Mark

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!

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.

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!

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.

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:

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.

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.

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:

IP.Nexus allows you to set up shipping prices with customisable rates, destinations and tax. Once an item has been shipped, you can then provide a tracking number which will provide the customer with a link where they can view tracking information. While this solution allows complete control over shipping prices, it can be tedious to set up methods, and arrange shipments with couriers - particularly if you receive lots of orders. In IP.Nexus 1.5, we're introducing direct integration with FedEx. In future versions of IP.Nexus we plan to integrate with other providers like UPS and USPS in a similar way. The setup To get started, you simply need to enter your FedEx account details in the Admin CP. You can also specify which services to use (if you don't want to use them all), add a surcharge to FedEx prices and more: Once that's done - you're all setup. FedEx options will automatically become available when a customer selects a shipping method - you just need to make sure you have provided an accurate weight for shippable products. You can of course disable FedEx services for any individual product. Purchase When a customer goes to purchase a product they'll now see FedEx services in the shipping methods select box: You'll notice that each option shows the price as well as an estimated delivery date. This data is coming straight from FedEx based on the customer's shipping address and the items being purchased. The customer can also edit their shipping address on this screen which will adjust the prices accordingly - the shipping address can be different from the billing address provided in step 1 (but will be automatically filled out with that data). The address entered is also validated with FedEx to check for any mistakes in filling it out. Shipping In the Admin CP, you'll now see a button on the shipping order to arrange the shipment: Clicking this will show you a screen like this: As you can see, there are several options for how you want to provide the package to FedEx. The nearest FedEx drop boxes and service stations are listed and clicking on any will provide the opening hours: You can also have Nexus schedule a courier to come to you to pick up a package which will present you with this screen: Once shipment has been arranged you'll be able to print a shipping label. When the package has been delivered, you'll be able to see a proof-of-delivery with the signature that signed for the package. Both of these are provided by FedEx: Tracking The shipping order page in the Admin CP provides tracking information from FedEx: The customer also has a page in the client area where they can view the same information:

Our last two blog entries have focussed on large new features to the support system in IP.Nexus. But we're not stopping there! In this blog entry I wanted to talk about some of the smaller new features and enhancements we've made to the support system for IP.Nexus 1.5. Pay-Per-Incident IP.Nexus 1.5 adds the ability for you to define a support department as "Pay-Per-Incident". Each department allows you to enter a Pay-Per-Incident amount. When a customers tries to create a support request in this department, they'll see a message like this: Clicking the "Submit Request" button will take them straight to the payment screen to provide payment for the support request. After submitting payment, they'll be redirected straight back to the support request submission form - the title and department will even be remembered and filled in: Contact Us Nexus allows guests to create support requests which can be used for sales enquires, etc. Currently, this is usually done through the incoming email support, however in 1.5, we've added an optional "Contact Us" link to the footer which will allow anyone, including guests, to submit a support request: Tracking notifications IP.Nexus allows staff members to "track" support requests, tracked requests can be accessed quickly from the main support request list and are highlighted in that list. In IP.Nexus 1.5 we've also added the option to receive email notifications when a customer replies to support requests you are tracking: Staff members can reply to these notifications directly via email and their reply will be added to the support request. Reply to notifications IP.Nexus allows you to send a notification to any email address(es) for new support requests or emails within a particular department. Previously, the notification just said that a support request had been created or replied to, and gave you the title and ID number. In IP.Nexus 1.5, the notification email will contain the full body of the message and can be replied to directly by email. Improved Incoming Email Handling IP.Nexus supports the ability to receive incoming emails as support requests and replies. In IP.Nexus 1.5 we've rewritten a lot of this code to make it more reliable and secure. We've also added a setting to allow you to control whether you prefer Nexus to parse emails as HTML or in plaintext. Each message now also has a toggle which allows you to quickly toggle (it uses AJAX) between HTML or plaintext on any message: Merge Staff members have been able to split a support request into two requests in Nexus for a long time. In 1.5, we've added the option you can merge two together into one. Reminder Emails IP.Nexus allows you to assign support requests to staff members. Staff members can quickly see all support requests assigned to them from the support request list, however, if you don't regularly check the list, you may not know a request has been assigned to you. In IP.Nexus 1.5, if a staff member has any support requests assigned to them, they'll receive an email each morning with a list of the support requests that are assigned to them. Edit Title In IP.Nexus 1.5, staff members will be able to edit the title of a support request: Stock Actions When Logging a Support Request Stock Actions allow you to quickly set a department, status, assigned staff member and reply on a support request. In IP.Nexus 1.5, when logging a support request in the Admin CP on behalf of a customer, you'll be able to use these Stock Actions in addition to when replying.

Those familiar with IP.Nexus will be familiar with the ability to create custom fields both for packages (so when a user purchases a package they can provide custom information such as the size, colour, etc. of the item being purchased) and for customer accounts (so you could add additional fields for customers to provide when making a purchase, etc.). In IP.Nexus we're adding the ability to use custom fields with support requests. You can choose from several different types of field, select the departments it applies to, and choose whether or not it is required. Here I've created a field to ask users what "software version" they're using: Now when a user goes to create a support request in the "Support" department, they'll be prompted to provide this information: This works on the mobile skin too, of course: The values of these fields can then be viewed both by the customer, and admins:

IP.Nexus provides a great support system, allowing customers to submit support requests through your community or directly through email. The support system also includes robust reporting tools allowing you to see the volume of support requests over time and audit individual members of staff to view how many replies they're making and the quality of those replies. Ensuring customer satisfaction is important to anyone running a support system, and in IP.Nexus 1.5 we're adding a feature that will allow your customers to rate, and provide feedback on, the support they receive. When the system is enabled, customers will see a star rating system below each staff member's reply: They can then click on their desired rating, which will bring up a popup where they can enter additional feedback. This is completely optional, and customers can just leave a star rating if desired. In the Admin CP, you can control using ACP Restrictions if administrators can view the ratings given and optionally also view the feedback given. If a rating is given and the administrator can see it, it will appear user the message, just like in the front-end: If the customer left a note, and the administrator has permission to view it, they can do so by clicking on the rating: IP.Nexus has a "Staff Audit" tool allowing you to view how many support requests each staff member has answered over time. The audit now has an additional column providing the average rating for their replies in that time period: And of course, when you click on the number to view the staff member's responses, the rating and the note if available will display here too: Finally, we've added an additional report page in the Admin CP which allows you to view the average rating for different staff members over time: In this screenshot, I'm comparing two staff members average ratings throughout 2012 on a bar chart. But just like the other reporting tools in Nexus, you can select any date range, chart type (options are bar, line, pie or a plain data table) and can customise the series too (you could compare any particular staff members, group staff members by their department to compare departments, view everyone on one series, etc.) As always, if you have any feedback or suggestions unrelated to this blog entry, please post them in the IP.Nexus forum

IP.Nexus has for a long time included a referrals system, allowing your customers to refer their friends to your community and subsequently earn commission on any purchases they make in IP.Nexus. The problem with this set up though is that you might not want referrers to continue earning commission forever, or you might want to specify different commission amounts depending on what the referring user is purchasing. In IP.Nexus 1.5 we're adding much better control over the system - you can now create custom rules which control the commission amount which will be paid out to referrers. Nexus will loop through the rules you set up and give the highest commission amount out of the rules that match. You can base your rules on: The number of purchases that the referring user has made (as a number, or as a money amount) The group that the referring user is in The number of purchases that the user making the purchase has made (as a number, or as a money amount) The group that the referring user making the purchase is in The packages being purchased The amount of the transaction You can then specify a commission amount to give as a percentage, and optionally a hard limit on the maximum amount of commission that can be given. Here you can see I've set up a rule which will give the referrer 50% commission on the first purchase that members they refer make, provided the purchase is at least $10: We've also made some improvements on the front-end. Firstly, users can specify any URL to use as the URL the people they refer are directed to. In addition, users will be able to see the commission rules that apply to them: If however, you don't want users to be able to see details of the commission rules, you can replace the content of that popup with your own custom message, or remove it all together. Just like before, you can also create banners and upload them in the Admin CP, which will provide users code for using your banners on that page: And you can of course keep track of who referred whom on the customer pages and customer history page:

As mentioned in our last blog entry, we're hard at work on our next version of IP.Nexus. One of the more visual features we're adding in this version is an updated mobile skin - here are some screenshots! Main store page: Category listing: Product screen: Cart view: Checkout screen: Client area - menu: Client area - invoice view: New support request form:

IP.Nexus is our hugely popular eCommerce and business management application for the IPS Community Suite. Over the past few weeks we've been working on lots of new features and enhancements for the next version of IP.Nexus (version 1.5). The first change we wanted to share with you is called Fraud Rules. For a long time, IP.Nexus has provided integration with MaxMind for anti-fraud measures. However, this is limited only to holding or refusing transactions based on the MaxMind score. You might want to, for example, manually review all transactions where, for example, the user's billing address doesn't match their physical location (which MaxMind can detect) - or perhaps you don't want to use MaxMind and want to manually review all orders over a certain amount, or all orders from particular countries - this is where Fraud Rules comes in. IP.Nexus 1.5 allows you to create as many Fraud Rules as you like based on a wide range of criteria - each Fraud Rule is checked in the order you specify and the last that matches is what is used. This is what the management screen looks like: Here you can see I've set up a number of rules (the names are assigned by you as a reference for what the rule does) - I've created rules so that if the amount is over $100 or the the customer is paying by PayPal and has not made any previous purchases, the payment will be held for manual approval, unless the customer is in the "Administrators" group. This is just an example of what you might do - there is a wide range of criteria that you can base rules on. Here is what the add/edit page for a rule looks like: If MaxMind is enabled, even more options are available: The full list of what you can base rules on is:The transaction amount (greater than, less than or equal to X) Payment method used was (multi-select) Customer is in usergroup (multi-select) Customer's email address (is/contains X) Customer's billing address country (multi-select) Customer has made X approved transactions (greater than, less than or equal to X) Customer has made X approved transactions which have been blocked by Fraud Rules or manually refused by an administrator (greater than, less than or equal to X) Coupon was used (yes/no) MaxMind: Score (greater than, less than or equal to X) MaxMind: Customer's billing address is valid (yes/no) MaxMind: Customer's billing address matches their IP address location (yes/no) MaxMind: Customer's phone number matches their billing address (yes/no) MaxMind: Likeliness that customer is using an IP address proxy (greater than, less than or equal to X) MaxMind: Customer is using a free email provider (yes/no) MaxMind: Customer's email address is considered "High Risk" (yes/no) MaxMind: Customer's username is considered "High Risk" (yes/no) You can then choose whether the transaction should be approved, held for approval or refused based on the conditions specified. You can also set the rule to ban the customer if it used (which you might use, for example, to ban someone if they make X transactions which are blocked by Fraud Rules). For each rule, you can specify any number of the conditions available - the conditions you don't specify will be ignored and the rule will only be used if all conditions specified match. As mentioned earlier, the rules are checked in order and the last that matches is used, with this in mind and the ability for a rule to approve a transaction, you can add additional rules to specify circumstances where a customer can bypass a rule (in my example above, I've set it up so Administrators are exempt from all rules). The new Fraud Rules feature gives complete control over your transactions and will hopefully ease some of the headache of manually approving transactions. This is of course just the first of many features and enhancements we have planned for IP.Nexus 1.5 - stay tuned for more updates over the coming weeks! As always, if you have any feedback or suggestions unrelated to this blog entry, please post them in the IP.Nexus forum :smile:

IP.Board has featured a reputation system since 3.0, allowing users to give positive or negative reputation to posts, as well as content in other apps in the IPS Community Suite (blog entries, gallery images, etc.) as well as content in third party applications. In IP.Board 3.2, we enhanced this by adding a new way of viewing the reputation system, in terms of "liking" content as opposed to giving reputation, which is a more common social feature on websites today. In IP.Board 3.3, we're adding two features to utilise the reputation system in content discovery. Reputation in user's profile We've added a new tab to the profile which allows you to see both the content that the user has most recently liked, as well as content the user has made which has been most recently liked. This of course supports both reputation modes (the "Like" system and the traditional reputation system). The tabs at the top allow you to choose which application you want to view content from (in the screenshot only Forums and Calendar are viewable, but of course, support will be added for other apps and 3rd party developers can also add support), and also toggle whether you want to see reputation given or reputation received. Content with the highest reputation In addition to the profile tab, we've also created a new page (the link to which appears in the footer next to the top posters, etc.) which shows the content which has the highest rating, or has been liked the most. Just like on the profile tab, you can toggle between which application you want to view the content for. Both systems of course also work exactly the same with the traditional reputation system: Feel free to comment on this blog entry below or, if you have feedback unrelated to this blog entry, start a new topic in our feedback forum.

With every release of our products, we like to spend some time identifying areas which can be improved slightly, and small feature suggestions we can use. 3.3 is no exception, and I wanted to write a quick blog entry to highlight just some of the smaller enhancements we've made to 3.3 to make the product more powerful and easy to use. Login autosave In 3.2, we introduced a login popup box when you click "Sign In" to make logging in faster. Previously, the content for this popup was loaded by AJAX which meant some browsers would not automatically fill in your username and password like they normally would. In 3.3, we've changed the way this is loaded so that this is no longer the case. It still works exactly as it did before, except browsers will now be able to autofill your login details. Emoticons in sigatures Emoticons (smilies) are now supported in signatures. Log in as member Sometimes it is useful to log into your community as a member if they're experiencing issues, or to check you have set permissions up correctly. Previously, you would have to change the user's password and then log in as them normally in order to do this. In 3.3, we've added a button to the "edit member" page in the Admin CP which will log you straight into the community as that user, without you needing to know their password. This is of course protected by Admin CP Restrictions, so you can choose which of your administrators have access to this function. Duplicate forum Sometimes you want to set up several similar forums. This can be a real hassle having to create every forum, and set the settings and permissions for that forum manually. In 3.3, we've added an option in the drop-down menu in the forums management screen which allows you to "duplicate" a forum, so that you can easily create multiple forums with similar settings and permissions. Remove ability to create status updates Sometimes, you might want to remove a user's ability to post status updates. Previously, this could only be done in the Admin CP, however, in 3.3, we've added this option to the "edit member" screen on the front-end, so moderators can toggle this setting without having to log into the Admin CP. Tasks as cron IP.Board features a powerful task manager which is used to run certain tasks throughout the day to perform cleanup, send emails, etc. The task manager has always supported running tasks using cron for sites which would prefer to do so or perhaps do not receive enough activity for tasks to be triggered by users. Previously, each task had to have its own cron job set up. In 3.3 however, you can create a single cron which will execute any tasks that need to be ran. Delete guest posts IP.Board has always had the ability to delete all posts by a certain member. However, if you allow guests to posts, there was no tool to delete all posts made by a particular guest. In 3.3, we've added this feature. Rebuild reputation When you delete a post, the user's post count does not go down as this is representative of how many posts the user has made. IP.Board however, does have a tool to rebuild post counts based on what's currently in the database to set the post count for each user to be the current number of posts on the community. Reputation has a similar problem - when a user receives reputation, if the post which received reputation is deleted, their reputation does not go down - this is by design. Up until now however, there was no way to "rebuild" this like you can do with post counts. In 3.3, we've added a tool to rebuild reputation based on what's currently in the database, just like the tool to rebuild post counts. Upgrader custom script This is a change which only applies to application developers. In 3.3, we've added support for two scripts which are executed before and after an upgrade, respectively. Developers can use this to verify the application is compatible with the IP.Board version, and to run any post-upgrade rebuilds that may be necessary. Email tester We've also added a tool in the "Support" section of the Admin CP which will send a test email so that you can verify your community is sending emails correctly. Feel free to comment on this blog entry below or, if you have feedback unrelated to this blog entry, start a new topic in our feedback forum.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog entry discussing our efforts towards moderation features, and specifically the new warning system. Today I wanted to talk about another area of moderation, perhaps the most important area - managing content - and how we've improved that in IP.Board 3.3. Unapproved, Soft Deleted, Deleted IP.Board has some great functionality when it comes to managing content - you can set any user, group or forum to require manual approval before posts are made, and once content has been posted you can edit it, hide it, or delete it. The way that this is presented though can sometimes be confusing. Currently, the ability to hide a post (which we refer to as "soft delete" or "remove from view") is accessed by clicking "Delete". I see on a lot of communities, a moderator wants to hide a piece of content, but not delete it, and clicks "Unapprove". This of course works in that the content is hidden, but it re-enters the moderation queue and is indicated to moderators that it needs their approval when browsing the community or the moderator control panel, when in fact, moderators are aware of it, and have deliberately chosen not to approve it. We've made some changes to make this a little clearer: Currently when viewing a post, the options are: Unapprove Delete Remove from View (Soft Delete) Delete from topic (Hard Delete) [*]Edit This presents a few issues - firstly, as mentioned before - it's not immediately obvious that the "Delete" option contains sub-options, and in addition, "Unapprove" and "Remove from View" perform almost identical actions. In 3.3, we've merged "Unapprove" and "Remove from View" into a single action called "Hide", and "Delete" now simply moves the post to the Trash Can (accessible in the moderator control panel) without any additional dialogues. So the options now are:Edit Hide Delete All the same functionality, but much simpler. This change also applies to both topics and posts, and also the comments system used by Blog/Gallery/Downloads/Calendar/Nexus, which currently does not allow content to be hidden in any way once it's been approved. Interface Enhancements We've also moved a few things around to make moderation tools easier to access. The drop down menu When viewing a topic, there is currently a drop down menu at the bottom of the screen allowing you to perform moderator actions on the topic. The problem is, not only is it below all the posts, it's hidden behind a "Show Moderator Tools" link: We've moved this up the top, next to the reply button, and made the options a little easier to understand: We've also moved the drop down in the forum view to the same location. Multi-mod Also in that "Show Moderator Tools" bar is a long select box - when viewing a topic, there are little checkboxes next to each post which you can check, then select an action from that box to perform an action on several posts at once. This isn't great though because it isn't always obvious that it is that select box that the checkboxes are about, and also, even if you do know it, you have to scroll all the way down to get to it. The comments system used by Blog/Gallery/Downloads/Calendar/Nexus has a much better way of dealing with this - when you click the checkbox, an overlay appears in the bottom-right corner of your screen. We've implemented this same design: This is used both for the checkboxes next to each post when viewing a topic, and next to each topic when viewing a forum. We've also made it so that the options available are aware of the options you check - for example, if you check a post which is hidden, you'll see the option to unhide it, but not also to hide it (since it's already hidden). Feel free to comment on this blog entry below or, if you have feedback unrelated to this blog entry, start a new topic in our feedback forum.

Any community administrator knows how important moderation features are to a successful community, and the IPS Community Suite offers some great features in this area. The Spam Monitoring Service, for example, a unique feature that is completely unmatched anywhere else, keeps your community safe from spam content. Also in IP.Board 3.2, we introduced the Moderator Control Panel feature, giving your moderators a central location to manage all of their moderation tasks. In IP.Board 3.3 we wanted to spend some time researching what could be done in this area to even further help your moderators to keep your community running smoothly. One moderation feature which has remained largely unchanged throughout IP.Board's life is the warning system. It's a fairly simple system - if a user behaves in a way that is inappropriate for your community you can issue them a warning and along with that warning give a punishment, such as requiring moderator approval of their content or even banning them from your community for a certain amount of time. So how can we make it better? We set ourselves a few goals for how we could improve the warning system for all of your users: Control. Many administrators prefer to have more control over the way moderation happens on their communities. You may want the first time a user is warned to always be a verbal warning only; you may then want to the second warning to always be a 1 day suspension, etc.; you may want different punishments for different infractions. Or perhaps you want to allow your moderators to choose punishments themselves as they do currently. We wanted the warning system to be able to handle both of these setups so you can be as fixed or as flexible as you like. Communication. At the moment, if a moderator gives a member a warning, no other moderators know about it unless they happen to be looking at a member's warn logs. We wanted communication between the system and the moderators to be better. Moderators should be able to know when a member is warned. They should be able to see who warned them, why, and what post caused the warning. They should know looking at a member's profile if they're currently serving out a punishment for a warning, and if so, which warning. Clarity. If a member is warned, they need to know why and what the punishment is. They shouldn't be put on mod queue and not know about it and then wonder why their posts aren't showing up. Points, Reasons and Actions The new system works on a points based idea. When a user commits an offence (for lack of a better term) they will receive a number of points appropriate for the severity of the infraction. As an administrator, you will set up these different "Reasons" in the Admin CP. For each reason, you can determine if moderators are fixed to a certain number of points, or if they can change the number of points to give a member. You can also choose whether or not to allow moderators use of a generic "Other" reason, for which they can set any number of points. For each reason, you can also set how long the points last for - whether they stay on the user's account forever, or if they are removed after a certain period of time, and if that is set in stone or something moderators can change when issuing a warning. You can then also set up Actions. Actions are the punishment that a user receives when they reach a certain number of points. There are 3 different punishments you can give:Moderation queue - all posts the user submits must be approved by a moderator before they are shown. Restricted from posting - the user cannot post at all. Suspension - the user cannot access any area of the community at all. And each can be for a specified period of time or indefinitely. Again, you can specify if this rule is set in stone or if moderators can have free control over the punishment. If a moderator issues a warning and it gives the user a number of points that does not have a corresponding action - you can choose if that means moderators can set whichever punishment they like, or if that constitutes a "verbal warning only". Through this advanced level of control - you can allow the system to be as rigid (in that moderators have to give a certain number of points for each type of infraction, and punishments for each number of points is defined) or as flexible (in that moderators can give whatever number of points and whatever punishment they choose) as you like. Since points can also automatically be removed after a period of time you can also be as forgiving or not as you like. So this is what the warning screen looks like (you can get to it from a link in the member's profile or next to any of their posts): After selecting a reason, the punishment will be filled out and you may or not be able to change it as per the Admin CP settings: If a moderator has control over the number of points, they can also click the "?" icon which will explain all of the points levels and warning actions. Notifications As you will have noticed in the above screenshot - when warning a member, you can specify both a note for the member (in which you will presumably explain why you are issuing the warning) and a note which can only be viewed by other moderators. Neither are required, but will show up in the warning log. After issuing a warning, the member will be sent a notification which will take them to their warnings log page from which they can see the warning and what punishment they were given: Users and moderators can access the warning log from the profile or from any post. When a moderator views the log, they will see the note for moderators in addition to the note for the member. In addition to members receiving notifications when they are warned, all moderators who have the ability to view warnings can set their notification options to notify them when any other moderator issues a warning. Warning and Punishment Information Note that the details popup includes a link to the actual post which caused the moderator to issue the warning. When a moderator clicks on to the warning page, it remembers where they came from - this allows both them to be taken back there once the warning has been issued, and it allows other moderators to see the exact post the warning was issued for. When another moderator is viewing that post, it will also be indicated there with a red icon: This allows moderators to see that a warning was issued for the post and that they do not also need to issue a warning. Clicking the icon brings up the details popup: In addition, when viewing a user's profile, moderators will be able to see if they are currently serving out any punishments: And again, clicking on that badge will show the details: Acknowledgements Another additional feature is the option to require that all members "acknowledge" their warnings. If enabled, after a user is issued a warning, they will not be able to post again until they acknowledge it. When they click the reply button, they will be shown a screen like this: After acknowledging the warning, the user will be taken straight back to the post screen. If you have not enabled acknowledgements, or even just to remind the user even if you have - when a user is on moderation queue, a message above the post editor will remind them of this, so that they don't wonder why their post isn't showing up after they post: Integration Although we have talked about this feature from within the forums app - the integration you see will be included in all applications, and developers can add easily add support for their own. The integration will allow the following features in every app:The link backs to the content from the warning log, wherever that is. The red icon within the content if a warning has been issued for it. Honouring of the punishments given - moderation queue and restricted from posting. The message showing above the editor if on moderation queue. Prompting the user to acknowledge warnings before posting. We hope that the new warning system helps you to manage moderation on your community more easily. This is just the start of our plans for IP.Board 3.3 so watch this blog for more updates coming soon. Feel free to comment on this blog entry below or, if you have feedback unrelated to this blog entry, start a new topic in our feedback forum.

IP.Blog is our popular blogging platform for the IPS Community Suite. We've been working on updates and improvements to this platform for the upcoming 2.5 release which we wanted to talk about today. Interface Improvements We've spent a lot of time cleaning up the interface and making use of the new styles available in 3.2. The aim was to make it simple and intuitive to create, manage, post to and find blogs. Here's a few screenshots: Tags IP.Blog was our first product to make use of tags. In IP.Board 3.2 however, we added a more global tagging system with more advanced features (for example, an open or closed system and prefixes). In IP.Blog 2.5, we've updated the tags system to use that new global system, so the features and interface that you're familiar with will now be available in Blog too, including tag search. Existing tags in entries will be updated to the new system, so nothing will be lost. Friends Only Currently IP.Blog allows you to have blogs that are private or only viewable to those who you specify. We've integrated IP.Blog into the friends feature in IP.Board and added a new "Friends Only" option which allows your friends (and only your friends) to view your blog. Blog This IP.Blog currently has a hook called "Blog This" which allows you to blog about a post you find on the forums. We've extended this feature so that a new "Blog This" link now shows in the standard share links used throughout the IPS Community, in: Forum topics Blog entries Gallery images Downloads files Content articles Nexus products Calendar entries By clicking the Blog This icon in any of these locations, you can blog about the content on that page with just one click. The content will be quoted and a link to the content will be added automatically to your entry. Manage Comments IP.Board 3.2 added a global moderator control panel. In IP.Blog 2.5 we've deepened the integration with this feature and so unapproved comments on blog entries will now show under "Unapproved Content" in the moderator control panel. Entry Images We've added an additional field when submitting a blog entry for an "Entry Image". This allows you to upload an image which will then display in your blog entry both in the entry itself and on listings in the entry and blog lists. Entry Views In addition to seeing how many views a blog has, you can now see how many views a single entry has had.

To wrap up our series of blog entries on IP.Nexus 1.4, there's just a few more new features and enhancements that warrant mentioning. HTML Emails Matt recently blogged about the new HTML email support in the IPS Community Suite. IP.Nexus 1.4 makes full use of this feature to send out clear, description and well formatted emails. It's much more than just a new wrapper around the same text - we've reviewed every email that IP.Nexus sends to make it more informative. Here's a sample before and after shot of a payment received notification: Charts & Graphs (and Lists) Back in December last year, we added a feature to Nexus allowing you to generate charts and graphs with various data. All graphs can be viewed for any period of time (and any span of time), you can customise which data to to place on what series and you can view the results as a pie chart, bar chart or line graph. We're adding two new features to this. First, a new type of graph which allows you to generate graphs based on the income received based on the country of the user purchasing: We've also added a new option for viewing the data - as a list. Often people just want to know, for example, what are their best selling products, not necessarily in a graph form. By selecting list as the chart type, you can see just that: You can of course use this list view for any of the graph types, including the new markets type. AJAXification When viewing a support request, there's quite a few things you can do other than reply. We've made two often performed actions: managing the cc list, and tracking/untracking the support request work using AJAX, so you can perform these actions without having to reload the page, distracting you from the support request. Support Bounce Sometimes customers will reply by email to a support request which had been closed for a long time. Previously, IP.Nexus would simply reopen the support request, however, this can be annoying if you sort requests by the date they were opened, as they will have suddenly jumped to the top of the queue. In IP.Nexus 1.4, you have the option to have Nexus reply to the customer in this case, asking them to submit a new support request, rather than reopening the old. Coupons and Renewals IP.Nexus allows you to create coupons which can only be used against chosen products. In IP.Nexus 1.4, you can specify if the coupon can also be used against renewals of those products. Alternate Contact Management We've redesigned the interface for managing alternate contacts in the Admin CP. You can now search for the alternate account by name, id number or email address, and can edit existing alternate contacts. That's all for IP.Nexus 1.4. Beta testing will begin soon, so keep an eye on the testing forum. In the meantime, if you have any feedback or suggestions unrelated to this blog entry, as always, please post them in the IP.Nexus forum :smile:

A little while ago, I talked about the front-end store improvements for IP.Nexus 1.4. In addition to these front-end changes, we've also made a few changes to back-end order management which we wanted to talk about today. Tracking Numbers IP.Nexus has always had the functionality for viewing shipping orders and printing packing notes. In IP.Nexus 1.4 we're expanding the shipping features by adding support for tracking numbers. When you click the button to mark an order shipped, you'll now see a popup asking for the tracking number and the service you're sending the package by: If you fill this in, customers will be given a link in their shipping notification allowing them to track their shipment. PayPal Payer Status Those who manually review transactions know that it's importance of to be able to approve genuine orders quickly while ensuring that fraudulent orders are noticed. For customers that pay by PayPal, one of the important factors in this decision can be if the customer paid with a verified PayPal account or not. In IP.Nexus 1.4, you'll be able to see right on the transaction review page if the payment (if it's a PayPal payment) came from a verified PayPal account. Transaction Review Sometimes when you're reviewing transactions, you might want to leave one and come back to it later - perhaps you're going to contact the customer for additional information, or wait to see if the funds appear. This can sometimes cause issue if there's more than one person reviewing transactions - one person might contact a customer for followup, then another refuses the transaction, or contacts the customer again. In IP.Nexus 1.4, we've added an additional status to transactions allowing you to flag a transaction as being "under review". Transactions with this status are clearly indicated on the review screen (they appear in a blue box rather than pink) and who marked it as such, so everyone knows you already have it under control. Void Account It is inevitable that sometimes you need to terminate a customer's account. Perhaps they've filed a chargeback, or broken your purchase agreement. While IP.Nexus has the ability to refund transactions and easily cancel purchases, this can be time consuming if the customer has made several purchases. In IP.Nexus 1.4 we've added something of a kill-switch. One button that will refund all transactions, cancel all purchases, close all support requests and ban the account from logging in. As always, if you have any feedback or suggestions unrelated to this blog entry, please post them in the IP.Nexus forum :smile:

Following on from our first blog entry on IP.Nexus 1.4, one of the areas we wanted to focus on in this version is hosting integration. IP.Nexus integrates with CPanel and WHM to allow you to sell and manage hosting services to your customers. Monitoring Anyone who sells hosting services knows that it is important to always have a eye on your servers and you need to know as soon as one of them goes down. With version 1.4, IP.Nexus has you covered. We're including monitoring features to keep watch on all of your servers. Here's how it works: every 5 minutes, IP.Nexus will call gateway script which will in turn call a monitoring script which you'll upload to each of your servers, the response from this tells Nexus that the server is online and healthy. If Nexus does not receive a response from the monitoring script, it does one of three things: 1) It can check with a backup gateway script (which you'll locate on a separate server) to ensure the issue isn't with Nexus' communications. If that script can get a response, the server is online and everything is okay. 2) It will give the server a grace period. You can configure how many times Nexus should allow a server to not respond before sending out notifications - this allows the server, for example, 10 minutes to recover before sending out notifications. 3) It will send an email to the list of people you have configured to be notified. Once that notification gets sent, all those who received it can reply to it and their replies will be sent out to all other people in the list - this is helpful if you have more than one person that's going to be being notified and need to keep them all in the loop. Any person receiving the email can also acknowledge the notification (more on that in a moment) or reset the monitoring back to a default state (which they'll do once they've fixed the problem). If nobody acknowledges the notification, and the server is still down after a period of time you specify, additional emails will be sent out to remind all that the server is still down. The system also has a plan for if Nexus itself goes offline. On the server where your gateway script resides, you can set up a cron for a script which checks the last time Nexus called it. This script will email everyone in your notification list if Nexus has not called it in over 15 minutes. You don't even need to configure this script - Nexus will keep it up to date with any changes you make to the list of people to notify. You can at any time view the status of your servers in the Admin CP - a green tick indicates that everything is okay, a red cross means the server is reporting offline: With this of course, you can now create servers which are not integrated with CPanel/WHM but are monitoring only. There are also of course hook points so you can add your own code to run when a server goes down or comes back up. Every sysadmin knows that when a server goes down to expect a flood of emails, phone calls, etc. from customers reporting the issue. Now that IP.Nexus knows when a server is offline, we've added a little notification which appears if a customer goes to submit a support request while one of the servers they have an account on is down, notifying them you are already aware of the problem: Server Cost When creating a server you'll now have the option to provide the monthly cost of the server. IP.Nexus takes this information and along with it calculates the monthly revenue from that server (based off the information IP.Nexus already has). This allows IP.Nexus to show you a monthly profit/loss for each server. Dedicated Servers Those selling dedicated servers in IP.Nexus are used to creating simple custom packages to represent dedicated servers. In IP.Nexus 1.4 we've added a special kind of custom package which represents a dedicated server. This allows you to make use monitoring and viewing the monthly profit/loss while maintaining all the flexibility of custom packages. Little Changes We've also made a number of small changes to the hosting features in IP.Nexus: As you may have noticed from the first screenshot, the server list is now separated by tabs into server queues. For those who prefer the traditional all-in-one layout, there is an "All" tab which will show all servers in the system. When cancelling a hosting account, Nexus currently terminates the account on the server. In IP.Nexus 1.4 you'll have the option to suspend or terminate the account. IP.Nexus now retains the domain and previous server of a hosting account even once it's been cancelled, this allows even cancelled accounts to show up in search results. We still have a couple more blog entries planned for IP.Nexus 1.4. In the meantime, if you have any feedback or suggestions unrelated to this blog entry, as always, please post them in the IP.Nexus forum :smile:

IP.Nexus is our hugely popular eCommerce and business management application for the IPS Community Suite. Over the past few weeks we've been working on lots of new features and enhancements for the next version of IP.Nexus (version 1.4). The first set of changes we wanted to talk about revolve around the storefront. The biggest change we've made in this area is a completely redesigned product page. This is what it looks like: The more perceptive of you will notice that a redesign isn't the only thing this screenshot reveals - we've added several new features to the storefront. Multiple Product Images Probably the most requested IP.Nexus feature, and coming with Nexus 1.4 is multiple product images. You can upload as many different images for a product you like and they are all displayed on the left-side of the product view. Clicking any image will bring it up in the larger box at the top, and clicking that will launch the lightbox to display the full-size image. We've made adding multiple images a quick and easy experience for administrators using an AJAX upload system, here's a video of it in action: http://www.invisionpower.com/uploads/nexus_multiple_product_images.mov As you can see, it's very easy to upload and manage multiple images. Product Reviews Another oft-requested feature coming in IP.Nexus 1.4 is product reviews. You can now set (on a per-product basis) if you want to accept reviews, and if you want to moderate reviews before they go live. Only customers who have purchased the product can review (they'll see a prompt both on the product page in the store and in their purchases list in the client area), and with it they provide a star rating out of 5. The average star rating is displayed on the product page. All members can click whether they found the review helpful or not, and the count for this is displayed just below the review. Product reviews of course integrate with the IPS Community Suite Moderator Center - so you'll be able to easily see a list of reviews pending approval, and members will be able to report reviews and these reports will show up in the Moderator Center. Tax Included IP.Nexus now has the option to include tax in the price which is shown to customers in the store. The text you see in the screenshot ("incl. vat.") can be customised to display whatever you like (so if you're not including tax in the price, it could say "excl. tax"). The calculation is based off of the member's location if known, or the fallback "All Locations" rate if the location is not known. Discounted Price IP.Nexus has long had the option to give selected members discounts based on their usergroup and previous purchases. In IP.Nexus 1.4, if a discount is applied, the original price will be shown striked out next to it so that users are aware that they're receiving a discount. Grid View As well as the product page itself, we've added a new viewing option to the category view. Rather than displaying products in a list, you can now display them in a grid format: You can of course set which view will be the default and disable the option for the user to choose. This is just the first blog entry we have planned for IP.Nexus 1.4. As always, if you have any feedback or suggestions unrelated to this blog entry, please post them in the IP.Nexus forum :smile:

IP.SEO is a free extra from IPS which provides tools to enhance the Search Engine Optimization of your community. It includes features like sitemap generation, the ability to set meta tags on any page, search engine statistics and SEO-related advice on your configuration. The IPS Community Suite itself has many built-in SEO features that are suitable for nearly all communities however IP.SEO expands upon them with more advanced SEO features. We've been busy working on an update to IP.SEO which will be available soon. New features include: Live Meta Tag Editor IP.SEO has long had the ability to add custom meta tags to any page within your community, allowing you to modify the title, add a meta description and more on an individual-page basis. While working on IP.SEO 1.5, we looked into ways we could make this important tool more accessible, and have taken concepts we learned from the Visual Skin Editor in IP.Board 3.2 and applied them to this. Much like how with the Visual Skin Editor you can modify the skin live on the front-end, the Live Meta Tag Editor allows you to browse the front-end of your community and view and edit the meta tags configured for each page you visit. This allows you to customise the meta information on every page in your community easier than ever before so you can make sure all of your pages have exactly the right information you want to show search engines. Improved Sitemap In IP.SEO 1.5, we've added support for IP.Calendar, IP.Nexus and IP.Chat to the sitemap, so now all IPS applications are supported and your entire community can be accessed by site maps easily. But not only that, we've also added some new settings for forums. You can now exclude a forum from the sitemap, or even set a priority level for forums on an individual basis. This allows you to rate your important content such as focussed user discussions higher than for example, site-related announcements or off-topic discussion. Acronym Expansion Users on a community will often post acronyms or abbreviations about the topic of your community, which can cause those posts to be missing the important keywords your community targets. For example, we often have users post "IPB" as an abbreviation for "IP.Board". Search engines of course, don't know these are one in the same and when someone searches "IP.Board", posts that say "IPB" won't match. This can be a problem. In IP.SEO 1.5, we've added a feature we call Acronym Expansion, which will automatically either replace an acronym with the specified long version, or wrap an acronym in a HTML <acronym> tag so that search engines know what the user means. This allows you to ensure that even user-generated content includes the important keywords your community targets. Miscellaneous Enhancements We've also of course included many miscellaneous enhancements. For example, in IP.SEO 1.5 it will be easier to get started with automatic sitemap.xml generation and a tool to download a blank sitemap.xml file if one cannot be generated automatically. In addition, in an effort to improve the SEO within all of our base products, the next releases of IP.Board and IP.Content have had some links removed when viewing the community as a guest which are inaccessible to spiders like the "Like" button. Beta Available Now If you are comfortable testing beta software, IP.SEO 1.5 is now available for beta testing in our pre-release forum. As always if you have any suggestions for future versions of IP.SEO, please post them to our feedback forum. If you're not already using IP.SEO, make sure you download this free extra now!