Lindy
Management
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Joined
Everything posted by Lindy
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Thanks everyone for the feedback and discussion. This topic was intended as an announcement to share upcoming changes and direction, rather than an open debate. We understand that not every decision will align with every individual preference. To clarify a few key points: Self-hosted (Classic) remains part of our offering, and we will continue to support it. However, it represents a relatively small portion of our overall customer base, and our product direction reflects broader market trends and the needs of the majority of customers. Regarding the Providers Directory, the way people connect with third-party developers and extend the platform has evolved significantly over time. At the same time, many listed providers are no longer active, and we regularly receive complaints about unanswered inquiries and outdated information. Maintaining an accurate and reliable directory requires ongoing oversight, which is not something we can reasonably dedicate resources to. Additionally, inclusion in such a directory can be perceived as an endorsement, which introduces expectations we are not in a position to meet or guarantee. Our key focus is on continuing to improve the platform as a whole in a way that is sustainable and forward-looking. We’ll be closing this now. If you have specific questions or need assistance, please reach out in the appropriate area. Thank you again.
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That’s not accurate. Classic (self-hosting) actually makes up less than 10% of our business. There’s a relatively small segment of customers who still want to deal with hosting, deployments, and maintaining their own environment. What you’re seeing on the forums isn’t representative of the customer base at large, it’s a support bias. Self-hosted environments inherently generate significantly more issues (85-90% in fact) due to hosting quality, server configuration, database management, and so on, which naturally drives a disproportionate amount of discussion (and is part of the reason behind the forum restructuring). Cloud customers, by contrast, require far less support... which is exactly the point of the platform.
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Thanks for sharing your thoughts! HTML in forum posts is not something we’ll be bringing back and the decision to remove it, I assure you, was not taken lightly. While it may seem like a convenient feature, it was in fact a source of client breaches in the past. Allowing direct HTML injection left communities exposed to cross-site scripting (XSS), session hijacking, and data exfiltration. Even when restricted to admin roles, the risk didn’t disappear. Compromised accounts, reused passwords, or simple internal mistakes often turned raw HTML access into persistent exploits that impacted every member who visited the community. Beyond the immediate security exposure, this created a poor impression of community management and, more importantly, lent an unfair perception that the platform itself was insecure. That’s not something we’re willing to reintroduce. For those reasons and more, we removed the ability to post raw HTML and replaced it with safer formatting tools and the editor suite. These provide rich content creation while ensuring the security of your community. You will find, apart from a few legacy platforms, most modern solutions do not provide a mechanism for injecting or modifying raw HTML in posts. We know some community managers liked the extra flexibility, but protecting client data and community integrity has to come first. If you can outline your specific use case(s) maybe we can point you in a more secure direction. We also always welcome feedback on enhancing the embedding functionality to get you closer to the outcome you want while being safe in doing so. Please note that while we encourage the use of third-party solutions to customize and enhance your community if you so desire, we cannot permit promotion of modifications that weaken the security of the platform. For this reason, the link has been removed. Thank you for your understanding.
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Thank you again for sharing your thoughts — I truly do understand your frustration, and I'm really sorry this experience has been disappointing. As mentioned in the email we sent, we’re offering the Creator Pro package at an introductory rate for six months to help ease the transition, should you decide that upgrading is the right path for you. Of course, the decision is entirely yours, and we’re not imposing any changes without your consent. I wish I could offer more beyond what’s already been extended, but we’ve done our best with what was mentioned. Since this is now more of an account-specific matter, and you already have a support ticket open, I’d be happy to continue the conversation there. This forum is meant primarily for general platform feedback — which you’ve provided, and we do appreciate. Thanks so much for your understanding, and I look forward to assisting you further through your ticket!
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Thank you for reaching out and I totally understand that this is a significant change. Several years ago, we transitioned away from our legacy packages as we moved to a modern cloud-based infrastructure. The older plans were built around a traditional hosting model, where costs were more directly tied to the package structure. Our new cloud platform is a true cloud solution, and as you can imagine, it requires a much larger investment on our end. That said, we’ve done our very best to honor legacy pricing for as long as possible — we really don’t enjoy raising prices. While our operational costs have steadily increased each year, your current plan has remained unchanged for quite some time. Unfortunately, we've now reached a point where it's no longer sustainable to continue offering the legacy package. We’ll need to transition your account to one of our current plans in order to continue providing reliable service and support. We’re happy to work with you to find the best fit — please don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions.
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🙏
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I'm sorry for any confusion, however, we haven't performed upgrades on Classic/self-hosted in years... perhaps a decade. It's fairly straightforward -- simply download, upload and run /admin/upgrade. Or, we would be happy to help migrate you to cloud. 😉
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Thank you for all of your kind words. The team did a great job with v5 and I'm excited for this next chapter!
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We strive to ensure our cloud platform leverages the latest, most advanced, secure and performant technologies available. To achieve this, maintenance is of course regularly necessary. While the vast majority of updates and maintenance are performed seamlessly behind the scenes, there are occasions where a brief outage may occur. On September 20 @ 10:00PM (EDT), an upgrade to our EU infrastructure will be performed. The maintenance window will be one hour, however, we expect service interruption, if any, to only last a few moments. Please note that this does not impact all EU customers; only those who are served by our EU platform. Thank you for your patience and, as always, you may find up-to-date information on our Status Page.
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This will be rolled out very shortly!
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I understand where you're coming from; it was indeed a tough decision. There is also, however, the side of the Marketplace that we've kept largely to ourselves and that is the costs associated with operating it. Many assume this has been an additional revenue stream for IPS, but the reality is, it has never even broken even. To explain why and in the spirit of transparency, let's use the example of a basic $5 plugin purchase; with our 10% commission, minus transaction fees, etc. we net virtually nothing, but we assume all the risk. This means, if someone decides they're unhappy with a resource (even though we have an all sales final policy), or uses a fraudulent payment method and a chargeback is performed resulting in us losing that dispute, we pay a $15-20 fee--the author is not charged this fee and usually retains the proceeds from the original sale. It takes dozens and dozens of sales of that single resource to break even on that one transaction. Multiply that by countless chargebacks and incidents of fraud in addition to the immense development time required to review resources, the administrative time to handle customer vs developer disputes, support overhead, payout fees, etc. the Marketplace actually costs us a significant amount to provide and maintain. The costs have actually exponentially increased as the use of the Marketplace has decreased. Previously, there were more good sales to help lessen the blow of the bad sales, however, with a 75% decline in usage over recent years, the volume is simply no longer there, so the losses are subsequently no longer sustainable, even if we were to triple our commission rates, which would only hurt us and the resource authors. On a scale of full app stores such as Apple, Google, Steam, etc. you have enough volume to chase the bad with good and the numbers add up. We are, of course, not Apple. As has been said, the vast majority of our customers today appear to either prefer their installation to be "stock" or to have custom development performed by third party providers. The top three Marketplace resources are currently installed on only 2% of communities (that report statistics to us, to be clear). I know how easy we've made it for those who like lots of tweaks and resources and we hope you will continue to enjoy these resources, but unfortunately, we can no longer prop up and absorb the losses of a declining ecosystem. I fully meant what I said in the original announcement - we are excited to be able to redirecting the resources expended in supporting the Marketplace towards improving the platform on the whole and creating new opportunities for motivated third party developers to connect with interested customers for custom development, integrations, services and yes, premade resources. For those that are active in third party resource utilization, I'm very encouraged by and grateful to @Joel R for his interest and commitment to bringing our loyal third party contributor community together again in a way that provides them more freedom and opportunities.
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Yes, you'll be able to transfer after the closure as well.
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To be clear, you will still be able to visit independent websites to obtain premade resources if you wish. From our standpoint, the trend has simply moved more towards custom development or stock installations.
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Not at all; both apps are very popular outside of our own use.
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We would like to take this opportunity to inform you of an important decision we've made with regard to the Invision Community Marketplace. After careful evaluation and consideration, we have decided to discontinue the Invision Community Marketplace, effective October 30, 2023. Over the past several years, we have noticed a decrease in usage of the Marketplace, with a staggering 75% decline in sales. In addition, we have observed a growing trend away from off the shelf customizations towards bespoke tailoring of a community by working more closely with developers. While it has been a platform for many dedicated and talented contributors to share their work, we believe it is time to re-focus our efforts and resources to better serve your present and future needs. We understand that change can be unsettling, but we are excited to share with you our new direction. We are putting our efforts into enhancing the newly introduced Providers Directory, a platform that will enable you to connect with third-party providers for a wide range of services, including custom development, community management/support, conversion services, and other valuable resources. Additionally, many providers will have independent websites you will be able to visit to explore and obtain existing and new premade resources. More details are to follow soon, but we would like to highlight a few key points: • Marketplace renewals will cease effective immediately • New purchases will end September 15, 2023 • The Marketplace will be removed in the October release and disabled on October 30, 2023 • You will continue to be able to install and manage existing and new resources via the methods provided by their respective authors • You will be able to obtain a key for each of your current Marketplace purchases and provide that key to authors to transfer your purchases directly to the author We invite you to visit the Providers Directory and start exploring the opportunities it offers. This will allow you to familiarize yourself with the database and the resources it will provide in greater depth. Many of the current Marketplace contributors have already created their profiles – please check them out! Of course, this does not mean the end of aftermarket development with Invision Community. We are currently building new development tools for Invision Community 5 which have easier ways to add new functionality. We want to express our sincere gratitude for your ongoing support and trust in Invision Community. We believe these changes will enable us to better position ourselves to continue moving forward in meeting the present and future needs of our customer base. If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out. Thank you for being a part of the Invision Community family. Update We have posted our next blog covering the next steps for obtaining purchases from 3rd party developers. -
We would like to take this opportunity to inform you of an important decision we've made with regard to the Invision Community Marketplace. After careful evaluation and consideration, we have decided to discontinue the Invision Community Marketplace, effective October 30, 2023. Over the past several years, we have noticed a decrease in usage of the Marketplace, with a staggering 75% decline in sales. In addition, we have observed a growing trend away from off the shelf customizations towards bespoke tailoring of a community by working more closely with developers. While it has been a platform for many dedicated and talented contributors to share their work, we believe it is time to re-focus our efforts and resources to better serve your present and future needs. We understand that change can be unsettling, but we are excited to share with you our new direction. We are putting our efforts into enhancing the newly introduced Providers Directory, a platform that will enable you to connect with third-party providers for a wide range of services, including custom development, community management/support, conversion services, and other valuable resources. Additionally, many providers will have independent websites you will be able to visit to explore and obtain existing and new premade resources. More details are to follow soon, but we would like to highlight a few key points: • Marketplace renewals will cease effective immediately • New purchases will end September 15, 2023 • The Marketplace will be removed in the October release and disabled on October 30, 2023 • You will continue to be able to install and manage existing and new resources via the methods provided by their respective authors • You will be able to obtain a key for each of your current Marketplace purchases and provide that key to authors to transfer your purchases directly to the author We invite you to visit the Providers Directory and start exploring the opportunities it offers. This will allow you to familiarize yourself with the database and the resources it will provide in greater depth. Many of the current Marketplace contributors have already created their profiles – please check them out! Of course, this does not mean the end of aftermarket development with Invision Community. We are currently building new development tools for Invision Community 5 which have easier ways to add new functionality. We want to express our sincere gratitude for your ongoing support and trust in Invision Community. We believe these changes will enable us to better position ourselves to continue moving forward in meeting the present and future needs of our customer base. If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out. Thank you for being a part of the Invision Community family. Update We have posted our next blog covering the next steps for obtaining purchases from 3rd party developers. View full blog entry
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We share your frustration and I assure you that although this is the first major outage event in years and we have a solid 99%+ record, we are taking this very seriously and have already taken both internal and vendor related steps to minimize the risk of this happening again. We have also made improvements to our status and communications system so you remain better informed throughout these unlikely events. I'm deeply sorry for the inconvenience this event has caused. Cloud clients with further concerns are welcome to send a support email and we will be happy to discuss. Thank you!
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I truly appreciate the fresh perspective and positive energy you brought to us, Jordan. I wish you the very best in your future endeavors and have no doubt that you will carry that ++ vibe wherever you go. 🙂 You are certainly leaving a void, however, I'm hopeful you'll continue to check in, let us know how you are doing and sprinkle some of that magic Jordust™ that the community has come to love and appreciate. Best of luck! 🙏
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I appreciate the feedback, candor and your kind words as well. Annual payments are something we would still like to explore and if we can modify the infrastructure to accommodate both, I personally have no issue with doing so. It will be something we revisit at a later date. I am truly appreciative of this post; your earlier post(s) troubled me personally as being evil, disconnected and full of marketing fluff is not the image we want to project. I'm grateful you provided the opportunity for the dialogue to evolve, for feedback to be heard and actioned and to witness some of the thought and care that went into some of these changes behind the scenes. I apologize that our communication missed the mark and again appreciate the constructive feedback and patience while we digested and acted upon same. I'm all in on the group hug.
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There is a lot to be excited about with PHP7 - the performance gains are significant and we are eagerly awaiting mainstream adoption. With that said, IPS4 utilizes several third party libraries to provide functionality across the suite -- one of these libraries is HTMLPurifier. The developers of that library are not yet supporting PHP7 and are specifically recommending PHP5. While we have resolved any known IPS specific issues within the suite for the next release, we too must recommend that you remain with PHP 5.4, 5.5 or PHP 5.6 until which time third party library developers update their libraries with full PHP7 compatibility. We will provide an update as soon as full support for PHP7 is given. Please note that IP.Board 3.x does not work at all on PHP7. There are no plans to release a PHP7 compatible update to IP.Board 3.x at this time.
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The adoption rate of IPS4 has far surpassed our initial expectations. In response to this as well as client feedback, we are refocusing more internal resources on supporting and solidifying the IPS4 platform. As such, we are revising our product cycle dates for IP.Board (3.4.x) as follows: March 1, 2016 - End of advanced technical support and development. Basic / limited technical support will continue. June 1, 2016 - End of all technical support. Only security updates will be provided. April 1, 2017 - Complete product End of Life (EOL)
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IPS is pleased to offer a 15% discount from now through December 4, 2015 (11:59PM Eastern.) This offer extends to all self-hosted software licenses as well Community in the Cloud packages. Whether you've been wanting to add a new component to your current IPS Community Suite license, have been waiting for the right opportunity to renew your license or are considering IPS for the first time, simply use the coupon code BF2015 at checkout to take advantage of this offer. Note: Offer extends to currently expired licenses or licenses that will expire during the promotion. Sorry, may not be used on early renewals but we will be running more holiday promotions.
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IPS is seeking knowledgeable and industrious individuals to join its support team as product specialists. Successful applicants will be responsible for answering general support tickets, including providing customers with information, troubleshooting problems and performing maintenance. You would be expected, where appropriate, to interact with other technicians and developers to resolve issues. Requirements: Must be familiar and have extensive experience with IPS applications. Must have a basic knowledge of PHP and MySQL. Must be able to effectively telecommute. Must speak fluent English and possess strong verbal and written communication skills. Experience with working in customer support. Preferred, but not required: Knowledge of server administration and experience working for a web hosting company. Knowledge of additional web technologies such as JavaScript, CSS, JSON, XML, etc. All positions are part-time with full-time opportunity. Schedules are flexible and salary will be based on knowledge and experience. Applications are now closed. Thank you to everyone that applied and those who were not contacted will remain on file for first-contact for future positions!
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We are thrilled with the response to the latest generation of our community platform, IPS4 and hope you have been following the exciting progress and enhancements with IPS4.1. I’d like to take this opportunity to highlight IPS’ Community in the Cloud service. IPS provides hosted/cloud service to thousands of communities and because we built the software and we limit our service exclusively to our software, we’re able to tailor and optimize our environment specifically for our products. This leads to an efficient, well supported, turnkey solution with a one-stop provider. There’s no waiting as you ask your host to review error logs, make potential configuration changes, repair database tables because a server was improperly shut down or the database ran out of room to expand or update outdated software to comply with the latest requirements. In the unlikely event you have an issue with your community and we don’t already know about it, we will have all of the tools and access required to take care of it with minimal, if any inconvenience to you. If you’ve previously considered our CiC packages but have hesitated due to disk space constraints, we’re pleased to announce that we have made significant enhancements to our offerings, including doubling the storage capacity on most packages. Whether you’re an existing or prospective client, please take a few minutes to review our offerings on our website. Here are a few of our more Frequently Asked Questions regarding our CiC service: Do I have to pay for each application separately? On all but our Standard 25 package, all IPS applications are included. Starting at $30/mo., you get nearly $500 worth of software wrapped up in a turnkey cloud-based solution. What happens if I exceed my “online visitor” allotment? Online visitors are determined based on the number of people simultaneously active on your community within a 15 minute window. This is not a hard limit, so if you are on, for example, the Super 65 package and you have 100 online visitors for an hour, there will be no change or overage. If, however, your average online visitor count exceeds the package amount for several days consistently within a billing cycle, you would be automatically upgraded to the next package. You can then downgrade after the next billing cycle if your activity levels have decreased. Can I install modifications and themes? Yes! You may install virtually all applications, plugins and themes from the IPS Marketplace. I’m already an IPS self-hosted client, can I move to your CiC service? We’re asked this daily and the answer is, absolutely. In fact, we will move your entire community to our CiC service at no charge to you and will work to make the transition as smooth as possible for you and your users. We can then deactivate your self-hosted license so you’re no longer paying renewals and should you decide to make use of it in the future, it will be as simple as reactivating. What happens if I want to leave the CiC service and self-host? That doesn’t happen often, but your data is just that - yours. We do not charge you to provide a copy of your database and attachments upon request. You would need to purchase a self-hosted license to obtain the files that power the community in a self-hosted environment. Can I use my own domain name? Yes. Initially, you will need to choose an IPS provided subdomain (eg. my community.invisionzone.com) - after your community is activated, we can switch it to your own domain. As always, please don’t hesitate to contact [email protected] with any questions. No matter how you choose to use IPS4, we appreciate your business!
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You can now purchase IPS Community Suite 4 or, if you are an existing license holder of IP.Board, you can download the upgrade as part of your license! Be sure to read this important information if you are upgrading from IP.Board 3. IPS Community in the Cloud clients can simply submit a support request when you are ready to upgrade and we will take care of it for you. 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Be sure to read this important information if you are upgrading from IP.Board 3. IPS Community in the Cloud clients can simply submit a support request when you are ready to upgrade and we will take care of it for you. Sign Up Now Existing Clients: Go to Client Area Background Online communities are a huge part of the Internet. Millions of people around the world use online communities to connect with each other about the things that matter to them. At IPS, we've been facilitating this for over 13 years, working with some of the most amazing and interesting sites. Fan communities such as those provided by Warner Music Group and Live Nation for their artists, sports leagues such as the NHL for their fan communities or Bethesda Softworks for their games all use communities to bring fans together. Business like Evernote use communities to reach their customers on a more personal level. And specialist sites like FindLaw use communities to help people find the information they need. Every day new communities are born and we're thrilled at IPS to be involved with this amazing part of the Internet, a part that we feel makes the Internet great. Two years ago we started on an ambitious project. We wanted to make our platform even better. We wanted to bring all of our applications together in a tightly-integrated suite with a modern codebase, gorgeous interface and unrivaled experience for users. Philosophy Being a web developer for a distributed application like the IPS Community Suite is an interesting position. The Internet moves very quickly: what looks good, works well and users will enjoy today might not tomorrow. Web development always needs to be modern, fresh and cutting edge to stay relevant. At the same time, a web developer needs to have understanding and respect for everything that has come before, and know what users expect. It’s no good creating a website that most people won’t understand how to use, or might not even work on some platforms. Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of projects rise and fall in popularity, and the ones that don’t do so well tend to fall into one of these two categories - either they fall behind and start to feel clunky, or overexcited developers get too carried away and create something that nobody wants. At IPS, we don’t do either. We make a platform that is modern and both easy and fun to use and customize. In short, we make the best community platform available. This is the philosophy which underlies IPS Community Suite 4. Features / Technology IPS Community Suite 4 is designed for the modern web. The default theme is designed to be clean and simple both so it’s easy to use and simple for designers to expand upon. The design is also responsive meaning it looks great whether you’re on a desktop or a mobile phone, or anything in between (and we do that the right way: we don’t just remove things on smaller screens) and this is true not only for the front-end but even the administration control panel too. Our editor supports drag-and-drop uploading, automatic media embedding, auto-saving and mentions. Every email the suite sends looks great no matter what client you’re using. These are just a few of the countless features that make IPS Community Suite 4 great. Check out the full feature tour The platform is built on modern, but solid, technology. We use PHP and MySQL because they run on pretty much every web server, but we use modern coding techniques within them like the namespacing, late static binding and closures provided by PHP 5.4, and we use HTML5 features like local storage and geolocation. And it’s coded well with meticulous care; things like valid HTML markup which doesn’t really matter to the average user, matters deeply to us. Finally, it’s ready for communities of any size. You can use Amazon S3 for file storage. You can leverage caching technology, including memcached to page output caching for guests which can even mean most requests never even establish a connection to your database. And that’s without mentioning all of the features which have always made IPS stand out, like the spam monitoring service, monetization, Sphinx integration and so on. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Expansion Potential But not only is IPS Community Suite great out of the box, its potential for expansion is huge, and there’s a great community of third party designers and developers working with us. Tools for developers The framework that IPS Community Suite runs on is powerful, but flexible and developers can get started with ease. It is possible to override any class anywhere in the entire framework using a technique called monkey patching, allowing customization of any aspect of the suite. Whole new applications can be created easily, using central classes for common concepts like content handling. And the framework is designed to be safe at low levels: output escaping for XSS protection (note, not input escaping, which is the wrong way round to do it) and prepared statements for SQL injection protection are handled at a low level, global basis, and customizations are sandboxed so an error in a customization cannot bring down the community. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Tools for designers Designers also benefit from a powerful designer mode that allows customization of HTML, CSS and other theme resources using local files so they can use their own code editors and tools. Designers can even create theme settings allowing end-users to customize even further. We also provide tools to allow designers to see the changes made to templates between versions so themes can be updated for new versions. Of course, for the less technically inclined, there is a powerful “easy mode” for creating themes allowing anyone to customize the look easily. Tools for translators Translators too can translate the IPS Community Suite easily. A “quick translation” tool allows any word or phrase to be translated just by clicking and holding to bring up a textbox, or an extensive list of all words and phrases can be browsed. Furthermore, we have been meticulously careful to use phrases throughout the entire suite that can be translated into any language with understanding of the differences many languages have with English such as grammar structure and pluralization. All of these customizations can be exported with one click and distributed as a single file. To install an application, plugin, theme or language, users only need to upload a single file in the administrator control panel. No more uploading dozens of files with FTP. Rapid Development Perhaps though, the most significant thing about IPS Community Suite 4 is what comes next. We now have a solid platform for future development. With the new modern framework, new features and improvements can be written much quicker than ever before. In addition, we have been using new tools and techniques within our development team for faster development, testing and deployment of new releases. For when a new release is ready, IPS Community Suite 4 includes a powerful delta upgrade system: no matter what version you are on, you can download an upgrade package for the latest version - this includes only the files you need, so upgrading is quick and painless. With these three significant improvements (to the framework, to our development processes and to the upgrade process for users) we have been able to adopt a much more rapid release cycle. A more streamlined process also allows us to be much more open about our future plans. The benefits of this have already been seen: since releasing IPS Community Suite 4, we have already added several new features. And this is just the beginning. Conclusion IPS Community Suite 4 has been a huge project. It’s an amazing experience to see the communities that have already upgraded - the countless hours of planning, discussions, whiteboard drawings and thousands of lines of code come that have come together in this incredible platform already spawning online communities of all genres. We’re hugely excited to see the many more to come.
