Around ten years ago, I was hard at work on one of the first 'Private Message' modifications for a board that has long ceased to exist. At the time it was an exciting novelty to be able to message another board member. These days it's an expected feature for any seriously considered forum software. Not much has really changed with messaging's core features. Sure, the interface has become a littl…
As we get further along in the development cycle for IP.Board 3 an obvious step that we will be taking on soon is general testing of the new codebase. While this happens with every release, both internally and publicly, it is even more important for a release as immense as IP.Board 3. The entire underlying codebase has changed and vigorous testing will be needed to iron out all of the issues us …
Possibly the most often requested feature we've had since the very first version of IP.Board is 'friendly URLs'. Although this sounds like you'd expect your URLs to greet you with a self-empowerment phrase first thing in the morning, it really relates to making the board generated URLs a little more attractive to both humans and search engines. I am being very careful to avoid the phrase …
It is necessary in any application to handle error situations. The most common method of handling such a situation is to issue an alert to the user so that they know an error has occurred. While this is sufficient in most cases to resolve the problem, we wanted to address IP.Board's error handling routines a little bit with the upcoming release to try to make them a little more useful. F…
Topic markers have evolved quite a bit over the past few years. What started out as being an almost secondary concern has become quite an important part of the user experience. A Very Brief History Early versions of IP.Board relied on cookies to track read topics. This worked fairly well but it wasn't without problems. Anything to do with cookies is always a little flaky. There is a very finite …
We wanted to use this blog entry to bring you an update on the brand new IPB3 skin. In my previous entry, I didn't go into any detail about the skin itself, but I did introduce the Style Guide and some goals/ambitions for the front-end interface. We're now at a stage where we can talk about the skin itself. Whereas most of our other entries explain one particular feature in-depth, this post will …
Way, way back in the early days when we were planning IP.Board 3, a primary consideration was to completely overhaul the output engine to add several new features and to increase extensibility. Out with the old... The system in IP.Board 2.x is really just a perfunctory "engine" build around a few methods in a class. There was no real cohesive structure with many different files and functions acce…
One of the most requested features of the past few years has been for a reputation system and we've already announced that it will be included in IP.Board 3. We're very excited to finally be releasing the details of this new feature and hope that you will enjoy this new feature! A user's reputation will be displayed on their profile and is based on the number of points that user has. You can conf…
Many of you have been waiting for this blog post, and I can assure you we've been equally as anxious to get it out to you, but we wanted to ensure the bulk of the system was in place first before releasing anything we had to pull back on. General Overview First, as used in this blog entry, the definition of a "hook" is a point in the code execution where a modification author can tell IP.Bo…
Managing reported content in IP.Board 2 and our first party applications for IP.Board 2 is decentralized. When a user reports a post due to inappropriate content, moderators assigned to the area in question will receive either a private message or an email to alert them to the post, and it is then expected that a moderator address the inappropriate content. It can become difficult to track who h…
IP.Board has grown a lot over the years, however at the core of it, addons have always been just that - additional software layered onto IP.Board. Some points of integration have existed to allow things to work smoothly together, but code separation has forced most functionality in IP.Board and components to also remain separated. One of our primary goals with IP.Board 3 is tighter integrat…
When we began planning IP.Board 3, the global search system was one of the first features that we decided would be essential. We've already talked about the global search, now we're going to tell you about the permissions system that makes the global search and other features possible. In previous versions of IP.Board, every application had to maintain it's own permission tables and database inf…
.thumb.jpeg.beabd3e950acc9626a39df2efa937da3.jpeg)
