Josh

We're pleased to announce that the first release of the bug tracker, now known as IP.Tracker, is available for download at IPS Beyond. We'd like to thank Michael, C_ind, and Krocheck for doing such a great job getting this first release available. We'd like to encourage everyone to stop by the tracker forum and post your feedback, as well as submit your own code for inclusion into IP.Tracker. Download Link: http://www.ipsbeyond.com/forums/index.php?...p;showfile=1043 Support Topic: http://www.ipsbeyond.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=22774 Suggestion Forum: http://www.ipsbeyond.com/forums/index.php?showforum=76 We're very excited to see how the Tracker will evolve and plan on creating more projects like this in the future. Please note that this free module is not included in your IPS support, if you need any assistance please use the support topic linked above.

I have a quick update for you on the bug tracker project now. I'm happy to announce that Michael and C_ind of IPS Beyond will be leading the bug tracker project. They both have a great track record and have been a huge benefit the the IPS Beyond community and we're very pleased to have them working on the bug tracker. We'll be delivering the code to them tomorrow, and then work will begin on getting the bug tracker into a releasable form. They'll work on cleaning up what we have and getting an initial release out to the public. From there everyone will be welcome to submit code contributions to them and they will decide to include them or not. I know they have a lot of great ideas themselves, which I'm sure they'll post about soon. We'll have more information on this soon, if you have any questions please ask in the comments and we'll do our best to answer them.

One of our major goals is to support our modification community and today I'm excited to tell you about a new venture to help the mod community. As many of you know we have our own internal bug tracker that we use on these forums. We've had numerous requests to release it and now we're ready to do just that, at no charge to our existing customers. The bug tracker will soon be released to IPS Beyond for everyone to download. This is going to be a unique project for us, we're going to have the IPS Beyond community run the bug tracker project. We'll be selecting a few IPS Beyond members to help us manage this project, they'll be responsible for reviewing and integrating community code contributions. Everyone will be welcome to submit a code contribution for approval. We're really excited about this project and hope that all of you are too. There will be more details coming soon, such as license, availablity, and who will be heading up this project. We're still considering people for this, if you're intersted feel free to email me at [email protected], please include both your IPS Forum user name and your IPS Beyond user name. Please note that I may not be able to respond to everyone, but we do appreceiate anyone that offers their assistance. This is just the first in a string of changes to both IPS Beyond and IP.Board that we hope will further energize our already great modding community. Keep checking this blog for news on future changes, they aren't far off. We'd also love to hear your feedback on this and any suggestions you have, please leave a comment and let us know what you think!

Last time I talked in very broad strokes about how we developed IP.Board 2.2, today I'm going to go into detail on exactly how the new profile system evolved from concept to the finished product you see today. Our initial goal was to bring some of the social network concepts to the profile system, without going overboard and turning it into a myspace clone. This is a fine line we walk in adding any new feature, how do we make this useful without going to far? We knew that we didn't want to let users customize the CSS or HTML for their profile image, that introduces any number of security and other technical concerns. We thought about letting users move blocks around, to give them some amount of customization, but in the end that was dropped due to the time involved. Here's a portion of the spec we came up with this for this feature: From that basic spec, Rikki created this mock up: This is generally how we work with a major feature, we create a rough outline of the features we want to include and then create a mock up to make sure everyone is on the same page. This mock up is quite a bit different from the final product, but you can see most of the elements of the final profile in it. A lot of things changed, the location of the profile picture for example. While this design looks cleaner, it's also less flexible, what if the user wants larger images? With this mock up there isn't much room for that. Also the tabs are clearly different, while we liked these tabs, they did not really fit in with the overall design of IP.Board. Here's an early shot of the profile system actually running: This has much more of the final functionality included, even if the design is not quite there yet. You can see that we've already changed how the profile picture looks, as well as how the tabs look. Another major change is that the comments are displayed below the main content area, rather than on the right where they eventually ended up. This change was made for a number of reasons, if the main content area had a lot of information, you'd have to scroll to find the comments and could easily miss them. So we moved them, but added a tab to the content area so that you could view them there if you want. This screenshot shows a few more changes, you can see the options to edit gender, location, and birthday inline with the profile view. You can also now rate the user as well as see their gender icon next to their name in the visitors/comments/friends block. The options drop down was also added to the top right of the name block, although it would eventually move to the left hand menu. And here's the final result: My Profile Through the entire process our staff is constantly reviewing the latest build of the profile and making suggestions. We also brought our test group in around the second screenshot you see, they provided valuable feedback that helped a lot in shaping the final product. They were given a few different builds that included the profile, before we announced the feature to the general public. Not everything that we wanted made it in to the final product, that happens with essentially every single feature. For example, multiple personal profile photos did not make it, even though we really wanted that. You have to know when to call it a day though, or you'll never be done. We decided that the particular feature did not offer enough of an improvement over what we already had with gallery integration, so it was dropped. That was another important concept for this feature, we had a lot of user information out there via our various components. We wanted to pull all that data into a central location, to provide much tighter integration and a better overall flow to our products. We also wanted to give mod authors the ability to easily add their mods to the profile tabs. So to wrap this up, we wanted to bring a fresh look to the profile and at the same time move IPB forward by bringing in social networking concepts where appropriate. I personally think we did a pretty good job of this and we all hope that you agree. If you have any questions or want more info, please ask and we'll do our best to answer.

I see this question come up once in awhile on the forums and I thought it would be nice to give you a little behind the scenes information on how we designed IP.Board 2.2. When we map out a new release, we usually have a specific goal in mind for that release. This can be anything from increasing security, reliability, new features, or some combination of the three. For example, when we started mapping out IP.Board 2.2 the overriding goal of the release was to streamline the software and make it easier to use. We didn't want to focus on adding a lot of new features, we wanted to improve what was already there. We spent a lot of time looking over every section of the forum and figuring out how we could make everything easier to use. We already knew most of the areas that needed improvement from our day to day customer service issues. We ended up with a huge list of tweaks, enhancements, and minor features that we wanted to include in 2.2. With development of 2.2 now underway, we began discussing adding one major feature to the release to add a little flavor. We decided that the profile could really use a overhaul, it really had not changed much since 1.0 and was one of the more stagnat portions of the forum. In fact a new profile system was something we had discussed off and on for a few years and with social networks on the rise, it seemed a good time to finally make those changes to IP.Board. Also, while the profile system was certainly a massive change, it still was more or less inline with our goal of improving existing functionality. We also selected a small group of customers to test 2.2 as it was developed and give feedback on the changes we were making. They were shown the profile system in a few different stages and their feedback was instrumental in the final profile. All the while this is going on, we continue to closely monitor the feedback forum and keep an internal list of features we want to add to the board. This list basically breaks down into three sections: Include in this release, would be nice in this release, and to be included in a later release. Anything that fit in with our goals for this release found it's way onto one of the first two lists. Anything that did not, but was still a good idea, found it's way onto the third list. After 2.2 was feature locked, everything left was moved to the last category. That's obviously a pretty broad overview of the process, but I think it gives you a good idea of how we handled 2.2. I plan to go into more detail on some of these points in the next couple weeks. If you have any questions about our development process, feel free to post them here and we may blog on it in the future.