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IP.Board 3.1.0 Dev Update: Modification Development Enhancements

There are a lot of enhancements being made to the application/hook system in IPB 3.1, many of which were discussed in a previous blog post. While that post focused on the hooks system, there have been many other changes made throughout IPB 3.1, and we'd like to highlight a few of those in this blog post. We hope that our modification community will find these changes helpful and can't wait to see what they do with this new version! As always, if there are any suggestions or comments, we would love to hear them.

Template Hooks: Replace Output

A new optional function has been added for template hooks called replaceOutput(), which receives the entire content of the page and replaces it with what is returned from your hook. This allows your hook to replace tags with whatever content you need, here's an example that adds the pid of a post next to the multiquote button:



public function replaceOutput( $output, $key ) { $tag = '<!--hook.'.$key.'-->'; $lastFound = 0; foreach( $this->registry->output->getTemplate('topic')->functionData['topicViewTemplate']['post_data'] as $pid => $post ) { $pos = strpos( $output, $tag, $lastFound ); $strToInsert = 'PID: ' . $pid; if( $pos ) { $output = substr_replace( $output, $strToInsert . $tag, $pos, strlen( $tag ) ); $lastFound = $pos + strlen( $tag . $strToInsert ); } } return $output; }

memberSync Changes

We've made a few changes to memberSync, in order to make a few of the functions a little more useful.

onGroupChange: The old member group is now passed into this function onLogin: The plain text password is now passed into this function onCreateAccount: The plain text password is now passed into this function


Extensible Forms

One of the new features we introduced with IPB3 was the ability for applications to extend the member and group edit forms in the ACP. We've now expanded that functionality to include the forum edit form as well. This works in the same way as the group edit form, by allowing your application to add a tab to the edit forum form. We've also updated the member form extender to determine tab ids automatically, exactly as the group form extender does in the 3.0. So you'll no longer have to worry about your member form conflicting with another applications member_form.

Attachment Plugins and Profile Tabs

Our goal with applications is to make them as independent of each other as possible, toward that end we've moved the attachment and profile tab plugins into the application extension directory of each application. Profile tabs will now be placed in YOUR_APPLICATION/extensions/profileTabs and attachment plugins will now be placed in YOUR_APPLICATION/extensions/attachments. The file and class names have remained the same, the only difference is their location within the file structure.

New Setting Type: Autocomplete Member Name

This new setting type will allow you to create fields that will then be turned into member name autocomplete fields by IPB.
  • 8,310 views
Josh

PHPDoc Developer Documentation

We'll keep this blog entry short and sweet, since there's not a whole lot to say.

Developers have asked for further documentation of IP.Board (and addon applications), specifically source code-level documentation of the various classes and methods that can be reused. Those of you familiar with phpdoc will know that it's the perfect tool for the job, and thankfully we wrote IP.Board 3 using phpdoc-style comments to facilitate this job.

After a lot of cleanup and tweaking, we have made the phpdoc developer documentation available for all. Please be aware that this is the first "release" of these documents, and there are likely going to be some oddities and under-documented functions. Please let us know where we can expand on the documents. We intend to add more code examples and to clean up the class-level documentation a little over time, but if you have any specific requests we'll focus on those first.

http://community.invisionpower.com/resources/phpdocs/index.html
  • 5,282 views
bfarber

IP.Board 3.1: Notifications

It's a well-known fact that one method of ensuring continued visitation of your site is to email members frequently to send reminders and notifications. For instance, if a user posts in a topic, they may forget that they posted after a day or two. If an email is sent to that user after someone else replies, however, it can remind the original user to return to your site to check on the updates.

IP.Board has a strong system of notifications, however we found that much of the code to handle this is scattered and duplicated throughout many files in IP.Board 3.0. The methods of managing your notification preferences are also inconsistent, making it confusing and difficult for new users to determine how to control notification preferences. If you are a moderator, you manage your report center notification preferences in the report center. You are only able to get email notifications of tracked topics. You can select to get email or PM notification of new comments and friend requests in your user control panel. Through these few examples, you can see that managing notification preferences can be made easier.

IP.Board 3.1 introduces many improvements to notifications, both on the backend and within the user interface of the board itself.

Inline Notifications
In overhauling the notification management options in IP.Board 3.1, we decided to add inline notifications. Essentially, this is a notification within the board itself, without actually issuing a private message or an email. There are many instances where a visitor might want to be notified of an action, but might not want an email to be sent to their email address, or they might not want a private message for such notifications (especially if your board has limits on the number of private messages an individual can store).

Visually, when an inline notification is first triggered, it will look identical to the existing private message popup. In fact, private messages no longer directly initiate the popup you have become familiar with - instead, they issue an inline notification (which initiates this popup). This was done on purpose for consistency, and for code reduction and reuse purposes.

A "Mark Read" button has been added to the popup so that, in addition to closing or viewing the notification, you can mark it as being acknowledged without having to leave the page.



A new option has been added to the profile dropdown to allow users to quickly access their inline notifications, as well.



Administrators can control how many inline notifications a single user can store on a per-group basis. If a user is allowed to store 50 inline notifications, and notification number 51 is issued, the user's oldest notification is automatically pruned. The user will see a notification popup on the board the next time they click a link. There is also an area in the user control panel where each user can list, view and prune their notifications. Additionally, a new board index hook will show up when a user has unread notifications (and automatically disappear once all of their notifications have been acknowledged).



Stronger control of notifications
A new area of the ACP has been added to allow administrators to better control notifications as well. Any registered notification events will be listed, and the administrator can control which methods to use by default for each notification event, which methods cannot be used at all, and will also have the ability to disallow users from overriding the admin-defined selection. For example, an administrator might want the default notification method for new private messages to be inline notifications (show a popup on the board). Administrators may also want to disallow users from electing to get an email notification when comments are made on their profile to reduce the number of email messages sent from the server. An administrator may also want to enforce that all users (with appropriate permissions) get an email notification when content on the board is reported. All of these things, previously not possible, can be configured from one page within the ACP of IP.Board 3.1.



Easier user configuration options
In addition to the new UserCP page to view your inline notifications, there is a new notifications page where all notification settings and options have been consolidated. New configuration options are available to control your notification preferences, as well. Each user will be able to select whether they want to receive email, PM, or inline notifications (or a combination of the above, or none of the above) for each notification event from one page. Methods that are not available per the ACP-defined preferences are removed from the user's options, while notification events that an administrator does not allow users to override are disabled but still displayed (so that a user can know how they will be notified when one of those events occur). A couple of screenshots should help clarify this.



If an administrator makes the following configuration in the ACP



A user can expect to see the following in their notification preferences



You'll also note from these last 2 screenshots that we've added the ability to get notified when someone quotes a post that you made.

Easier for developers
IP.Board 3.0 has well-abstracted code to make sending private messages and emails easy for developers. While this is true, code is duplicated throughout IP.Board 3.0 that is meant to handle sending either PM or email notifications. As a general rule, duplicated code is not a good thing to have. We also had to find a way to easily implement inline notifications (without adding yet more if/else style statements everywhere that sends notifications).

We have created a new notifications class which developers can easily use to allow third-party applications to plugin to the new notifications system. This reduces the workload needed to set up notification capabilities (and management) for new applications significantly.

A developer will first need to create a plugin file for their application to define notification events. A sample plugin file might look like this


/** * Notification types */ $_NOTIFY = array( array( 'key' => 'report_center', 'default' => array( 'email' ), 'disabled' => array() ), );
<?php









(Yes, this is the actual code for the "core" application of IPB to handle report center notifications). You define the default selections, and the options to disable by default. For example, you would not want a private message to issue a new notification by private message. This allows the developers to define the default handling of notifications for their applications.

Then, to send a notification, the following code can be used


// Notifications library //----------------------------------------- $classToLoad = IPSLib::loadLibrary( IPS_ROOT_PATH . '/sources/classes/member/notifications.php', 'notifications' ); $notifyLibrary = new $classToLoad( $this->registry ); $notifyLibrary->setMember( $user ); $notifyLibrary->setFrom( $this->memberData ); $notifyLibrary->setNotificationKey( 'report_center' ); $notifyLibrary->setNotificationText( 'This is the text to show to the user' ); $notifyLibrary->setNotificationTitle( 'This is the title of the notification' ); try { $notifyLibrary->sendNotification(); } catch( Exception $e ){}
//-----------------------------------------


















The most common implementation will be to use the email library to first "build" an email, and then to assign the subject as the title, and the message as the text. As you can see, however, it is quite easy to use the notifications class. The class itself will determine what the administrator has defined as being allowed and disallowed, and what the user has selected for their notification preferences, and issue all appropriate notifications automatically based on the ACP and user preference selections. You don't have to worry about ACP settings or user cp settings either, using this method. All of it is taken care for you!

Closing
Through implementing the new notification capabilities, we hope to be able to expand the notification capabilities in IP.Board easier in future versions. As you can see, we've already added one more area where a user can get notified of changes in activity, and have some ideas of other areas where we would like to have the ability to issue notifications as well. With the refactored code and easier configuration management, implementing these changes will be easy.

Also, please keep in mind that the screenshots you are seeing are very early screenshots taken of a development build. Rikki hasn't had a chance to put his magic touch on these pages, so most likely the final look and feel will be touched up a bit. We just wanted to share the new capabilities, complete with some screenshots to help you visualize them, as soon as we possibly could.

Please let us know if you have any suggestions or feedback about the new feature.
  • 18,685 views
bfarber

IP.Board 3.1.0 Dev Update: Status Updates

I blogged just before Christmas about the improvements to the status update feature in IP.Board.




A recent addition is the ability to locks a status update. A normal member can lock their status to prevent comments from other members, although a super moderator (and admin) can over-ride this and reply and/or unlock the status. When a super moderator (and admin) lock a status, it means that in addition to other members being able to reply, the status owner can not unlock it.

I have also improved the sidebar hook to allow on-the-fly commenting, updating and deleting without leaving the page.



You can see it in action, here:



We feel these minor 'social networking' style features add interest and a secondary reason to re-visit your forum. Members can receive email notifications when a reply is made to their status, or a reply is made to a status they have commented on. This will continually drive traffic back to your site and encourage more interaction between members.
  • 15,243 views
Matt

IP.Board 3.1.0 Dev Update: Hook System

In IP.Board 3, we introduced the hook system, the goal of which was to cut down on file edits from modifications and make modifications easier to install. We designed the system to be as flexible as possible, primarily using the HTML logic feature to create hooks in virtually every portion of the output generated. However, we knew there were still cases where a file edit was needed, to access certain data or to reach any area of the board that was not a template or an action file.

One of our primary goals with IP.Board 3.1, is to expand the hook system to further reduce the need for file edits, as well as to make installing them even easier. We've read all the feedback on hooks from modification authors and are incorporating as much of it as possible into 3.1. Here's a quick rundown of the changes that we have mode so far:

New Hook Types

Our first goal was to extend the hook system to cover areas of the forum that are not currently accessible to hooks. Toward that end, we are introducing two new hook file types to address this issue:

Data Hooks

Modifications often need access to add their own data to insert/update queries that are run by IPB, at the moment that data is not accessible and must be queried separately and then hook has to run another insert/update query. To address this issue, we have added a new hook file type called a Data Hook. This type of hook allows you to access certain data arrays before they are inserted into the database. For example, you can create a hook that will receive the $post array before it is inserted into the posts table, this will give your hook a chance to add any data it needs or modify any data being saved. Technically, a Data Hook does not even have to modify the actual data array, you can use them as a simple code execution point as well.

Unlike Template Hooks, which are essentially generated automatically, Data hooks are manually specified in the code, so if you have suggestions on where you would like to see these placed, please reply to this blog post and let us know. At the moment, data hooks are used in the posting library, the messenger library, and some areas of the profile screen.

Library Hooks

There are many classes used within IPB that are inaccessible to hooks, as they are not actions or templates. However, it is often useful to be able to modify these classes with your own methods or to add on to existing methods. This leads to the second type of hook file that we are adding in 3.1, the Library Hook. This type of hook will allow you to extend the libraries that we use throughout IPB, a common example would be class_forums. This works in exactly the same way as an action overloader, your hook will extend the library you have selected and allow you to add to it or replace method calls with your own. Like the action overloaders, you will need to remember to call the parent method from your overloaded method.

In order for a library hook to work, we have to update the require call that includes that library. We're going through the code to try and find as many of these require calls as possible, but during beta you should check any includes that you are interested in extending to make sure we haven't missed them.

Other Changes

Hooks in AJAX requests

In the current release, any output returned via AJAX is not passed through the hook system. This has been changed in 3.1, now all returned output is properly run through the hooks system, allowing you to hook into any AJAX generated output.

Export CSS Files

There is a new option when exporting a hook that will allow you to specify CSS files that is used by that hook. The CSS files will be included in the hook xml and then imported along with the hook and cached to the file system.

Access Function Data

One of the most frequent requests we've seen is for a way to access template function data, with IP.Board 3.1 this will now be possible. Any active hooks within a template function will be able to access the function data through a special class property called functionData. To save resources, this data is not saved for any template function that does not contain active hooks. Here's an example of how to access function data inside of the topicViewTemplate function:

Function Declaration:


function topicViewTemplate($forum, $topic, $post_data, $displayData) { All of this data will be accessible to your hook via $functionData:

$this->registry->output->getTemplate('topic')->functionData['topicViewTemplate']['forum'] $this->registry->output->getTemplate('topic')->functionData['topicViewTemplate']['topic']

Wrapping up

We've also made quite a few minor tweaks throughout the hook system, these changes include updates to the ACP interface, performance enhancements, a toggle to quickly disable/enable all hooks, changing hook positions without IN_DEV enabled, and more. If you have any suggestions regarding these changes or the existing hook system, please do not hesitate to reply to this entry and let us know about them. We're very excited to see what our community will do with these new features!
  • 9,666 views
Josh

IP.Gallery 3.1.0 Wrap Up

IP.Gallery 3.1.0 will be released soon, so we'd like to take a moment to summarize all the new features we've added in this new release.

Friendly URLs

We've integrated gallery into the global FURL system used by IP.Board 3, this will allow gallery to create friendly URLs for categories, albums, and images.

Category/Album Covers

When viewing an image, you will have a new option to set that image as the 'cover' for the category or album that contains the image. When a cover image is specified for a category or album, that image will always be displayed, in place of the last uploaded image thumbnail.

Sub Albums

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

Profile Picture Album

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

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

Image rotation
Images can now be rotated in 90
  • 1,729 views
Josh

IP.Blog 2.1.0 Wrap Up

As we near the release of IP.Blog 2.1.0 final, I wanted to run through some of the new features you can expect to see after upgrading. This is a very substantial upgrade that gives your blog a major facelift as well as drastically improving functionality.

User Interface
The user interface has had a complete facelift to bring it up to standard. The new look feels more 'bloggish' and enhances the experience. I've added drop down menus at the top so that you can quickly access common areas and start new entries where you have permission to. The post screen has been overhauled to add functionality. You should find the new version much easier to navigate and easier to use.

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

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

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

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

List View
A common request was the return of a fully sortable and filterable list view for blogs that emulated a forum view. I have added this in. You'll notice you can click the table headers to sort on that column and click again to reverse the sort. There is also a "List Blogs" sidebar block to quickly filter and list the blogs.
There's even a little 'preview the latest entry' icon that shows the entry excerpt in a pop-up so you don't have to leave the page to preview it.

Dynamic Sidebar
I've moved some the footer links (Top 10 bloggers, etc) into a dynamic sidebar along with Recent Entries. This makes it easier to locate and saves a bit of space.

RSS Imports
Another long requested feature was to be able to create entries from an RSS feed. This is now a feature. You can control which member groups have access to this as well as limit the number of items imported on each cycle.

Banish Entries
You can now banish entries from the front page to remove any 'clutter' such as 'testing' blogs or other unsuitable content.

ACP Clean-up
I've gone through and cleaned up some of the Admin CP pages to make them a little easier to understand and navigate. I've added explanations to the 'Headers' / 'Dynamic Headers' pages so it's clear what they do.

Efficiency
I've removed several slow queries and introduced several more caching layers to substantially reduce SQL overhead when dealing with large numbers of blogs.

We hope you find the updates useful, and we look forward to your feedback to continue improving the product.
  • 4,540 views
Matt

IP.Downloads 2.1 Wrap-Up

As we near the release of IP.Downloads 2.1.0, we wanted to take a moment just to summarize the changes in this release and to point out the new features you can expect to see upon updating.


Friendly URLs

Friendly URLs have been implemented into IP.Downloads starting with version 2.1.


Ability to shut off "Resume breakpoints"

Most download accelerator clients support downloading multiple pieces of a file simultaneously. While this means that the file can download faster for the user, it also means that you can have multiple connections open from one user downloading a single file. Beginning with IP.Downloads 2.1 you can disallow requests for individual file parts to help control the number of open connections to your server.


Download sessions

Beginning with IP.Downloads 2.1, you can enable functionality that will cause IP.Downloads to create a unique URL for each file download request. The URL will expire once used (or after 24 hours, whichever comes first), helping to prevent users from sharing direct download links to the files.


Global settings

IP.Downloads 2.1 will allow you to configure maximum file size and screenshot dimension settings globally, while still allowing you to override those settings on a per-category level should you need to. This can help simplify updates to your download manager configuration for these particular settings which are commonly configured the same across all categories.


Support for link "types"

When submitting screenshot and file links, you will now be able to select what type of link you are submitting. The link types are configurable in the ACP so administrators can add and alter link types to better suit their site.


Upload progress meter

Through integration with the flash uploader used for uploading attachments to IP.Board posts, the download manager now supports a true progress bar for all uploads (if the user is using the Flash uploader as specified in their user control panel).


One record, many files

To date, IP.Downloads was designed to allow you to submit one file at a time (and one screenshot, depending on the configuration). IP.Downloads 2.1 takes the next step and allows you to submit multiple files and multiple screenshots per record.


Interface updates

The interface for the download manager has been tweaked and updated to provide a more polished feel, while distinguishing the user interface from the rest of the board.


Wrap Up

The primary focus of IP.Downloads 2.1 was expansion of the file storage methods to include support for important new functionality: multiple files per record and support for the flash uploader tool used by IP.Board. To that end, we decided to focus development on this core functionality in order to provide a solid foundation for future functionality changes in IP.Downloads. We hope you find the updates useful, and we look forward to your feedback to continue improving the product.
  • 1,908 views
bfarber

IPB 3.1: Search Engine Optimization Part Deux

Earlier this week we discussed some of the changes you can expect to see with regards to search engine optimization in IP.Board 3.1. Mostly, the changes are basic tweaks that will have great impact. These are the best kinds of changes.

Based on the feedback received, we've implemented a few other changes related to optimization of your site for visiting search engines. As before, most of these changes are pretty basic. In the end, the goal is to help streamline your site for purposes of search engine indexing. We want to promote the content that is valuable and worth indexing, de-emphasize the content that isn't, and overall adhere to common industry standards and protocols for purposes of ensuring IP.Board does everything it should to help your site position appropriately.

Removal of a setting

We have removed the "Use 301 for friendly URL redirects" setting from the ACP. After reviewing the functionality and purpose of this setting, we have decided it is unnecessary. If you enable friendly URLs and decide to redirect the wrong urls to the correct friendly URL version, you will always want to use a 301 header. By removing the setting, we have effectively hard-coded this to "Yes". The purpose of this is to remove unnecessary options, in favor of presenting you with the options that truly are important for optimizing your site.

Centralize SEO-related settings

We have created a new "Search Engine Optimization" setting group in the ACP to better pull out and separate settings meant for this purpose. We have moved the existing friendly URL settings to this new setting group, and have added some other new settings we will discuss later on in this blog entry.

Addition of "canonical" meta tag for board index

This is an addition we feel is very important and beneficial. A "canonical" meta tag identifies the proper URL for a webpage to a search engine spider. For instance, all of the following urls will load the IP.Board forum index


http://yoursitehere.com/forums http://yoursitehere.com/forums/index http://yoursitehere.com/forums/index.php http://yoursitehere.com/forums/index.php? http://yoursitehere.com/forums/index.php?act=idx
http://yoursitehere.com/forums/






There are many other variations that will do the same. But which one is correct? How can a spider know which version to index, or should it index them all? At the end of the day, they are all different urls, and can potentially be treated differently by a search engine spider. With dynamic software, such as IP.Board, it is often difficult to ensure that the URL used to reach a page is the "correct" version and to redirect appropriately. It is not difficult, however, to tell a search engine which version of the URL SHOULD be used. When a search engine reaches the board index page in IP.Board 3.1, through any URL listed above, or any other variation not listed, the canonical tag will instruct the spider to use one specific version of the URL for that given page. This will help consolidate inbound link weight to the single/correct version of the page, and consolidate duplicate results in search engine listings to the single/correct version of the page.

More improvements for the board index

Many users have requested that we provide a way for them to specify the page title to be used on the board index page. The board index page is going to be the most important page of your forums (in the eyes of a search engine spider), and having complete control over the page title is important. Prior to IP.Board 3.1, the "Board Name" setting was used for the board index page title. This works well for many users, however it is also appended to the end of the page title for many other pages, so depending upon your specific needs, you may want to use different text for the two locations. IP.Board 3.1 has a setting to allow you to change the page title for the board index page specifically. If left blank, the board name will be be used, just as with previous versions.

Additionally, we have added settings to allow you to specify the meta keywords and meta description tag values in the new Search Engine Optimization setting group mentioned earlier. The end result is that you now have much more control over SEO aspects of your board index, arguably the most important page of the forums for search engine spiders.

De-emphasize unimportant pages

IP.Board 3.1 will now issue a meta robots tag with the value "noindex" for some common non-content pages. Examples include the login page, the register page, and the lost password request page. The purpose of the tag is to suggest to the search engine not to index the page at all. Every IP.Board installation on the internet will have effectively the same login, registration and lost password pages, and these pages have no valuable content that search engine spiders want to index anyways. By de-emphasizing unimportant pages, more emphasis is placed on the content-heavy pages we want search engine spiders to spend their time on.


Wrap up

We've got some more feedback and suggestions we would like to take into account and implement in a future version of IP.Board, however we feel that for 3.1 we've taken the most important changes that do not require many invasive core changes to the software and implemented them in a manner that will benefit customers the most. We are working hard to ensure we've done our part to help your forum stand out from the crowd, and are confident that the changes made to IP.Board will have actual, useful benefits to your forum with regards to search engine indexing.
  • 12,357 views
bfarber

IPB 3.1: Search Engine Optimization

Many of our customers have expressed interest in optimizing their forums for search engines, and to that end IPB 3.0 introduced many great features to facilitate this. You may recall from our blog entries leading up to 3.0 that we introduced friendly urls, canonical tag, dynamic meta tag support, and many other useful changes to make indexing your website easier for search engine spiders.

Here are a few blog entries detailing the new features in IP.Board 3.0.


IP.Board 3: Friendly URL Enhancements IP.Board 3.0 Search Engine Optimization IP.Board 3: Friendly URLs at last!



For IP.Board 3.1 we have consulted with an industry specialist to determine some areas of IP.Board where we can optimize the software to better adhere to standards and facilitate easier discovery of content. By making some minor changes to how the software behaves, we can help search engine spiders more easily index your forums, and more easily filter out content that should not be indexed.

Appropriate header codes for errors

Error pages do not need to be indexed by search engine spiders, as they provide no real content that one would expect to search for using a traditional search engine. We have changed IP.Board 3.1 to issue a 500 header code ("Internal Server Error") for most generic error messages. Errors that are indicating the user does not have appropriate permissions will now be delivered with a "403 Forbidden" header code, while error messages that indicate the content could not be found (i.e. an invalid topic id) will issue a "404 Not Found" header code. By using more appropriate header codes, search engines will more easily be able to identify that certain pages should not be indexed, as they are true errors.

The infamous "icon" alt attribute

XHTML Strict standards dictate that an alt attribute must be supplied with every image. The idea is that the alt attribute can be read by screen readers and other assistive technology (as well as by search engine spiders) to better identify what an image represents. Many images in IP.Board are used merely for visual "eye candy" purposes and don't have specific meaning. The title attribute used for anchor tags wrapping the images is more than sufficient to dictate what the link itself is used for, while the image is routinely nothing more than an icon used in place of text to look nicer.

As such, IP.Board 3.0 frequently used "icon" as an alt attribute for many images, because that is what the image was. However, search engine spiders are seeing this as an increasingly relevant term on many IP.Board forums as a result, when clearly many (if not most) forums are not really about "icons". To that end, we have removed "icon" as an alt attribute (in some places, specifying no text as the alt attribute) to de-emphasize the unimportant term. We will be making similar tweaks to other textual and meta data on the page to better help search engines identify what is truly important within any given page.

Cash in on social networking

Social networking is all the craze these days. Love it or hate it, it is hard to deny that social networking is changing the landscape of the internet. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are serving millions and millions of users on a daily basis, making them excellent places to promote your own website to garner interest and put out word of mouth advertising for free.

While IP.Board 3.0 already supports Facebook Connect out of the box, making it easy for users with a Facebook account to simply login to your site using their Facebook credentials, we decided we wanted to do something more for IP.Board 3.1. Pulling IN content is great, but pushing OUT content is even better.

IP.Board 3.1 will feature buttons when viewing a topic that will allow you to quickly push out any given post to Twitter and/or Facebook, making it easier for you and your members to share specific content on your website with large audiences. What's great about this is that this sort of content sharing is much more targetted than generic advertising. If a member shares a specific post on his Facebook "wall", it's much more likely that his friends and colleagues will be interested in the content, and more prone to following the link to your website, than an advertisement block on a random website, or within search engine result listings. Friends and colleagues often share similar interests, after all.

Even more to come

While we feel the above changes are simple but useful tweaks to the existing software, there are some more similarly simple changes we intend to implement to IP.Board 3.1 in order to better position your site to stand out from the crowd. We hope that you feel, as we do, that these improvements will only improve your site, both for search engines, and for your actual users.
  • 12,016 views
bfarber

IP.Content 1.2.0 on its way

Not content just sitting back and letting our latest product IP.Content stagnate, I've been hard at work getting version 1.2.0 ready for everyone very soon. In the mean time, I wanted to put up a blog entry to discuss some of the changes you will see with this new release.

Field default values
There is now a per-field option to define the default value for the field. This default value will be used when the "add new record" form is displayed as the default value to place in the field. The user can still, of course, change this value while configuring their record.

Disable fields in listing and display templates
Many have requested a method of disabling specific fields from displaying in listing and display templates without having to modify the default templates (i.e. to exclude certain fields in the foreach loop, or to manually define the layout). As of 1.2.0 there are two new settings when configuring your fields to do just that. If you disable a field in the listing template, it simply won't show up there. You can even disable a field in the listing and display template and have a hidden field attached to the record, if you wish.

Additional sorting for database feeds
You will now be able to sort database feeds by meta-data fields (record id, last updated, submitted date, comment count, etc.). This will allow you to more easily create database feeds to show latest records, for instance.

Text formatting options for text input fields
There are now per-field settings on text-input fields (only) to allow you to define the following automatic formatting options:


Capitalize all letters Lower-case all letters Capitalize just the first letter of the string Capitalize the first letter of each word in the string Remove excess punctuation
You can mix and match, using more than one option, but of course some options will have no effect when used together (i.e. capitalize all letters, and lower-case all letters).

Attachment parsing for forum and blog feeds
Attachment parsing has been added for forum and blog feeds (provided you do not use the default strip tags and truncate calls in the template for the content value).

Attachment data available programatically
Some users have expressed interest in having access to attachment data in a more robust manner than simply passing the field through the IP.Content attachment parser. For instance, you may want to display 1 image from an attachment field in the listing, without having to worry about whether there are more than 1 images associated with the field.

Attachment data has now been added to a global cache during normal parsing routines, so that you may be able to programatically access the attachment data for the record and do more unique things with the data. A resource article on how to access this data will be forthcoming following the release.

WYSIWYG and Code Highlighter Support
We have added support into IP.Content to integrate with the following WYSIWYG and Code Editors:

TinyMCE CKEditor CodePress EditArea (None/default textarea)
You can select which editor interface you would like to use (be careful using WYSIWYG editors when editing certain content, as they will strip special tags) and the editor will be available when editing templates and content throughout the ACP. Even better, the code highlighters will be "smart" and recognize what type of content you are editing (javascript, css, html or php, depending on the block, template or page details). If you have a favorite editor that you would like to see integrated let us know. We've designed the system to make it easy to drop in (and remove) editor types as needed, so if we can integrate with your favorite editor, we're happy to do so.


The wrap up
Undoubtedly you will notice that most of these features aren't big features, however we feel they will be extremely useful and relevant features as members continue to explore IP.Content and how to use the software to enhance their websites. Every feature listed above was requested by you (our customers), and were culled from tickets, feature request topics, and support topics in the peer to peer forums. Keep on suggesting things you would like to see in IP.Content, and we'll do our best to get those features in place appropriately!
  • 3,957 views
bfarber

IP.Board 3.1.0 Development News

Laurel resting isn't an activity we do at IPS and we're all very hard at work on IP.Board 3.1.0 now that we've finished primary development on our suite of applications. We've got lots of exciting things planned and progress has already been made on a few key features.

As an early Christmas present to our community and to continue our honest and open development, I wanted to show you one of our already completed 3.1.0 features:

Enhanced Status Updates
During the latter stages of IP.Board 3.0.0's development, we added in very basic status updates in users profiles that was further enhanced by the index page sidebar hook. We've seen this feature get a lot of use on our own community and we wanted to take it to the next logical step and allow archived statuses and status replies.

There is a new tab in a member's profile for recent status updates and recent status actions.



As one would expect, this is all handled via Ajax with normal post operations for those who do not have javascript enabled. Replies appear instantly, comments are deleted instantly and even status updates are removed instantly. See it in action below:




There is also a new page for all status updates:



You can even receive email notification on any replies to your statuses or any replies to statuses you've replied to:



This takes a minor feature and gives it a little more focus and should help increase traffic between user profiles and give more of a social feel to your bulletin board.

Your status can also be updated automatically from Facebook if you are using Facebook connect.

As always, please keep in mind these are early preview screenshots and may change between now and the first public release of IP.Board 3.1.0. As always, we'd love to know what you think.
  • 13,885 views
Matt

IP.Downloads 2.1 Installed Here

While we announced planned features for IP.Downloads 2.1 in October, we've been a bit quiet about it since then. This wasn't because we had forgotten about IP.Downloads, or because we had some secret thing going on in the background we didn't want to relay to you just yet. We simply wanted to take the time to test out the changes a little bit before applying them live to our site. We know everyone would be quite upset if the resources section was down for a prolonged period of time, so we knew we had to get it right.

I'm pleased to inform you that we've now updated IP.Downloads here to version 2.1, and it seems to be running quite well. There's going to be bugs here and there, given that this is a pre-final release (please report all bugs you find to our bug tracker, as always), however on the whole we think you'll like what you see.

So head on over to the resources section and take a look at the new and improved download manager.


For those of you who contribute, you'll find a few nice features in this release which you might wish to take advantage of. While these are highlighted in the previous blog entry I linked to, a quick summary is as follows:


You can now submit multiple files at one time per file record. You can now submit multiple screenshots per file record When submitting links you can identify a link "type" (i.e. a mirror, for instance) Due to the improved file uploading process, a progress bar is now shown for all files uploading
We look forward to your feedback!
  • 1,695 views
bfarber

IP.Blog 2.1.0 Development Update

You may have noticed that I've updated our blog installation again. This brings many new features sine the last update. This update pretty much wraps up principle coding for new features and although there are a fair few tweaks and bugs to be fixed, we should see a beta release fairly soon.

The new feature highlights are:

List View Returns
A common request was the return of a fully sortable and filterable list view for blogs that emulated a forum view. I have added this in. You'll notice you can click the table headers to sort on that column and click again to reverse the sort. There is also a "List Blogs" sidebar block to quickly filter and list the blogs.
There's even a little 'preview the latest entry' icon that shows the entry excerpt in a pop-up so you don't have to leave the page to preview it.



Dynamic Sidebar Block
I've moved some the footer links (Top 10 bloggers, etc) into a dynamic sidebar along with Recent Entries. This makes it easier to locate and saves a bit of space.



RSS Imports
Another long requested feature was to be able to create entries from an RSS feed. This is now a feature. You can control which member groups have access to this as well as limit the number of items imported on each cycle.



Banish Entries
You can now banish entries from the front page to remove any 'clutter' such as 'testing' blogs or other unsuitable content.



ACP Clean-up
I've gone through and cleaned up some of the Admin CP pages to make them a little easier to understand and navigate. I've added explanations to the 'Headers' / 'Dynamic Headers' pages so it's clear what they do.

Please have a click around and let us know what you think. We've tried very hard to incorporate a lot of commonly requested features in this release and we'll continue to do so over several subsequent releases.

As always, this is late alpha software so please report any bugs into the Blog bug tracker as normal.
  • 4,910 views
Matt

O'Reilly Answers community now available

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

Read the full announcement from O'Reilly

From the O'Reilly announcement:




Visit O'Reilly Answers
  • 3,346 views
Charles

IP.Content 1.1.2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


We hope that these small but useful and oft-requested features will go a long way towards making IP.Content more flexible and customizable for your installation. If you have any questions or feedback we'd love to hear it! Just drop us a comment at the end of this entry. :)
  • 5,077 views
bfarber

Welcome to the new Blog!

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

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

User Interface

The user interface has had a complete facelift to bring it up to standard. The new look feels more 'bloggish' and enhances the experience. I've added drop down menus at the top so that you can quickly access common areas and start new entries where you have permission to. The post screen has been overhauled to add functionality. You should find the new version much easier to navigate and easier to use.


Group Blogs

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

Blog This!

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


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


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


There are also countless other improvements and enhancements. Keep in mind that this is very much early beta software so expect bugs! Please report them in the tracker as usual.
  • 4,444 views
Matt

IP.Gallery 3.1.0 now in testing

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

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

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

Image rotation
Images can now be rotated in 90
  • 6,772 views
Rikki

How IPS uses its hosting services to grow and learn

Origins of IPS offering hosting services

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

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

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

Growth brings us to today

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


Fully redundant, multi-honed 10 Gigabit connections to providers such as Level 3, Global Crossing, Nlayer, Savvis, and Cogent. Cisco 6509 core router Cisco 3500 distribution switches Foundry networks load balancing and failover equipment Internal and external network separated for fast backups and restores
In addition to these capabilities, the facility in which we locate our equipment also features everything one would expect from backup power to high security entry requirements.

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



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

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

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

Enhancing our software by using our software

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

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



Over the years, our hosting facilities have allowed us to grow our offerings and learn how to create a software platform that can scale with that growth. We will continue to leverage our unique position to develop software and host it all in one, managed environment. Those clients who choose not to host their community with IPS can always be assured that our constant monitoring and learning process will benefit them as well through our continued software updates.
  • 2,500 views
Charles

IP.Gallery 3.1.0 Preview

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

Friendly URLs

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

Category/Album Covers

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

Sub Albums

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

Profile Picture Album

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



New Slideshow

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



More to come

We'll have a lot more to show you in the coming weeks, from new features to an improved interface, we hope that you will enjoy this new version!
  • 5,523 views
Josh

IP.Blog 2.1.0 Development News

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

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

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

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



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



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

This screen capture shows the new UserCP Blog dashboard:



This screen capture shows the new UserCP Manage Comments screen:



These are just a few of the features already completed. We'll follow up with some more next week.
  • 5,459 views
Matt

Community Resources Blog Open to Authors

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

If you are interested in resources for IPS software, don't forget to track (requires account on IPS forums) the community resources blog or subscribe to its RSS feeds for updates. Also have a look around the community resources section of our site for articles, ideas, and more for your IPS-powered communities!
  • 1,357 views
Charles

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