We've been hard at work on IPS 4.0 for some time now, and we're finally at a stage where we are ready to reveal the new AdminCP to you. I won't be showing you everything the ACP has to offer - some things will be revealed in more detail in later blog entries. But lets get to an overview. Background information
IPS4 brings with it a new CSS framework that aims to modularize our styles. This is s…
Introduction
Modifications, add-ons, plugins, hooks - whatever your preferred name for them is - 3rd party code modifications are an important part of any successful web application. It wasn't that long ago that the way you did this was manually opening up files and copying and pasting bits of code in, or the really cool web applications had points scattered throughout the code for modifications…
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Piracy is something that all software companies face and IPS is no exception. Our losses due to credit card fraud and software piracy are significant and to minimize passing along costs to customers, we are seeking to expand our piracy department and take a harder stance against piracy and pursue those who enga…
One of the things we wanted to focus on for IPS Social Suite 4.0 right from the beginning was providing better support for sites which do not use English or use multiple languages (or, as it was scribbled on my whiteboard, "++ i18n/L19n"). In this blog entry I'm going to cover some of those changes and new features. Translatable Everything
Currently when you create a forum, user group, custom …
The IPS Social Suite stores skin and language (and some other stuff) in xml files which are imported into the database at installation and upgrade. The reason we do it this way is so of course, you can export skins and languages and install them on other sites or distribute them via the IPS Marketplace.
I'm not the biggest fan of PHP's XML handling at the best of times (it would seem whoever wro…
We have a few updates to our services to share with you. Community in the Cloud
For over 11 years IPS has provided hosting services for clients that want a turn-key approach to their online community. Over time we have become more and more focused on community hosting solutions so it seemed like a good time to drop the older "hosting" term and adopt a new name for our service: Community in the …
Charts and graphs are an essential tool in modern web applications. The API we use for displaying charts and graphs in IP.Board presently is something we wrote in-house during IP.Board 2.x - it uses the PHP GD library to generate an image representing a chart. At the time, it was pretty amazing, but as times have changed a number of libraries for generating much more visually appealing and intera…
Javascript is a key component of front-end web development - it's essential for a modern web app to provide a good user experience, and javascript is central to enabling that. Getting it right in 4.0 has been one of our goals from the start. Problems
To begin, let's summarize some of the issues with javascript in the current 3.x series: Lack of file organization (a single JS directory that cont…
Sending email is an important part of almost any web software available today. Social Suite applications have varying needs for sending email. Examples include allowing users to confirm their email address during registration, advising users when there are updates regarding content they are following, and bulk mailing your member base to alert them to something important regarding your site. Wh…
I'd like to introduce two new areas we've been working on. These new areas are designed to support our developer community, while making it easier for our clients to get their custom projects taken care of. Projects http://community.invisionpower.com/resources/projects
The first new area is Projects. When you have a custom project for which you need a developer/designer, this new area will allo…
Our proprietary Spam Service which was launched in 2009 has been a very popular feature for IP.Board license holders. This service (which is included at no additional cost for all active license holders) is queried during account registration on your IP.Board installation and will respond to the query with a flag to indicate the likelihood that the registration might be a spammer. You can contro…
To round up our previous blog entries on the post editor in IPS Social Suite 4.0, there's just a few extra features not previously mentioned to show off. @mentions
@mentions are a common feature on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. If you type an @ symbol and then start typing the name of a friend, an autocomplete menu shows so you can quickly then click on the user and they'll re…