The Old Man

Great work, thank you Mike!

Am I okay to update to this following the beta version fixes you PM'd me, or should I not?

Hi,

I'm trying to use the free Openwesther API which provides weather data in JSON format. I've also tried to use the XML format into an RSS block but that didn't work, and they don't offer the data in actual RSS format.

I've also been trying to get RSS news article feeds of text and image content into Pages Articles, but bizarrely for a CMS, it's only achievable via a small widget. I'd rather use Pages Articles than Blogs as the main front app.

Is there a modern best practice method to import third party content into IPS? The web seems to be switching to JSON fast from RSS and XML for incorporating third party content between websites, but JSON is not available in the AdminCP.

I can only seem to find RSS in the Pages and widgets sections, but Pages won't provide RSS feeds into Pages articles out of the box, unlike content import into Forums, Blogs and Calendar.

Is it achieved via the REST API? I thought that was more for making IPS content available into external sites and web pages?

Many thanks,

4 hours ago, Mike John said:

As in automatically grab the title and description like the IPB 3.4 version did with "quick add video"? If so, watch this space.

Awesome, thanks Mike! 

The new Search Console has some useful tips and offers a few clues.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7440203

On one of my sites, entirely powered by IPS (Pages, mostly Gallery, no Forums), it says 2.5k out of excluded 6.5k urls were excluded for being duplicate pages without canonical tags.

Looking at the list, a lot of them are as a result of Google following various sort and display options for Gallery albums in Profile view, but these are albums that don't exist because the user is brand new and hasn't even submitted anything yet. I'd exclude them too!

Another 1.8k Pages were marked as excluded for being Alternative page with proper canonical tags.

Again, looking at the list, the urls seem to relate to different sized versions of Gallery images.

380 were excluded for Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag.

These appear to be various Pages Articles urls appended with options such as "sortby=record_views&sortdirection=desc&page=1&d=1&advancedSearchForm=1".

Another 409 were marked as "Crawled - currently not indexed: The page was crawled by Google, but not indexed. It may or may not be indexed in the future; no need to resubmit this URL for crawling." Very informative! These seem to be urls of Gallery images and page articles.

Another 300 or so were excluded for being soft 404s, mostly calendar events.

One area I've had a lot of Google errors in the past is with Tags not being crawlable, on one site in particular the majority were Tags on Blogs, supposedly fixed in a future release according to a ticket at the time.

Hi Mike,

I just enabled Clubs and when adding a Video with a YouTube link, it doesn't seem to grab the Description from YT.

I tried adding a video in the main Video app to compare, and the same, the video appears with the thumbnail but without a description. Is that intentional? I'm sure it used to fetch the description as well as the title and thumbnail.

No biggie as the videos look nice and neat with no description but may be a bug for others?

Many thanks.

@Matt Thanks for taking an interest in this. Will 4.3 support Google Tag Manager I.e. the latest Google recommended method of adding Google Universal Analytics via Google Tag Manager?

At the moment I use the current input box for Google Analytics code for the Google Tag Manager snippet code which goes in the head section, then I create a new global front system/core template called GoogleBodyTags for the Analytics code snippet which gets included as close as possible to the opening body tag of the globalTemplate, which seems a bit fiddly. 

It is a bit weird how you can't set a default tab in Profile, though.

The profile almost appears to work like there are two profiles*. The About Me tab (if it exists on a site) would be the most obvious candidate for default on a lot of sites.

It's also odd to my mind that when you go to a profile you see a list of Activity first, under the tab heading "Activity", but then you spot the button that says "See my Activity", er, I thought I was!

"See my Activity" should probably read Detailed Activity or See All Activity, since that's what it shows (aside from the Status Update input box above it, whilst the Activity tab should probably read as something else, as it's kind of like the condensed Activity Stream option.

*"See my Activity" doesn't seem a cohesive part of Profile, since there are no breadcrumbs or navigation elements to suggest you've gone deeper into a Profile, other than another button that says "View Profile" which suggests you ar no longer in the person's profile. 

Meh, semantics. 

Sad its not going to be supported in v5.

They made a v4 shim for quicker updating to 5.x (you can also stick with the Web Fonts with CSS icons rather than upgrade to the SVG icons) or you can follow this process for a complete upgrade which seems to be mostly search and replace tasks.

https://fontawesome.com/how-to-use/upgrading-from-4

Quote

Upgrade Steps

Ready to do a full, proper upgrade and completely replace version 4 with version 5?

1. Remove Old Files. Remove the files associated with Font Awesome Version 4 from your project - including the fontawesome/ folder of web fonts and CSS/SCSS/LESS (if you’re using Font Awesome’s CDN, you can skip this step.)
2. Remove Old References in <head>. Remove the reference to Font Awesome V4’s JS or CSS from the <head> of your document.
3. Get Started. Pick your method of using FA5 and follow the Get Started directions. (SVG with JavaScript, Web Fonts with CSS, or Advanced Options)
4. Search & Replace. Find and replace any icons that have different names between version 4 and 5. Make sure to read the complete list below.
5. Update Styling. Update any custom styling you’ve added around Font Awesome icons (if applicable).
6. Double Check. Click through your project’s UI to make sure all icons are rendering as expected.

Perhaps someone at IPS could do a feasibility test on the full, proper upgrade to v5x?

On 20/01/2018 at 2:06 AM, Mike John said:

Do you have ftp access to your files or are you cloud hosted? I've actually got some previously used code to add "thumbnail" support to the existing rebuild feature. Which should make it into the next version but can provide a patch sooner if you can modify your files.

On 20/01/2018 at 8:52 AM, The Old Man said:

Hi Mike,

Yes, I have FTP access to my VPS, not on IPS cloud hosting. That would be great, currently my Videos System looks very broken.

Many thanks.

Any news on a fix, please Mike? My videos are still showing no image thumbnails since moving to S3 and Cloudfront.

The rebuild tool doesn't fix the thumbnails. If I edit a video and save it, it creates a new thumbnail but I need a bulk fix, ideally. Thanks.

Thanks Fosters.

Thanks, PM sent. 

Thanks, got it, awesome support as always!

Hi,

I've recently set up S3 and Cloudfront. I followed the Amazon guidance recommendation and console warnings about only granting CDN access to the S3 bucket and removing the Everyone Read permission to ensure the file cant be accessed directly. I've got the CDN path in the file settings and once I got the full path correct, all works as it should.

However, looking at the files that IPS moved over to the CDN, it appears every file transferred is accessible via the s3 bucket direct URL, because the Everyone grantee permission for Read is enabled. 

What permissions do you have enabled for your IPS buckets when using a CDN?

If you're only using US and Europe endpoints, and S3 bucket direct access is disabled, does that mean visitors from say China can't view the images?

Thank you.

P.S. The guidance in the Help section really needs updating, best practice examples if using a CDN with S3 would be nice, and the video although out of date, is so hard to make out, even in HD quality, although listening to Charles is strangely very relaxing! He should do the shipping forecast of voice overs on History and Discovery documentaries!

Hi,

Does v1.3.2 fix the issue with trophies awarded prematurely due saving them during the creation stage before criteria was completed? I've logged into AdminCP to see a task running called rebuild trophies.

Thanks.

On 20/01/2018 at 2:57 PM, The Old Man said:

Thanks for this!

Each time it fails to download the tar for me, it keeps saying Download Failed. 

Downloading fine, now!

Weird, I just can't download from the Marketplace again.

Hi @Pete T

Just tried this plug-in, and it doesn't seem to honour the WYSIWYG text. Once saved it appears as plain text, no paragraphs or formatting, just a line of plain text. Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks for this!

Each time it fails to download the tar for me, it keeps saying Download Failed. 

Downloading fine, now!

Hi Mike,

Yes, I have FTP access to my VPS, not on IPS cloud hosting. That would be great, currently my Videos System looks very broken.

Many thanks.

Thanks @Marcher Technologies, have a donut!

To be honest, its not like we haven't been patient! We've been waiting and asking for a variety of new Pages templates since v2!

Why couldn't one of the IPS designers been tasked to create and release a few packs of free templates in the Marketplace, instead of us hoping for more to appear in a next major release?

Agreed category view is terrible, I hate lists of records unless I need an actual list of records like in a table.

Am I correct in thinking you can only have article style layout on one database at a time still?

Hi,

Is there anyway to quickly rebuild the videos or at least the thumbnails for the videos, please? I saw a Rebuild button under Media Sites but it didn't work.

Reason why is that I managed to lose all thumbnails trying to configure Cloudfront on AWS S3, the videos are there just lots of empty images. After switching back to local storage the images disappeared although the img src links to them are correct in the view source html.

If I click on edit video then save, it generates the missing image, but I have a lot of them!

Many thanks

3 hours ago, Fosters said:

That's correct. There's no check implemented, nobody of us had this scenario in mind. I have implemented this for the next bugfix release.

Awesome, thank you! 

6 hours ago, Fosters said:

We don't have any timeline on the rebuild tool, so I would encourage you to re-make your awards in the meantime.  Unfortunately, we've been extremely busy with our day job.  

Can you do us a favor and verify the bug that Members can actually see Trophies that should only be accessed by Admins?  If you're able to confirm bug, please initiate a Support Ticket on our website Fosters.Tech for us to track the issue.  

FostersJ

Hi,

Okay thanks.

I've been able to confirm the bug, I've just created a dummy test account with members permisssions to test with, and like guests, it can view all the trophies in any members profile, despite only the Admin group having access to the Trophy modules.

Also I've been setting up some Font Awesome trophies etc but didn't want to reveal them to my community yet so I've only allowed Admin group to access Trophies for now in the ACP Applications Settings. However, I've just realised that the awards are visible to guests who can see them in member profiles, so I'm assuming they're visible to members too; aargh!

Some of my members appearing to have been award awards for say posting 25 topic, even though they are new members or haven't posted. What's the best option, should I delete all the awards and start again, or wait until the rebuild tool is available to correct any unintentional awards whilst I was creating and editing them. 

Many thanks!

Great, thank you!