Mark

Last year, we added an auto-install/upgrade tool into our client area. The tool would upload the latest version of the IPS Community Suite to your server automatically. The way it worked was after submitting the request, you were entered into a queue, and a program on our server uploaded the files, and emailed you when it was done so that you could run the upgrader script. It normally took about 30 minutes. 30 minutes is pretty good. For someone without the technical knowledge to upgrade, it's a great alternative to asking for a support agent to do the upgrade for you (especially just after a release when everyone is doing just that). However, many users still prefer to do the upgrade themselves (after all, if you can download the source files and upload them to your server in the same time, what's the point?). We decided we should try and get that time down. We also wanted the process to be much more seamless - so you click "Upgrade", get a loading screen, and then are taken immediately to the upgrade script when it's done, rather than waiting for an email. Interested to see how fast we managed to get it? Take a look for yourself: Watch Video In addition, the system can now handle communities that have renamed their admin directory seamlessly without issue (it previously reset to /admin), and the system will automatically detect which encoding of IP.Nexus to use for your server, if applicable (previously it would only use Zend). We really hope the Auto-Upgrader will provide a much easier way for you to keep your community up-to-date with the latest features and enhancements. If you've not already upgraded to IP.Board 3.4, why not go and try it out now? To access the tool, simply go to the Purchases area of the client area, select the community you want to upgrade and click the big "Upgrade Now" button.

When adding a package to an invoice being manually generated, the custom fields bit sometimes displays "Array"

As we wrap up principle development of new features for IP.Board 3.4, I wanted to go through some of the other changes we've implemented for the new release. Share a single post A common feature request has been the ability to share a single post. You might want to share a great reply to a topic on Facebook or perhaps email a link to an interesting post to a friend. You can now do this by clicking either the post number or the little share icon to the right of the post number. This brings up a new modal window System Templates Some "system templates" such as the wrapper used for HTML emails were previously only editable by manually changing the files which contained those templates. This is inconvenient, especially as it means one has to remember not to upload those files when upgrading IP.Board. In IP.Board 3.4, these templates will be editable from the Admin CP making it much easier to maintain edited versions of these templates. Mobile Moderation Our mobile theme is suitable for all mobile devices. Even though we have our mobile application available for the iPhone and iPad, we want to ensure that other devices are able to interact with IP.Board. A very common request has been to enable basic moderation actions from within the mobile theme. To that end, we've added buttons for common topic moderation into the mobile skin. Editor Pasting A lot of the time you find that you just want to paste plain text into the editor so you don't have to then remove formatting such as background and font colors. We've made this an option from within the IP.Board 3.4 editor via the new Options icon (far right on the screen shot). You can still paste as rich text by clicking on the relevant paste button on the top right section of the toolbar. We hoped that you've enjoyed reading this series of blogs on IP.Board 3.4. We're currently putting the finishing touches to this major new release and can't wait make it available for release!

IP.Board has for a long time allowed administrators to send bulk mails to members, including the ability to filter recipients and use variables to customise the message sent to each member. This is an important tool for communicating with the members of your community and in 3.4 we've made it even better. The problem with bulk mail Sending vast amounts of email through your own server is troublesome. Firstly, it takes a long time (you can't just send out thousands of emails in one go) and due to the way PHP works, you need to have activity on your community to initiate the sending of each batch of emails (you could set up a cron, but you'd probably only want it running when you actually have a bulk mail sending, and they're fiddly to set up). Secondly, if you're on shared hosting, other sites on the same server may have given your server a bad reputation and caused it to be placed on blacklists, this causes the emails you send to be more likely to be marked as junk. Thirdly, sending vast amounts of email through your own server is an expensive task - most communities we see use the same server for sending emails as hosting the community itself, meaning resources are being used for the sending of those emails and not serving your users. Fortunately, these problems are well-known throughout the internet and a number of companies offer services to send mail for you, through their servers to alleviate these problems. In addition, these services provide web applications where you can view statistics, and track how many of your emails have been opened, rejected, etc. We're really pleased to announce that in IP.Board 3.4 we've built in integration with Mandrill, a service of well-known and respected MailChimp. How it works Setting up integration with Mandrill is really easy. In the new "Community Enhancements" section of the Admin CP (which we've mentioned in earlier blog entries), there will be an option for Mandrill: After creating an account on their site, all you do is enter your account details: IP.Board will from then on send all bulk mails through the Mandrill service. And it's not just bulk mails. You can even configure IP.Board's normal email settings to send all outgoing emails via Mandrill's SMTP server. Sending bulk mails As part of our improvements, we've also: Tidied up the interface for sending bulk mails Improved the unsubscribe link sent in emails to be a one-click link (rather than requiring users sign in and uncheck the box) Built extension capabilities the filter options available when composing a bulk mail, meaning 3rd party applications can add their own filter options (we'll use this for example, in a future version of IP.Nexus to allow you to send bulk mails to anyone who's purchased a particular item). Added a tab on the confirmation screen to allow you to view the list of recipients before actually sending the bulk mail. All these improvements are present even if you choose not to use the new Mandrill integration. Statistics and Tracking You can view statistics via the Mandrill web application. Emails sent from IP.Board's bulk mail system automatically enable tracking for opens and clicks. They even have iPhone and Android apps available. Pricing Full pricing details are available from Mandrill - for up to 12,000 emails per month though, the service is completely free.

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!