Andy Millne

Custom Sidebar Blocks and Profile Photos Since the IP.Board 3.2 update, the look & feel of content blocks and sidebar widgets has been somewhat left behind in IP.Blog. Inconsistent avatar image sizes and design decisions that were made for IP.Board 3.1 have left some areas of IP.Blog looking dated and disconnected from the rest of the suite. For IP.Blog 2.6 these sidebar blocks have been given an overhaul and brought up to date with IPB 3.3. In addition to this, the much loathed pink Twitter block has finally been replaced by a more modern and clean look; vs Inline Moderation Moderating blogs from the front end has become somewhat tedious over time. With this release the moderation tools have been updated and now use the much more friendly popup style as seen in the forums. Furthermore, moderation now works across pages. No more selecting multiple items only to move to page 2 and see your options removed for you to start over. This inline popup is also context aware and only shows those options that are relevant to the selected items. Managing Categories Another source of frustration for Blog users and an issue that comes up often is the inability to edit individual blog categories. Many users have spent time setting up categories only to discover they cannot be renamed and must be removed and then re-added causing the blog entries to have to be recategorized. Thankfully it is now possible to edit these category names inline on the front end with the changes automatically assigned to entries. Wrapping Up Continuing to ensure the look & feel of all IPS products remains intuitive and consistent is a key goal. We hope that these small changes will help refine the end user experience in IP.Blog adding to the already feature rich options. Whilst it's not always possible to release with no outstanding bugs, I'm also pleased to say that all confirmed bugs reported to the tracker have been fixed for IP.Blog 2.6 in time for QA testing.

Another of the goals for IP.Blog 2.6 development was to increase the level of user engagement, both from existing on-site users and from elsewhere. Auto Share on Content Creation To complement the existing share links which appear alongside blog entries, it is now possible to automatically share Blog content with Facebook and Twitter at the time of posting. This is possible even if the content author has not yet linked their account with the sharing services. If a user has not yet authenticated they will be prompted to do so inline, provided they have opted to share and auto share has been enabled by the administrator. This significantly reduces the barrier to sharing that now exists. Share Images When sharing content with Facebook the page is checked for Open Graph meta tags. By default a tag is added to your logo for the purpose of displaying an image alongside the shared content snippet at Facebook. Starting with IP.Blog 2.6 we've included additional tags for all attachments that have been added to your content. It is therefore now possible to select a specific image which more appropriately matches what you are sharing. Auto Follow In previous versions of IP.Blog, it has been possible for Blog owners to optionally choose to be subscribed to all comments made on their blog via the per blog settings. The problem with this approach is that the option defaults to off and as many blog owners never revisit this settings page after the initial blog creation, it often goes unnoticed. In the forthcoming 2.6 release this setting has been removed and instead replaced by a checkbox presented when posting individual blog entries. This has two major benefits over the existing implementation. Firstly the checkbox is placed in a more prominent position and secondly it allows more granular control over the content notifications are received for. Additionally, the setting now defaults to auto follow in line with the rest of the IPS suite which should result in greater Blog participation. Reputation As of IP.Blog 2.6 it will now be possible to view the reputation or likes both given and received in a user's profile in a similar fashion to content in other applications across the suite. Blog related reputation will also appear in the global "most liked/highest reputation content" section of IPB bringing further emphasis to this application. Quick Nav The quick navigation feature within IP.Board allows an at a glance overview of the most important sections within IP.Board. This functionality now extends to IP.Blog showing featured blogs and the logged in user's own blogs. These areas of IP.Blog can now be reached in the fewest number of clicks in a consistent manner from whatever your location on the site.

With the recent IP.Board 3.3 update much emphasis was placed on search engine optimization. Many areas were found where a small change would make a big difference in preventing duplicate content, reducing crawl errors and ultimately resulting in better rankings. One of the goals for IP.Blog 2.6 was to continue this trend and identify potential improvements. Duplicate Content Recent algorithm changes used by the major search engines have highlighted duplicate content as a particularly relevant problem. With modern web applications such as IP.Blog it is often possible for interface elements to cause genuinely unique content to unintentionally fall into this trap. One such area we have addressed in IP.Blog is the filtering of blogs on the index page. By filtering and sorting the content on these pages, the same content can be displayed in slightly different ways. Canonical tags have now been added causing content to be attributed to the single canonical URL regardless of the URL search engines use to enter the page. Page Titles When viewing individual categories within a blog the title shown was always that of the blog itself. For IP.Blog 2.6 we have tweaked these titles to also include the category name in the format; Category Name - Blog Name - Site Name Additionally, canonical tags have been added to these pages to prevent further problems with duplicate content. Dead End Links With IPB 3.3 we introduced changes to the way user profiles were linked. In cases where site owners disallowed profile viewing for guests, there were still numerous links to profiles throughout the site that resulted in permission denied error messages being served to search engines. Now, if you don't have permission to view a profile, then the username and profile photo are no longer hyperlinked. This functionality has been extended to IP.Blog for the 2.6 release Microformat and Schema Updates As well as improvements made to help your site rank higher, making those results also stand out is an increasing concern for site owners and webmasters. With IP.Blog 2.6 we've introduced two such changes to further expand your audience. Links to user profiles from blog entry pages now include the rel="author" microformat tag. This tag, when combined with a link to a compatible social network in the user profile, will allow search engines to identify and display author info directly in search results like so; Additionally, blog entry ratings have now also been tagged with appropriate schema data so entry ratings will display alongside search results further highlighting those entries. The addition of these small changes both assists search engines in finding relevant content and at the same time improves usability for the end user. It is also worth noting that the majority of these changes have come about as a direct result of user contributed feedback in the IP.Blog Feedback forum. We're very excited that we are able to continually act on readily shared experiences in this way and welcome any further comments you may have.