improve the functionality and capabilities of IP.Gallery 5.0. Note that these changes were derived as a direct result of client feedback, so keep it coming!

RSS Feed Enhancements
As of IP.Gallery 5, RSS feeds for IP.Gallery have been updated to give users better options as to how they subscribe to feeds on your site. In IP.Gallery 5, you will have RSS feeds available for categories, albums, and a new global latest images feed has been added, allowing users to stay abreast of latest images throughout the entire Gallery. This global latest images feed is discoverable easily by browsers and other feed reader applications, and a link is available in the board footer amongst the other RSS feeds for the software.

Notification Enhancements
One common request we've seen for IP.Gallery centers around notifications. IP.Gallery allows you to follow any album or image to be notified of new images or comments already, however you must follow these areas manually. Often you will upload some images and forget to follow them afterwards, so when another user comes along and comments on your images you are not aware of this.

We have added a checkbox on the review page (the secondary step after uploading your images where you specify the caption and other details) that allows you to follow the image(s) immediately upon submission. This checkbox is checked by default, so the default action is that users will be notified of comments on newly submitted media. A user can optionally deselect the checkbox if they don't wish to be notified of comments made against the submission.

This small change will help your users remain aware of comments on their images, and help spur return visits to your site through enhanced notifications relevant to the user.

Homepage Changes
While we have a fair many customers looking for a traditional navigational approach to Gallery (Category -> Album -> Image), many of our clients left feedback following an earlier blog entry regarding the new homepage indicating that they prefer a more social approach to the Gallery. Rather than a category listing, you want to see recently updated albums and new images to keep the page fresh. Additionally, the use of two sliders on the homepage spurred some discussion about the best way to present the data being made available on the homepage.

Firstly, we have changed the recent images block to a stream of images, as you would see within a listing. The featured images block remains as a large slider at the top of the screen, however the recent images near the bottom of the page will now list many small thumbnails instead. Clicking one will open the image in the new navigational lightbox to allow you to see the larger version and the image details.

Additionally, we realize that the categorical approach is not the preferred solution for all of our customers, so we have added a setting that will allow you to switch the homepage to a more "social" version. This setting only affects the homepage, however the data will be presented in a manner that will better allow users to simply review the most updated content with less of a focus on the structure of the Gallery. Here are some screenshots

The top of the page continues to show the featured images in a slider, and otherwise looks similar to the more traditional categorical layout. The main difference is that the categories are listed in a sidebar block here, de-emphasizing the structure but still allowing you to navigate into categories at will.

The main difference comes after the featured image. When the social layout is enabled, a stream of the most recently updated albums (that you have permission to view) are presented in order of last update. Up to 20 albums will be displayed. Below that, up to 50 of the most recently uploaded images are displayed, and as with the other image listings, clicking an image will open it inside a lightbox showing you the full size image and other image details without leaving the page.

Wrapping up
We will continue to evaluate feedback, particularly after the new software has been shown to our focus group and other alpha testers, and we will make sensible changes based on the feedback we receive. Please feel free to leave us feedback in the appropriate feedback forum!

8,430 views

bfarber

July 18, 201213 yr

New Bug Tracker, powered by IP.Content

Hopefully most of you don't have the need to visit our bug tracker enough to have noticed, but we recently switched from a third party application for managing our bugs to IP.Content.

The history of the software we used to use for our bug tracker goes back quite a bit. It was originally written by Matt, many years ago - before that we used regular forum topics as bug reports!

A couple of years ago, around the time IP.Board 3.0 was released, we handed over the codebase to a group of volunteers who wanted to develop the bug tracker application further - and they did.

The developers have done a fantastic job with Tracker, however since then we've released IP.Content, our own application which lets you create (amongst other things) custom databases.

We decided that since moving forward it's definitely easier for us to be using our own applications (otherwise we have issues whenever we upgrade this site to beta software) especially as soon we'll be developing them all under one release cycle, and IP.Content is more than capable of handling the task, to switch from Tracker to IP.Content.

So what did we do to turn IP.Content into a fully featured bug tracker? Actually, nothing special!

IP.Content's databases already have support for categories (we created one for each product) and custom fields (we created fields for "status", "version" and "fixed in version"). We didn't need to do any skinning either - the default database templates work fantastic for a bug tracker. We also took this opportunity to have one of our non-technical members of staff create the database. This gave us some great ideas on improving the system for ease of use.

In fact, there was only 3 hurdles we had to overcome:

1. Filter Bars

When you're working through bug reports you only really want to see open bug reports - we needed a way to filter the records being shown created on the custom "status" field we'd created.

After thinking about the best approach for this, we realised that there's probably other uses for IP.Content which also might benefit from fields being "filterable". So we went ahead and added the feature to IP.Content.

When the next version of IP.Content is released, any enumerable field type (dropdowns, radio boxes, checkboxes) will be able to be selected as "filterable".

When viewing records you'll then see a sidebar allowing you to select one or more of those values to filter the records by.

This is what it looks like in our new bug tracker:

2. Quick Changing Fields

Unlike most database uses, in a bug tracker, you need to be able to change the record's data (status, fixed in version) quickly - and often at the same time as making a comment on the report.

We decided for this we'd need to write some code specifically for our needs. Fortunately, IP.Board's hook system makes this really easy.

In case anyone out there is feeling particularly geeky and wants to know how this works, the hook has 3 parts:
A skin overloader which adds dropdown boxes above the comment form A data hook which intercepts the comment being added and updates the records data based on the dropdown box values. It also edits the comment that was posted and adds in "Updating Status to: X", or whatever was changed. An action overloader which stops an error being thrown if the comment is empty.

In total, the hook is just 81 lines of code and took about 30 minutes to write.

3. Moving the data

Our final hurdle was converting the data (for which I whipped up a CLI script).

Naturally, we also had to make sure that old bug report links gave HTTP 301 redirects to the new reports - wouldn't want our SEO to suffer!

To do this, I just dropped a few lines of code in one of the old Tracker source files.

So here it is, our brand new bug tracker, completely powered by IP.Content.

Read more about IP.Content or try it for free.
If you have any questions about what IP.Content can do, shoot us an email - we'd love to hear from you.

18,703 views

Mark

July 17, 201213 yr

IP.Gallery 5.0: More Navigation Changes

While we discussed some of the basic core navigational changes in IP.Gallery 5.0 already (and yes, we've heard your feedback on those changes!), we have implemented some other changes to enhance consistency and bring IP.Gallery into the modern world wide web. Some of these changes are basic on the surface, but will help to ensure the interface remains consistent throughout the application, in third party applications, and in future features we may add, while some of the changes represent an entirely new way to use the software.

Image Navigation
When you enter into a category or album that has a listing of images, you see each image and can click into them one by one to view the full-sized image and some further details. This is simple and intuitive enough, but a little...boring. With today's web, we can enhance this a bit, so we've done so.

When you are viewing a listing of images and click onto an image, it will now open in a lightbox and most of the image details will be presented to the user. You can navigate through the images in the listing with next and previous buttons, easily allowing you to view all of the images on the page without ever leaving the page itself. The functionality itself is handled by javascript (and AJAX requests), but the links are good old-fashioned links to the full image details page, so you don't have to worry about search engine spiders being able to navigate through the software. To them, the navigation will work as it always has.

The AJAX responses are cached to save resources while the user is still viewing the page (if the user navigates to an image they've already loaded, it pops up instantly).

Here is a quick video demonstrating this new change. Note that you can still access the full image details page by clicking the caption in the lightbox (or through any other normal browser means, such as opening the link in a new tab, or dragging the image itself to your address bar in your browser).

http://screencast.com/t/5yMrkqTe

Album Changes
In IP.Gallery 5.0, you will no longer be able to create sub-albums. Sub-categories are still supported, however albums themselves can only be placed within a category, not within another album. The upgrader routine will move sub-albums to the nearest category that allows album creation (or to the special Member's Gallery if a suitable category cannot be found). Similarly, private and friend-only albums are only allowed within the special Member's Gallery. These changes represent necessary deviations from past versions to allow IP.Gallery to scale effectively as the site becomes larger. One of the primary issues faced in past versions was resource consumption as the number of albums on the site grows - this will no longer be an issue with specific rules in place that prevent complex hierarchy challenges.

Member's Gallery
The special Member's Gallery category is the only category that allows friend-only and private album creation. It is designed as a category that members can create any type of album they want within (subject to the per-group restrictions the administrator has defined), and includes a special option to allow you to determine how to present the contents of this category.

The special Member's Gallery allows the administrator to determine if the category will display albums, images or individual members. When you display albums, the category works like any other category that allows album creation. This is the default setting. When you display images, all images within all albums in the category (that you have permission to view) are displayed, just as if the category allowed direct image submissions. To the end user, they will be looking at an image listing, and will be unaware that the images are coming from albums within the category (although this is noted in both the lightbox popup and on the full image details page in the right hand information block).

When you choose to show members instead, however, all members who have submitted an album to the special Member's Gallery are displayed, and clicking on the member will show that user's detail page (which in turn will list their albums and image submissions). For sites who wish to group by member within the category, this option allows you to do that, similar to earlier versions of Gallery. The last 10 images the member has uploaded into an album within this category will also be displayed.

You will note there is a "Show Me" dropdown button at the top right. Members can override the administrator-defined default if they prefer to view the listing differently (e.g. if they just wish to see a stream of images), and their preference is stored in a cookie so that it is remembered if they leave the page and come back.

And still more
We have yet more to announce for IP.Gallery 5.0 and hope you are enjoying the updates. We are taking all feedback in and are looking forward to being able to show you the new release as soon as possible.

7,378 views

bfarber

July 16, 201213 yr

IP.Gallery 5.0: Smaller Changes

We have taken the time with IP.Gallery 5.0 to implement some smaller changes that help to round off the functionality of the software and bring it more in-line with the rest of the suite. While these changes individually are all quite small, collectively they help to make Gallery easier to use and more intuitive for the average user.

pInterest Integration
For those of you not familiar with this new service, pInterest is a popular new image tagging website that allows users to "pin" images from across the web to a "pinboard". They can create multiple pinboards to classify their images. IP.Gallery will now show a pInterest sharing button with the rest of the social sharing options.

Shared Media
Currently when you share an IP.Gallery image via the shared media plugin, a small box with the image details is shown, linking the user to the full image page. Here is an example (note that this example will change once our site is updated to IP.Gallery 5):

http://community.invisionpower.com/gallery/image/1854-test/

Many users have requested that we instead simply embed the thumbnail directly and open the full image in a lightbox. We've updated IP.Gallery 5 to do just that. Here is a quick video showing this in action.

http://screencast.com/t/YOlreAnC6Bi

Set as Profile Photo
In recent past versions of Gallery, members were required to create an album that they designate as a "Profile Photos Album", and then they are able to set an image within this special album as their profile photo. While functional, we have determined that the restrictions here are largely unnecessary. We have removed the "profile photo album" functionality within the software, and now members will be able to set any image they can view as their profile photo.

Hidden vs Unapproved
Keeping in line with the distinction between hidden and unapproved implemented in other areas of the suite, IP.Gallery has been updated to recognize this distinction. When an image requires moderator approval upon initial submission, it will be in an "Unapproved" state, and you can either "Approve" or "Delete" the image. After it has been approved, you will be able to "Hide" or "Delete" the image. When it is hidden, you will be able to "Unhide" or "Delete" the image. You will no longer unapprove a previously approved image. While this does not affect the functionality of the software greatly, it does serve to separate the actions.

A new moderator control panel plugin has been added to show "Hidden" images.

IP.Content
The Gallery feed blocks in IP.Content have been updated to reflect the changes in Gallery, namely the distinction between Albums and Categories. The feed blocks will be available immediately upon IP.Gallery's release, as IP.Content blocks are now part of the individual application's package instead of the IP.Content package (in other words, you won't need to wait for an IP.Content release to enable these new changes).

SEO Tweaks
We have reviewed the on-page optimization of many pages in IP.Gallery and have made small tweaks to enhance the software. We have implemented canonical tags where appropriate to point all URL variances (such as sorting changes) back to the parent page. We have made certain duplicate page titles unique and clearer as to what they represent for the page in question. We have forced the true "page title" (e.g. the name of the category, album or image you are viewing) to an <h1> tag, and have cascaded down other <h*> tags as appropriate. We have forced some of the on-page javascript and CSS code into the head of the HTML document. These small but useful changes will only serve to better clarify to search engines how pages relate to one another and what pages are the authority source for specific requests. We are listening to feedback and suggestions regarding SEO, and we encourage you to let us know if you spot something that doesn't seem right in the appropriate feedback forum.

More to come
These small changes will work towards better consistency between suite applications, and bring some minor but useful updates to existing features in IP.Gallery. We have more changes to announce yet, and hope you are looking forward to hearing about other updates to IP.Gallery 5.0. Stay tuned!

5,901 views

bfarber

July 14, 201213 yr

IP.Gallery 5.0: More Administrator Control

One of our big goals with Gallery 5 is to restore a level of administrative control that allows different sites to dictate how their users and moderators will interact with the software. Some sites wish to allow their users to have control over their submissions. Some sites wish to control the submissions their members contribute once the file is uploaded. In order to accommodate the myriad of needs our clients have, we have implemented many new controls to IP.Gallery, and reworked how some existing controls function.

Moderators
One change we have made is to remove moderator-style permissions from the group management area and implement a full "Moderators" area of the ACP. When managing your categories in the IP.Gallery ACP, you can now add moderators to one or more categories. These moderators can be groups or individual members. You can specify the following permissions for your moderators:
Can approve images Can approve comments Can edit images and albums Can hide images Can delete images and albums Can move images and albums Can set cover images Can edit comments Can delete comments

Members will be allowed to move their own images between their own albums, but will not be able to move images from their albums to another member's albums, or to categories. You can still specify on a per-group basis if members can edit their own images and comments, delete their own images and comments, and you will also now be able to specify whether they can delete their own albums or not. This will allow administrators to control what their members can and cannot do in IP.Gallery.

Controlling Albums
In addition to the aforementioned moderator permission updates, administrators will now have more control over how users manage albums. You can now specify whether members can create public, private and friend-only albums separately (so you can allow members to create all 3 kinds, only public albums, or disallow members to create albums entirely). As with previous versions, you can also limit the number of albums they can create, and the number of images they can upload into each album.

Further to this, however, you can control the defaults for new albums and which of those default options members can override. Under the Album Manager area of the IP.Gallery ACP, there is a new page: Album Defaults. When you visit this page, you will be able to control the album default options and determine which of those options members can change.

To lock or unlock a field from being editable, you simply click on the green or red icon to toggle it. Fields that are locked will still display to users on the front end, but will be disabled and uneditable. This allows users to know what preferences are being enforced.

You will note in the screenshot that there is a message under the watermark field advising that the option is only honored when a category is set to "Allow members to choose per-album". When you create a category that allows album submissions, you can choose one of three options for the watermark preference:Do not watermark Force watermark on every image Allow members to choose per-album

The first two options are self-explanatory. The last option allows members to specify whether they use watermarks or not when creating their own individual albums (and of course can also be restricted by the album default preferences discussed above).

It is important to note as well - you can enable and disable ratings and comments at the category level. If you disable comments or ratings at the category level, this preference cascades down to the albums within the category. If comments are disabled in a category, they are disabled for all albums within that category. If a user does not have permission to comment in a category, they will not have permission to comment within albums contained in that category.

Image Control
Administrators have fairly good control over images in IP.Gallery already, however we are expanding this control in IP.Gallery 5.0. Some new options include:Ability to shut off "medium" and "small"-sized images. You cannot shut off the thumbnail or large-sized images, as both are used throughout Gallery in many different places. You will be able to shut off cropping of thumbnails. Instead of "unapproving" images, you will now "hide" images. These will show up in the Moderator CP when hidden. Members who can delete their own images will actually be "hiding" them, giving moderators a chance to review the deletion before it is carried out completely.

You will of course retain all of the previous image control options available in Gallery 4, and many minor interface changes will make handling your images easier and more intuitive.

Up Next
We realize control of your Gallery installation is important and we are working towards giving administrators sensible options to enable them to configure IP.Gallery to their needs. We have a lot more changes in store and will be discussing some of the more interesting changes in our next blog entry. Stay tuned!

8,483 views

bfarber

July 11, 201213 yr

Gallery 5.0 Goals

Development of Gallery 5.0 is well underway, and while we are not quite ready to reveal the product just yet, we wanted to give our clients an outline of what they can expect to see when the new version becomes available. Gallery 5.0 will build upon changes in the 4.x series, while restoring some of the functionality of the 3.x series, delivering a product you can easily understand and navigate that is both modern and fun to use. The next version of Gallery will not see many new features - instead, we are focusing on the existing functionality to ensure the released product is flexible, intuitive and dependable.

Goals

While our goals for Gallery 5 are simple and focused, don't let this fool you. A lot of changes are being implemented to accomplish these goals, and you will notice many small changes that add up to big differences in how the product is used.

We can outline our high level goals as follows:
Redesign the navigation, structure and hierarchy Gallery makes use of.
Terminology notwithstanding, many users find navigating the current release of Gallery to be confusing, and do not understand the relationship between "global" albums and "member" albums. Many changes in the previous iteration of Gallery were made to ensure the software could scale effectively. We have taken many of the concepts of Gallery 4 and merged them with concepts in Gallery 3 to present an interface we think is easy to understand and navigate, and allows the administrator to control the setup of their Gallery. Give administrators more control over their Gallery.
We have implemented or reinstated many software options that allow administrators to better control what members can do and where. Administrators will now be able to define what types of albums members can create, whether they can delete those albums or not, which album options members can customize, and much more. SEO and efficiency improvements.
In virtually every release, we review the search engine optimization and code-level optimization of the software, and this release is no different. Interface updates.
Much of the interface has undergone a complete overhaul as a part of the navigational restructuring of the software. In addition, some new functionality has been added to make navigating through images quicker and easier, and minor feature improvements or additions will be noticed.

By keeping our goals list short and focused, we can put more emphasis on the high-level things that matter most to our clients.

More Information

More information about each of the goals outlined above and changes made to the software to implement these goals will be forthcoming in future blog entries. The software is still very much under heavy development and we are not ready to show off everything just yet. Nevertheless, we wanted to highlight the higher level goals you can look to in the next release, and give everyone a small update on development.

A Teaser

For now, we will leave you with a teaser - the new index page.

Here you can see the top of the index page. In the right hand sidebar we have a block identifying the latest comments and a block identifying the most popular tags used in Gallery. The top of the content area is filled with a featured images slider (if you have any featured images - if you do not feature any, this block disappears, as expected). You can feature as many images as you like, and up to 20 will be displayed in a javascript slider. The slider will display the image (with some details along the bottom of the image), and will automatically show the next image after a couple seconds, cycling through them (and restarting when the last featured image is displayed).

You will also note that the upload button is available. In fact, it is available on every page throughout Gallery, if you have permission to upload images somewhere.

Further down the index page, you will see the category listing. Global albums have become categories in Gallery 5.0. More information will be available on this in a future blog entry. For now, just know that categories are administrator-defined containers that can be set up to [*]Allow albums to be created in them [*]Allow neither (useful if you create subcategories and don't wish for images to be accepted within the category itself, but rather in a subcategory) Categories allow you to specify cover images, and allow you much of the same control you had with global albums in Gallery 4. You can think of categories in Gallery 5 as global albums, renamed, in part to help alleviate confusion and to clarify the relationship between the two different types of containers Gallery allows. You can see from this screenshot that the hierarchy and navigation of Gallery right from the index page has been restored to a more traditional container listing. Finally, at the bottom of the page you will see the 20 most recent images that you have permission to see, in the same slider that was used to display the featured images at the top of the screen. You can see the hint of arrows on either side of the image, allowing you to manually navigate to the next or previous image in the slider (although, as with the featured images, it automatically cycles through each image). [*]Allow direct image uploads

13,661 views

bfarber

June 29, 201213 yr

IP.Nexus 1.5 Dev Update: Miscellaneous Enhancements

To wrap up our blog entries on IP.Nexus, there's a few more additional features and enhancements that we haven't previously covered:

Custom Advertisement Zones

IP.Nexus allows you to create advertisements and even sell advertisement space on your community.
There are several different areas where the IPS Community Suite has built-in advertisement spots where Nexus can place advertisements.

In IP.Nexus 1.5, you can create your own custom "zones" and then add tags into your skin templates, IP.Content pages or even external websites outside of your community to display the advertisements in the zones you have created.

Expected Output Monitoring

IP.Nexus can monitor your servers and report to you if any of them are not responding.
Sometimes though, a site can be having issues, but not actually be reporting as down - for example, if a database table had collapsed, the server would be reporting as online, even though the site isn't actually usable.

In IP.Nexus 1.5, you'll be able to create custom "Expected Output Monitoring" rules. IP.Nexus will then call the URLs you provide at regular intervals, and if the page output is not what is expected, will notify you that there's an issue.

Transaction Review

Details on the items being purchased is now available in the transaction review screen without having to click into the invoice.

Voiding Customers

IP.Nexus has a tool to quickly ban a customer, refund their transactions, close their support requests, etc.
Sometimes however, you might want to only perform a select few of these actions. In IP.Nexus 1.5, each "action" now appears as an individual toggle when you go to void a customer.

Resource Improvements

When we work on a new release of any application, we look at the resource usage to see if any improvements can be made.
We've made several changes to improve the resource usage of IP.Nexus.

The most significant of these changes is a change to how package data is cached.
Some communities use IP.Nexus with lots of packages in many categories. Up until now, IP.Nexus stored all packages in a cache so that they didn't need to be fetched from the database on every load. However, for communities with lots of categories and packages, this can result in a large cache which ends up using more resources to process than is necessary.
In IP.Nexus 1.5 we've reworked some of the logic to make this method of caching data no longer necessary, and as a result, Nexus is able to scale much more efficiently when there is a large number of packages.

This wraps up all of the changes we're making in IP.Nexus 1.5. Keep an eye on our pre-release testing forum over the next couple of weeks for public betas :smile:

6,397 views

Mark

June 1, 201214 yr

IP.Nexus 1.5 Dev Update: Store & Billing Enhancements

Our last few blog entries on Nexus have talked about some of the larger changes we've been making to the storefront and how billing is handled.
In this blog entry, I wanted to go over some of the smaller changes we've made in these areas :smile:

Gift Vouchers

Starting with Nexus 1.5, customers can purchase gift vouchers, which can then be redeemed in your store.

If you have enabled this, when in the store, they'll see two new options underneath the package categories:

Customers will then be able to select a gift voucher amount from the options you have set in the Admin CP, or, if you have enabled it, enter their own amount:
\

Vouchers can either be emailed straight to the recipient or printed off. The voucher is given in the form of a code, which can then be entered into the store to redeem.
Nexus will keep track of who used vouchers purchased by whom and will show all this information in the normal customer history screen.

And of course, all this can be done from the mobile skin too:

Multiple Billing Cycles

IP.Nexus allows you to create recurring packages with whatever renewal terms you specify.
Sometimes though, you might want to give several different options - for example, let's say you wanted a package which costs $10 per month or $100 a year (or whatever).

In IP.Nexus 1.5, this is now possible. You can create as many different renewal options as you like:

When a customer goes to purchase a package which has more than one renewal option, a drop down will be displayed for them to select their desired renewal option:

Self Purchase Management

You're probably very familiar with getting support requests from customers who want to renew their purchase for a period of time in advance (we, for example, often get people asking to pay for a year's hosting) or cancel their purchase.

In IP.Nexus (provided you have enabled it), customers will be able to renew purchases for any length of time up to what you have allowed, and cancel their own purchases.

Bulk Discounts

Nexus currently has several options for providing discounts to certain customers:
Usergroup discounts can be used to give customers in certain groups a discount. Loyalty discounts can be used to give customers who already own (or are purchasing) some of your products a discount. Bundle discounts can be used to give customers a discount on their entire purchase if certain items are purchased in combination.

In Nexus 1.5, we're adding a new discount type which we call Bulk discounts. Bulk discounts can be used to give customers a discount on an individual product if they are purchasing it with certain other products.

In this manner, it can be used for "Buy one get one free" type deals:

In this example, the first of this item the customer adds to their cart will be full price, the second will be free, the third will be full price, the fourth will be free, and so on.
You could also do "Buy one get second half price" or "3 for the price of 2" style deals, and so on.

Grouped Renewals

Let's say you have a setup where you want to adjust the renewal fees for a product based on additional products that a customer has purchased.

Currently, there are two ways to do this.
You can set up add-ons as product options which adjust the renewal price of the package - however this isn't feasible if the add-ons also need access to support, downloads, etc.
Alternatively you could set the add-ons up as packages which must be associated with a parent and have their own renewal costs - however, this means that if a customer purchases an add-on at a later date, their renewals won't be at he same time, which can be inconvenient and confusing.

In IP.Nexus 1.5 we're adding the option for packages which can be associated with a parent package to have grouped renewals. This means that rather than having their own renewal dates, the renewal fees for add-on packages will be added on to the parent package.

Latest Products

The storefront in Nexus allows you to view featured products, popular products or browse by category.
In IP.Nexus 1.5, we've added an option to view the latest products.

Thumbnail Sizes

The thumbnails used in the IP.Nexus store are hardcoded to 100x100px. In IP.Nexus 1.5 you'll be able to set whatever thumbnail size you'd like to use.
When you adjust the setting, Nexus will set a flag on your products that the thumbnails need to be rebuilt, and this will be done on the fly as they're requested, so you don't need to sit around waiting for the images to rebuild.

6,290 views

Mark

May 31, 201214 yr

IP.Nexus 1.5 Dev Update: Selling Domains

IP.Nexus allows you to sell hosting packages with using integration with CPanel/WHM.
In IP.Nexus 1.5 we're adding support to sell domain names too using integration with eNom.

Once set up, customers purchasing hosting accounts will see a new option to purchase a domain name:

The TLDs available and their prices can be set in the Admin CP.

When selecting this option, the domain will be added to the cart like a normal item:

When the customer then pays, the domain will be registered through eNom. The domain then shows as a normal purchase associated with the hosting account:

A renewal invoice will be generated as normal when the domain is due to expire, and when renewals are paid, the expiry date will be updated with eNom.

This feature requires an eNom reseller account. In future versions of IP.Nexus we will add additional registrars based on interest.

6,304 views

Mark

May 25, 201214 yr

IP.Nexus 1.5 Dev Update: Gateways & Payments

IP.Nexus currently provides support for a number of gateways: Authorize.Net (with ARB and CIM support), PayPal (Website Payments Standard and Pro), 2CheckOut and manual payments (check, bank wire, etc.)

In IP.Nexus 1.5 we're adding more gateways and extending the functionality of some existing gateways.

Gateways

Stripe

Stripe is a relatively young payment gateway. They support all major cards and have no monthly or setup fees which makes them great for smaller companies wanting to accept card payments.

One of the more interesting aspects of Stripe is that they have a clever solution where although the customer can enter their card details right in Nexus, these details never actually hit your server - which is great for security.
Those interested in the technicalities of this - the card form elements are displayed without having a 'name' attribute, meaning that their values are not sent in the POST data to your server. Instead, Javascript on Stripe's server extracts these details and provides Nexus with a token which is what is then sent.

In addition, Stripe supports "storing" card details (again, technically, Nexus only actually stores a token) meaning when paying your customers will be able to tick a box to save card details, and these details can automatically be used for renewals, future purchases, etc.

Authorize.Net DPM

Nexus already provides support for Authorize.Net's AIM (that's "Advanced Integration Method") service. This allows customers to enter card details directly into Nexus.

The way this works is that the card details have to be sent to Nexus - this is a concern for some as it means that, even though it's very briefly, your server has the customer's card information, which means that certain security precautions need to be considered.

Authorize.Net now have a new service called DPM ("Direct Post Method") - to the customer, this seems to work exactly the same, however, rather than posting the card data to your server, and then Nexus sending that data to Authorize.Net, the form submits directly to Authorize.Net's server - meaning your server never deals with the sensitive card information.

Unfortunately, due to the way this works, Authorize.Net's ARB and CIM services (both of which are a form of recurring billing) are not compatible with DPM. Those who need recurring payments can keep using the AIM method.

Sagepay

Nexus 1.5 also adds support for Sagepay.

Refunds

Currently, Nexus allows you to refund transactions right from the Admin CP for Authorize.Net and PayPal transactions.
In IP.Nexus 1.5, PayPal Pro and 2CheckOut can now handle this too. Authorize.Net DPM and Stripe, which are added in 1.5, also support it.

2CheckOut Improvements

2CheckOut payments are now handled with their INS service. Not only is this more secure and reliable, using it has also allowed us to add support for recurring payments.

So where does that leave us?

IP.Nexus now supports 7 different payment gateways (8 if you include manual payments like check and bank wire), each of which have their own features and merits over one another.

We've created a little table to show the key differences between each gateway:

As always, we'll continue to gauge interest and add additional gateways to Nexus over time.

But wait.... there's more!

Split Payments

Sometimes, people might want to pay for an invoice using two different cards (or other payment methods). In IP.Nexus 1.5, this is now possible:

You can set a minimum invoice amount before this feature is available, or disable it completely if you don't want to use it.

Package Methods

In IP.Nexus 1.5, you'll now be able to set which payment methods can be used to purchase a particular package:

9,690 views

Mark

May 24, 201214 yr

Platform

Solutions

Guides

Help & Resources

Configure browser push notifications

Chrome (Android)

Chrome (Desktop)

Safari (iOS 16.4+)

Safari (macOS)

Edge (Android)

Edge (Desktop)

Firefox (Android)

Firefox (Desktop)