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Tom S.

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  1. Like
    Tom S. reacted to Charles for a blog entry, Coming Soon in 4.1.16   
    IPS Community Suite 4.1.16 is nearing the end of development so I wanted to go over some of the new features in this upcoming release. Some are big and some are small but we always enjoy making any sort of enhancements to the Suite.
    We expect 4.1.16 to go to public beta next week. If you are interested in using a public beta please check out our beta forum (clients only) with more info. We welcome as much testing as possible and our betas are considered safe to use on a live site. We do offer support for betas so, if you are technically minded, consider giving them a try.
    Commerce: New Ticket Listing
    We have redesigned the ticket listing view in Commerce to be much more user friendly and better use screen space. You can also now group by department which is great for organization.

     
    Much like Activity Streams on the front end you can create custom views for tickets based on how you work.

    The new My History view allows staff to quickly see their latest replies and actions along with some basic stats.

    There are many other smaller improvement in Commerce in 4.1.16 as well. We think you will enjoy all the updates.
    Security Questions
    To enhance the security of your member accounts we now have a new security questions feature where you can allow your members to put in their own, personal security questions. The member will then be prompted to answer those questions for account actions you define.

    Account Change Emails
    Members will now receive confirmation emails when they change their email address...

    and their password...

    Topics per Page
    You can now define the number of topics per page in forum view.

    Remove all Followers
    Moderators can now remove all followers from any item that allows follows. This is useful if you are archiving an old item or otherwise do not want people getting notified of new activity on an item.

    Automatic Following
    Your members can already choose to automatically follow content they start or reply to but now you can define this as the default behavior for all members. Your members can of course override this to their own preference.

    Embed Failure Message
    To answer the constant question "why didn't my media embed?" we now show you why. Regular members will just see a message indicating the Suite tried to embed but was not able to. Admins will get more information on what failed.

    Suspended Member Page
    When you banned/suspended a member previously they simply saw a generic permission denied message. We now show a more friendly page saying they were suspended and why.

    The member can click to get the full information from the Warning System as well.

    Contact Us
    The contact us page now has configuration options to control where messages are sent. You can do email and even Commerce support departments now.

    Announcements
    Global announcements can now be restricted by member group.

    And some technical stuff...
    In addition to the new feature additions we have also fixed dozens of issues reported by clients. There was a particular focus on Commerce, Pages, and IPS Connect. Some other items of note:
    Performance improvements in: profile view, sitemap generator, posting replies, and Activity Streams We now try to more reliably detect the AWS S3 endpoint for those using S3 file storage Tasks view will now show the last time a task ran More efficient license key checking to keep the keys from being checked too often which can slow your site down If group promotion based on date is enable the system will now auto-promote even if a member does not login If you move your site to a new URL you no longer have to update a constant if using the image proxy You can now press ctrl/cmd+enter in any editor window to submit the reply (yay!) In Commerce ticket view there are keyboard shortcuts to perform common actions (such as press 'r' to open reply box or 'n' for note) There is now logic to prevent double-posting when the initial post encounters an error on submit If your datastore (cache system) is not working properly the AdminCP will now show you a warning telling you that it needs attention.    
  2. Like
    Tom S. reacted to Charles for a blog entry, Pages Improvements   
    Our Pages CMS is one of our most popular applications as we are continuing to improve it based on feedback. New in 4.1.13 includes:
    Designer’s Mode HTML Editing
    This update allows you to edit your HTML mode pages inside the designer's mode file system. Any edits you make, once saved in your text editor are instantly available which makes it much faster to build HTML pages with Pages.

     
    Database Template Improvements
    We listened to a lot of feedback about templating within the AdminCP for Pages and one common request was for a way to delete a group of database templates and to rename those groups. When you import databases, the template group names are created unique but you may want to change this to something more memorable. You will see here that the dialog also shows you which databases this template is used.

     
    Page titles when using databases
    Currently, when you add a database to a page, the page title is replaced with the database name. This may not always be desirable, and you may want the page title to remain in all database URLs (such as record view). There is now an option for this per database.

    Relational Field Improvements
    Now when you create a relational link between databases, you can opt to show which records link to the relational record. To give you an example, say you had a database for actors, and a database for movies, and you created a link on the actors record to show which movies they star in; now when viewing the movie, it will show you a list of the actors.

     
    More Filterable Fields
    We added both "Date" and "YesNo" field types to be filterable when viewing a list of records. When you use the Date type, you can select a date range for listing articles.

    We also added the ability to use any custom field set as filterable to be used when creating a database feed widget.

     
    Unique Fields
    Another popular request was to allow a way to force unique entries for custom fields. This means that when enabled, only one record per database can have the same value. This is enabled when creating or editing a field.

     
    Other improvements
    You can now quickly delete an entire media folder via the AdminCP.

    You can now quickly see which databases are used on which pages via the AdminCP page list.

     
    And we added a way to programatically fetch a custom field value via the $record object. Currently, you need to use something like $record->field_12 which works well until you import that database to another installation. The fields are renumbered so this syntax no longer works. We made it possible to use the field key like so $record->field_{my_key_name_here}. Not only does this solve the issue when importing databases, it is also much more readable and easier to remember!

  3. Like
    Tom S. reacted to Charles for a blog entry, Post Color Highlight   
    Often when you are reading a topic, comments, or other posts, you will see team members replying. Although IPS Community Suite already allows groups to set up custom images and member titles, these replies can get lost in the noise.
    Version 4.1.13 now allows you to switch on post highlighting per member group. This makes sure the reply stands out from the rest of the replies.

     
    Of course, this feature works everywhere; from calendar comments to article replies.

     
    The feature is switched on via the Group form in the ACP.

     
    You can edit the look of the highlighting via the theme’s settings which allows for different color schemed per-theme.

     
    We have also ensured that theme designers can get the most out of the system by embedding a data attribute noting the group of the author. This means that you can add custom CSS to use different colours per member group.

     
     
     
    We think post highlighting will be a simple way to bring attention to member posts in groups that you define.
     
     
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