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Next up in our round-up of changes you can expect to see in our application releases this holiday season: IP.Chat 1.2.0. For IP.Chat 1.2.0 we decided to hold back on some of the larger changes we would like to implement, in order to better evaluate the server requirements on our side and ensure we implement the big features in a resource-friendly manner for all involved. In the mean time, we hope you like the changes you can expect to see in IP.Chat 1.2.0! Friendly URL While IP.Chat really only has one URL, we've gone ahead and added FURL support for the IP.Chat page. This means instead of "site.com/index.php?app=ipchat" you can now access chat on your site at "site.com/chat". As search engines generally won't be supported by IP.Chat anyways, this change is more for the benefit of your users rather than for search engine optimization reasons. Auto-Kick Inactive Users We felt this requested change was especially relevant to IP.Chat, given that chat packages have a maximum online users limit. We have implemented a feature in IP.Chat where-by a user will be automatically kicked from the chat room after a specified period of inactivity. You can specify the period (in minutes) in the ACP, and if a user sits in chat but does not submit any messages or perform any moderation activities the user will be kicked after the number of minutes you specify. This can be useful if you have users that will visit your chat room at the end of the night, and forget to leave before leaving their computer in the evening. Instead of the user sitting in chat all evening long (even though they are not really present at their computer), the software will kick them, and show the normal "You have been kicked from chat" message, freeing up more space in your chat room without you having to upgrade your chat package unnecessarily. Shut Off User Messages We have added a setting that allows you to disable the "User X has entered the room" and "User X has left the room" messages that IP.Chat automatically show when users enter and leave, respectively. This new setting was added based on direct user requests. Ability To Hide Recent Chats When you enter the chat room, the most recent chats are shown to the user who has entered. This allows them to quickly catch up on the current conversation so they know what is being talked about at present. Some users have requested a setting to NOT show this chat "buffer" when new users enter the room, and in 1.2.0 such a setting has been added. Instead, when the user enters the room (and the setting is enabled), they will start with a blank slate and none of the recent chat messages will be shown to the user if the setting is enabled. Launch Chat In A Popup Probably the most heavily requested feature since we launched IP.Chat, you will now be able to launch chat in a minimalized popup window. There is a setting in the ACP that, when enabled, will automatically force the chat tab to launch a popup window instead of showing chat in the page with the full IP.Board wrapper. Additionally, if a user is viewing the chat room on a regular page, there is a new button (near the sounds toggle button) that will launch the chat room in a popup window, allowing you to leave the full chat page in IP.Board and continue navigating the forums. Wrap Up We have also performed some miscellaneous code cleanup to better optimize the code, and provide for better developer documentation for our third party developer community. We have intentionally kept this IP.Chat update scaled back so that we will be better positioned to deliver some bigger features for you in the next major release. We hope you find the features coming in 1.2.0 useful, and look forward to your feedback, as always!
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Since applying IP.Downloads 2.3 to our company forums this month, we've noted a few features that we felt would be really handy to add. Given the fact that all of these features have been requested by customers recently, we took the time to add these features now, for IP.Downloads 2.3.0, in an effort to ensure we release a solid product that has everything you need to manage your file repositories. We hope you enjoy these few small but useful changes coming in IP.Downloads 2.3. Featured Files Beginning with IP.Downloads 2.3, you will now be able to designate a single file as a "featured" file. This featured file will be highlighted on the IP.Downloads portal page for everyone to see. This is useful for pointing out a file that is of particular importance to your community, or to highlight a file of exceptional quality that has been recently submitted. Here at IPS, we will be using this new functionality to feature files we feel our customers will be interested in using, be they skins, applications or hooks. Note that there is also a new moderator setting in the ACP moderator management area to allow you to control which moderators can feature files. All super moderators will automatically have this ability. Pinned Files In addition to "featured files", we have also added the ability pin and unpin files in the file listing. When you pin a file, much like a topic, it forces the file to be listed at the top of the category listing no matter what sort order you choose to use to list the rest of the files in a category. You can pin (and unpin) files to help users find commonly requested or downloaded files quickly. For instance, if you use your IP.Download installation to host car manuals, and you find that a large portion of users are downloading a specific car manual, you may wish to pin this file to the top of the category listing so that it is easier for them to find. Or if you have advertisers on your site that also submit files, you can charge your advertisers a fee to pin their file at the top of the listing for a specified period of time. As with featured files, there is a new moderator setting in the ACP to control which moderators can pin and unpin files. All super moderators will automatically have this ability. Redesigned Category View Continuing from Rikki's last blog entry where he showed you all of the other redesigned areas, we have now updated the category listing page to bring it more in line with the rest of IP.Downloads modern look and feel. At the top, you will now have some quick filters that allow you to easily re-sort the category in various ways. Additionally, if IP.Nexus is installed (it is not, in this screenshot), you will be able to quickly filter "All files", "Paid Files" and "Free Files" in the category via a filter option at the top of the screen. If a file is reported broken, this will now be highlighted with an alert icon in the category listing like so: (Note in the first screenshot we opt to display screenshots in the category, while the second screenshot is taken of a file where screenshots are not displayed in the category listing) The download count can be clicked on to view who downloaded the file (for those with permission to see this information). When you view a category with subcategories, the category bar on the left changes slightly to indicate this. In this picture, we are inside "Empty" and you can see there are two subcategories within this category in the left hand block. Conclusion We have a few small areas to touch up still, but for the most part things are now wrapping up. We hope you like the update and we look forward to your feedback regarding the changes to come.
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We have added some new features to IP.Downloads 2.3 that have been requested by our customer base and that we believe will help you better manage your files. Most of these features we pulled directly from our feedback forum, and we'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who participates and shares their ideas through this channel. Your feedback directly helps shape the future of IP.Downloads, and we hope you like the new functionality that you have requested and will be available with version 2.3. Enhanced Searching In addition to the improved search performance coming in 2.3, we have added some new search filters and sorters that have been requested by our customers. Using the advanced search form, you can now filter your IP.Downloads search results based on category, allowing you to search for files within specified categories easily. Additionally, we have added "Last Update Date" and "Rating" as new sorting options, allowing you to better control the order of the returned search results. Lastly, we have overhauled the search results interface to present you with much more information which can be useful when reviewing the search result to verify if it is the file you are looking for. The results are now displayed in a traditional table manner, consistent with the manner in which files are displayed within the download manager itself. Additionally, the category breadcrumb is shown below the file name so you can easily see which category the file is contained in. The file rating, number of views and downloads, submitter information, and last update information are also available for you to review. Who Downloaded My File? While the administrator can review all downloads in the ACP using the available reporting tools, often times users want to know who has downloaded a file from the public interface as well. A modification author or skinner may want to know who is downloading their skins, for instance. Or you may be curious who has downloaded a file before you yourself download it. Beginning with IP.Downloads 2.3 this functionality will now be available. For this feature to work, you will need to ensure you have the setting "Log All Downloads" enabled in the IP.Downloads settings. Additionally, you will be able to control on a per-group basis who can view file downloaders and who can't. For the groups that are allowed to view file downloaders, all download counts will now be linked, and clicking the link will open a modal box within the window showing the downloaders. Mark All Categories Read A new link has been added to the statistics bar on the download manager index page that allows you to mark all categories in IP.Downloads as read. If you used to be in the habit of marking each category as read one by one, you will no longer have to do this. You can just click the "Mark All Categories Read" link and be on your way. Reporting Broken Files We have added a new per-group option to allow you to control which groups are allowed to report files as broken. Some users have indicated that they have validating users reporting files as broken unnecessarily, so you will now be able to configure members of the validating (or any other) group to remove this capability. Ban Users From Uploading Beginning with IP.Downloads 2.3 you can now ban individual users from submitting files to IP.Downloads globally. While you have always been able to do this on a per-permission mask and per-category level, sometimes you want to ban individual users entirely from submitting, while not restricting them from downloading files. Rather than creating special permission masks for these users and applying them to the users individually, you can now just ban the users right from IP.Downloads. To ban a user from submitting in IP.Downloads, go to the ACP, My Apps menu, IP.Download Manager, and on the home page under "Run Reports" enter the user's name into the Member Report field. On the member report screen you will be able to block or enable their ability to submit files. Change File Owner Another oft-requested feature for IP.Downloads is the ability for moderators to change the file owner. You have always been able to change the file owner by running a file report in the ACP, however this capability has not been present on the front end...until now. While super moderators will always have this ability, you can control on a per-moderator basis which moderators have permission to change file ownership from the front end. For moderators that have this ability, a small tag will appear next to the file submitter's name when viewing the file details page. Clicking the tag will present you with a form field where you can enter the new file owner's name, and change the file owner. The member type-ahead functionality is also utilized to allow you to more easily search and find the new file owner's name. Latest Files A new board index sidebar hook has been added that will display the latest files in your IP.Downloads system. There's not a lot to say about this feature - it does what it says. :) Better File Control We have added a few new features that will allow you to better control your files when submitting them, as a user. Firstly, we have added the ability to specify on the submission form which screenshot should be the "default" screenshot for files. This default screenshot is then displayed as a primary screenshot when viewing the file information page, and is used whenever a screenshot for a file (that has multiple screenshots available) is requested, for instance in the random files block. To go along with this, we have changed the screenshot generation method to use a "cropped" thumbnail, instead of a traditional proportional thumbnail. Now, when configuring screenshot dimensions, you will only enter one dimension (for instance, "100" if you wish to have thumbnails at 100px x 100px). IP.Downloads will generate a screenshot in square proportions, cropping the edges as needed. This will allow for a more fluid layout with screenshot dimensions that can more easily be expected and worked with. Additionally, we have added two additional fields to the file submission process: version number and change log. You can now supply a version number when submitting a file, which will then be displayed next to the filename on the file information page. The file version is preserved when a new version of a file is submitted, so the "Previous Versions" section will also display the previous version number next to it's filename as well. This allows you to more easily understand the previous versions section, as you can see which version each entry is. The other new field, change log, allows you to enter in changes that were made with the new version you are submitting when adding or editing a file. This change log is displayed below the file description on the file information page, and is preserved when you submit a new version of a file (i.e. the change log for each version is saved when a new version is submitted). This allows the user to view the full change log for a given file by clicking on a link presented on the file information page. In this screenshot, I clicked the "View all changelogs" link and the modal box appears showing me all changes in the current and previous versions. As you will undoubtedly be able to tell from that last screenshot, the user interface has also been completely overhauled. Keep an eye out for our next blog entry, where we will go over the changes you can expect to see to the interface in IP.Downloads 2.3. We are really excited about these changes and think you will be too, once we are able to share them with you!
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The term "consistency" can encompass many facets of a software package. Consistency can refer to backend code, ensuring that one piece of the application is utilizing available classes and methods to ensure it behaves as similar as possible to every other piece of the application when executed. Consistency can refer to the user interface, ensuring that users navigating a piece of an application can easily familiarize themselves with it, whether that be comparing the interface to other established websites the user is likely to have visited, or comparing the interface to the rest of your application as a whole. Consistency is important in software development, because it helps ensure that the application will behave as expected, and that users will know exactly what to expect. We are focusing a lot of our efforts into usability and consistency in our applications, in an effort to ensure that users can easily navigate and use our software, without having to first "learn" how to use it. IP.Downloads is no different, and I wanted to talk in this blog entry about some changes you can expect to see with IP.Downloads 2.3 which we feel will help improve consistency between IP.Downloads and the rest of your IP.Board applications. Sphinx Support Arguably the least exciting thing I would like to mention in this blog entry, is that beginning with IP.Downloads 2.3, Sphinx search support has been reintroduced. This means that websites utilizing Sphinx for their search engine will be able to also use Sphinx for IP.Downloads. With previous versions of IP.Downloads, MySQL is used for searching. Similarly, if you do not use Sphinx, you may still gain from a small performance boost with MySQL searches, as proper "fulltext" search support has been added for IP.Downloads as well. For those of you who may be technically inclined, but not quite sure what this means, basically instead of running a query with a where statement like WHERE file_name LIKE '%search term%' we now will run a query like WHERE MATCH(file_name) AGAINST ('+search +term', IN BOOLEAN MODE) This is a minor backend change, but will help performance if your site has a large downloads section that is heavily searched. Custom Field Formatting IP.Downloads has featured custom fields support since it's initial release. This is a powerful tool that will help you collect additional meta data from your users when they submit files. Custom fields show up on the file information page when filled in, allowing you to easily customize the data collected and shown for users in IP.Downloads. We have enhanced custom fields in IP.Downloads 2.3 to allow you to define how to format them from the ACP. Similar to the formatting options for member custom fields, you can use a {key} and {value} macro when defining the formatting options for your IP.Downloads custom fields, allowing you to display the data exactly how you intend to. One common use scenario we have run into ourselves is wanting to display a custom field that should contain a link as an actual link, instead of just the link text. This will now be possible in IP.Downloads 2.3. Share Links & FaceBook IP.Board 3.1 introduced the new share links strip functionality, and included a robust and easy to use FaceBook "Like" feature throughout the forums. We have implemented this into IP.Downloads 2.3, allowing your users to easily share and like the content throughout IP.Downloads just as they would throughout the forums. In doing so, we have removed the old "Email File" link that would appear on file display pages, as you can now use the Email share link option instead. While I presently do not have FaceBook enabled on my development board, you can see the share links strip in the following screenshot. The FaceBook like hook will show up on the left side on the same line, when enabled. (Please be aware that this is an early screenshot, and the user interface is subject to change before release) Comments & Likes As well as implementing the share links and FaceBook Like hook into IP.Downloads, we have gone ahead and implemented our new commenting and likes systems into IP.Downloads 2.3 as well. Matt previously discussed these new features in a Gallery blog entry (take particular note of the 'Favorites' feature, which we have renamed to 'Likes' and the new comments area), so feel free to check that out to get a better overview of how these systems work. As part of our efforts regarding consistency across our applications, these features will work identically in IP.Downloads as they do in IP.Gallery. All content that you 'Like' throughout IP.Board is available in a new 'My Liked Content' option from your user dropdown in the top of every page. We will be further expanding this central control panel in IP.Board 3.2. When you like a file, you can choose to like anonymously (so that other users do not know you have liked it), and you can choose to receive notifications of updates. If you enable notifications, you will be notified when the file is updated and/or when someone comments on the file. This new like system replaces a couple of existing features in IP.Downloads, but in a manner that will make it more consistent with every other application: Favorites (including the UserCP "Manage Favorites" area) and Subscriptions (including the UserCP "Manage Subscriptions" area). You can now manage these from one central area of IP.Board for all applications, including IP.Downloads. The comments area will now support AJAX replies, hovercard moderation, and more, all in an interface consistent with our other applications. Again, check out the previous blog entry with a video of Gallery for an idea of how this section works. I would take a couple of screenshots here, however we are in the process of overhauling the user interface and as such I don't think screenshots will help you visualize the changes much at this time. When we blog about the user interface changes later on, we will be sure to point out these two specific changes to show you how the look and work. In addition to changing these systems for our file view page to be more consistent with our other applications, we have also added the ability to "Like" a category of files, allowing you to optionally be notified when new files are submitted to a category. This is analogous to the "Watch Forum" option in the forums, allowing you to be notified if new topics are submitted. We believe this will help your members monitor areas of your site more effectively and with better control, keeping your members interested in your downloads area as new content is submitted. Summary We are working towards improving usability and consistency in IP.Downloads (as in all of our applications) and to that end we have implemented some new functionality that will allow your users to navigate your downloads area with ease. They can expect to be familiar with how the downloads area works based on consistency with our other applications, without having to figure this out on their own. Additionally, the inline AJAX functionality of the likes and comments systems provide for a more robust user experience, allowing them to interact with the site in useful ways, without having to jump from page to page unnecessarily. We hope you like these changes, and stay tuned for other upcoming blog entries regarding the direction of IP.Downloads 2.3!
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Early on during development of IP.Downloads 2.3, one key area we identified that we wanted to improve was the notification capabilities of IP.Downloads. In previous versions of IP.Downloads, you can elect to be notified when a file you are watching is updated, and you can elect to be notified when a file you submit is approved or denied. These are necessary and useful notification options, however they do not encompass all of the scenarios users might want to be notified of within the application. New Comments We have implemented the new 'Like' and 'Comments' systems into IP.Downloads 2.3 (we will discuss this further in our next blog entry), and in doing so have added the ability to allow users to be notified when a new comment is received on a file. A user need only visit a file, 'like' it, and choose to be notified of new comments if they so wish. If you are subscribed to files, or have any files in your favorites list in your current IP.Downloads installation, those will be removed, and converted into 'likes' appropriately when you upgrade to IP.Downloads 2.3. New Files In addition to supporting 'likes' for files, you can now 'like' any category in IP.Downloads, allowing you to receive notifications (if you choose) when new files are submitted to a category you like. Broken Files Until IP.Downloads 2.3, no one would be notified when a file is reported broken. A note would be added to the top of the page with some details, and the file would be listed in the Moderation panel, however this requires moderators to be vigilant and to actively monitor the Moderation panel to discover when files are reported broken. Beginning with IP.Downloads 2.3, you will now be able to elect to be notified when a file you have submitted is reported broken (as the file submitter). This allows you to know if any of your files are being reported as broken by the community, giving you the opportunity to address issues with the file if needed, and to communicate with moderators more effectively if they contact you about the file. Additionally, moderators will now be able to elect to be notified when a file is reported broken, giving them the opportunity to let the software handle notifying them of problems, rather than requiring the moderators to actively monitor areas of the software to discover problems on their own. We believe this new functionality will ease the workload of your moderators, and ensure consistent communication occurs between the software and your staff. As an aside - we have also added group-based permissions for who can report a file as broken, which will now allow administrators to better control who has access to perform this action in IP.Downloads. Files Pending Approval In addition to having no way to know when a file is reported broken, in previous versions of IP.Downloads moderators had no way to know (without checking for themselves) if a file is pending approval. This means that moderators must monitor the downloads area manually to determine if files are pending approval, which is time consuming and inefficient. Beginning with IP.Downloads 2.3.0, your moderators will now be able to elect to receive notifications of new files pending approval, allowing them to be notified when action is required on their part, without having to actively monitor the downloads area. Summary With IP.Downloads 2.3 we are working to improve both the consistency between IP.Downloads and IP.Board (as well as our other addon applications), and the usability in the application itself. We believe these small but important changes will allow you (the admin), your staff, and your users much better control over how they interact with the software, saving everyone time, energy, and useless clicks. ;) Let us know what you think in the comments, and subscribe to our blog if you are looking forward to our next IP.Downloads blog entry, which will discuss some further usability and consistency improvements you can expect to see in IP.Downloads 2.3!
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IP.Content is a powerful toolset that allows you to create dynamic pages and content on your site, utilizing all of the APIs IP.Board provides. Using these tools, you can create pages, templates and blocks that retrieve, transform, and output data in your IP.Board and addon application databases. IP.Content can even allow you to take blocks you have created and integrate them into any page in IP.Board itself, so you can create dynamic content-driven blocks on any page of your IP.Board installation with ease. While the integration possibilities are quite robust within IP.Board, we wanted to take this a step further and allow you to implement blocks created in IP.Content anywhere! Imagine if you could create a feed of the latest topics on your forum, and integrate that into your Wordpress blog? Or imagine creating a feed of your latest Gallery images to show on your website homepage, simply by inserting a little tag into your homepage HTML file? With IP.Content 2.1, you will be able to do exactly that. A new "external.php" file will be included in the Tools folder of your IP.Content download. You will first need to upload this to your IP.Board root directory. Then, in the ACP Block Management page, you will see a new icon next to every IP.Content block. When you click this icon, you will be presented with a small modal box that includes the exact HTML (a javascript tag) that you need to include where-ever you want the block to show up You simply copy this javascript tag, and paste it into your page where-ever you would like for the block to show. It really is that simple! Additionally, while this is not the "preferred" method of integrating blocks into your IP.Content pages themselves, there is nothing stopping you from doing so if you find this method to be the easiest way to include your blocks in your pages. I have created a short video to demonstrate how this works. Hopefully you will be able to see just how easy this new feature is to use in IP.Content through a short tutorial example. As you can see, there is really nothing to it - you simply copy a tag into your HTML page and the block shows up. Additionally, because the block is loading off of your forum domain and utilizing the IP.Board framework, all member data is available to the block. You can create user profile blocks, for instance, and show them on your external site, providing an easy way to integrate "member" functionality into your site without having to create your own membership system, or tie your site into your IP.Board installation through backend PHP code. Some Boring Techy Details, if you are interested The block is implemented via a javascript tag, which then renders an iframe into the page. The iframe will size dynamically so that all of the block content is displayed, and scrollbars are not. You can override this on a per-block basis, simply by changing the URL in the script tag to include "&w=xx&h=xx" parameters (you can provide either parameter, or both parameters) if you wish to set a static width and/or height (if you do so, the iframe will automatically show scrollbars as one would expect). We hope you like this new feature in IP.Content 2.1, and that it will help you expand your website in easy and fun ways. Let us know what you think in the comments!
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Alongside the new articles system introduced in IP.Content 2.0, we redesigned and included a default demo site to showcase some of the core functionality in IP.Content. This default demo site utilizes the concept of page templates, custom database templates, custom databases, custom blocks, and all of the useful functionality you will probably make use of yourself. The idea behind this is that we wanted to show off some of the capabilities of IP.Content in a "real-world demo" so that you could dive in and, hopefully, better understand how all of the different capabilities of IP.Content can be pulled together to create unique and creative websites. Well, while the demo site looks sharp and has been generally well received, there has been one recurring criticism of this approach with IP.Content 2.0 - the articles system, because it was embedded into the default demo site, did not look consistent with the rest of IP.Board if you chose not to use the included page template. If you edited the "index.html" page and set it to use the IPB wrapper (and not the page template we included), much of the layout did not flow as expected. We have decided to change our approach with IP.Content 2.1. We are no longer going to include a default page wrapper with IP.Content 2.1. I'm sure some of our customers may have liked seeing how the page templates can be used to facilitate making an entire website with a consistent look and feel outside of the forums, however in our polling most of the users who make separate website pages (and don't want them to look like the forums) are already fully capable of doing so. Additionally, these users tend to be more advanced users and they login to IP.Content after it is installed and just delete the default wrapper anyways. This functionality is still in place of course, however the new default installation of IP.Content will utilize the IP.Board wrapper instead of a separate wrapper, in an effort to make IP.Content more consistent with your forums, and much easier to use "out of the box". The new templates included with IP.Content 2.1 are not radically different from 2.0, however some changes have been applied to various elements of the pages to allow IP.Content to re-use your existing IP.Board skin easier with fewer changes on your part. Ideally, this means IP.Content will work out of the box with (most) custom skins with few or no styling tweaks needed. Thus, once you install IP.Content 2.1, you can click the Pages tab and begin adding your own articles: a much more plug-n-play approach, if you will. I'm sure a couple of screenshots will make this clearer, so here you can see the major views of the articles system in IP.Content 2.1 (using the IP.Board wrapper). Please be aware that these screenshots are not 100% finished and small details may change between now and release. We're still tweaking a few areas but wanted to give you an idea of what was in store. This is a category frontpage of the "Databases" category One of the first things you'll notice here is that the sidebar has been moved to the right hand side of the page. The concept of "articles" is part of a content-driven website. Articles are content that are highly relevant to your community that you want separated from the forums, in an area that is easy to navigate and view. To this end, much like most blog products on the market, we have moved the sidebar to the right side of the page so that the first thing you see when you visit the page is the content. We will also set the *default* frontpage template to be our "Frontpage (Blog Format)" template. For those of you who are not familiar with IP.Content (or, who are not familiar with the concept of a frontpage or the frontpage templates), the "Frontpage" is the first page you hit when visiting the articles system, or when you visit any given category in the articles system. You can assign a special frontpage template that allows you to issue the content in the manner you best see fit (and you can assign separate frontpage templates on a per-category basis if you choose to do so). IP.Content ships with 3 default frontpage templates (although you can modify these, and/or create your own): 1x2x2 Layout (this is where you get a larger area for the first article, which will have it's own "row", and then all other articles on the frontpage will be in a smaller sized box with 2 per row), Blog Format (this is a layout similar to a blog product, where the entire article shows on the frontpage, one per row), and Single Column (where you have a layout similar to the blog layout, however only an excerpt of the article is shown instead of the whole thing). While the 1x2x2 layout is arguably the most creative, and as such we used it to show off what you could do with IP.Content 2.0, we have opted to use the Blog Format frontpage template as our default template in IP.Content 2.1. We feel this is more consistent with most users' experiences on other websites, and should make it easier for users to navigate your own site as a result. (It is important to note, all 3 templates are still shipped and available for use with 2.1 - we are only changing the default configuration here). This is the article view Here you will notice that we now re-use the "maintitle" styling from the forums for the header of the page. The interface should feel much more consistent with topics and posts in your forums, while still standing out as content that is not directly contained within the forums. All user-action buttons have been added to the container bar below the content, and the date/poster info is moved above the content into it's own bar with a separate background color. This allows the content to better "stand out" without other meta data contained within the same area distracting the user's eyes. All in all there isn't much to say about the changes made to this page - we think they're pretty self-explanatory. And here is the archives view Again, most of the changes should be pretty self-explanatory. A list of the articles contained within the category is shown (as is pagination, when necessary), along with a sort-bar that allows you to resort the articles in a couple of different ways. This is not unlike IP.Content 2.0, however of course this is now displayed within the IP.Board wrapper. If you have sub-categories in the category you are viewing, they will be displayed below the list of articles. We have also redesigned the included media database demo so that it will work with or without the default demo site wrapper. Again, we have moved the sidebar to the right side of the page to put the focus on the page content, and we have simplified the interface, removing extraneous meta data. A list of recent videos is shown at the bottom of the page, while the most popular videos are shown on the right side of the page. It is important to note that this "media database" is nothing more than a regular database in IP.Content, with some customized database templates. You could entirely recreate this media database yourself without anything special - we ship with it simply to show some creative ways you can use the databases functionality. If you didn't notice in the screenshots initially, we've also updated the breadcrumb functionality for databases (and articles) so that if you are using the IP.Board wrapper, the breadcrumbs are correctly appended to the IP.Board secondary navigation bar, rather than being inserted separately. This should provide for better navigational consistency with other applications. We value all of our customers' feedback and as a direct result of the feedback received, you can see that we are making changes to IP.Content 2.1 in an attempt to make it easier to approach and use. You will no longer have to jump through hoops to use IP.Content inside or outside a wrapper - either way you wish to use the software, we've got you covered out of the box. We look forward to your comments!
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Blocks, a core feature of IP.Content, provide you with an easy way to create static and dynamic widgets that can be embedded anywhere in IP.Content (and indeed, anywhere in IP.Board itself). There are three core block types: custom blocks (where you can effectively embed any HTML or PHP you want into a widget), plugin blocks (these blocks execute a PHP script to generate specific output, such as a mini-calendar or poll), and feed blocks (feed blocks are used to "feed" data from anywhere in IP.Board, as well as RSS feeds). While blocks are extremely powerful, it can be challenging for a novice to fully understand what can be done with the blocks in IP.Content. To get the most out of your blocks, and to make them customized and unique to your site, you have to know what variables are passed to the blocks and thus are available for your use. As part of our drive to make IP.Content easier to use and more accessible to novice and intermediate users, we have developed an inline block helper window for IP.Content 2.1 that we think will help everyone to better understand what variables are available in individual block templates. (Please be aware that the following videos and screenshots are of a pre-final copy of IP.Content 2.1. The interface may change before the final version is released.) Launching the Variable Help In the following screenshot, I have clicked on the "Recent Articles" block and am now presented with the form to edit the block template. You will see a "help" button that you can click which opens the block variable help window. Upon clicking the button, the variable help window opens Here we can see that two variables are passed into the template. Different blocks have different variables available to them, so this helps us understand what is available with the block we are currently working on. $title is a variable that holds the block title (as the description notes), while $records is an array that holds all of the records in this feed. You will note that $records is underlined because it is a link. When we click on this link, it expands the variable help for the $records variable. Now we can see that when we loop over the $records (this is done by default in the template), each member is an array, and we see what array keys are available. By default, you see this in the template: <li class='{parse striping="feed_striping"}'> <a href='{$r['url']}'>{parse expression="IPSText::truncate( $r['field_1_value'], 30 )"}</a> </li> </foreach> <foreach loop="$records as $r"> Here you can see that the default template uses $r['url'] and as well as $r['field_1_value']. If you were not familiar with the software, you may not know what this means. By utilizing the documentation available now, you can now gain an understanding of what is happening. $r['url']: The URL to the database record or article $r['field_1_value']: The formatted value for the field "Title" that should be shown to users Now What? While understanding what each variable in the default template is for is very helpful on it's own, you can now take your blocks even further. Now that you can access documentation on what variables are available, and what each variable does, you can modify your block templates to make them more personalized to your site, with the information you want to display. Let's walk through a quick example. Please see the following video, and the subsequent description of what we have just done. The first step we take is to create the block. For this demonstration, I am creating a "feed" block that pulls topics from the forums. Because I am showing "news" from a specific forum, I opt to order by "start date" (instead of the date the last post was made). I decided not to edit the template initially, and saved the block. Now I preview the block so you can see what it will look by default. The default template works well as a "latest posts" block, however if we are intending to show news, we will probably want to show the entire post. Next, I go back in and edit the block template. I decided to move the date to the beginning of each row, and then I show the name of the member that started the topic. Now, I remove the code that truncates (shortens) the post, and wrap it in a div that gives it a margin so it is easier to see. Lastly, I decided to add a small blurb to the end of each row that tells who last edited the post, and a little bit of information about this user. I added the last poster's name, the date they made their last post to the topic, their profile picture (the "mini" size version), the user's post count, and the number of times this user's profile has been viewed. I save the block again, and launch the preview again to give you and idea of what the end result will look like. All of the above was simply to demonstrate how you might be able to use the block help to find variables you may wish to use in your blocks. By using the block help, I was able to add a lot more data and thus make the block more useful. Wrapping Up Of course, the block templates still don't write themselves - you will need to determine what it is you want to show and where. We hope, however, that the block variable help panel provides you with direct, relevant documentation of the various variables you will want to access in your blocks. We believe this help panel will lower the bar to customizing IP.Content just a little bit further, making it easier for more people to do the things they want easier in IP.Content. We look forward to your feedback and hope you like the changes!
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While we continue to work on polishing IP.Content 2.1 to make it easier to access and easier to use, we wanted to take a moment to highlight some of the changes we have already made which we believe will allow you to better make use of all that IP.Content 2.1 has to offer. One major goal we are continuing to work towards with IP.Content 2.1 is to make it easier for everyone to use, and we believe these two changes will do just that (even if our work is not yet done). Textual Keys in Templates Databases and articles map to pre-defined templates in the ACP. You can modify these templates, and even create new ones, as needed for your site. You can use one database template for all of your databases, or you can make one template for each database you create in order to give each database it's own unique look and feel. There are many ways to configure your templates so that you get the most out of IP.Content. One limiting factor in IP.Content 2.0 (and previous versions), however, is that within the templates you refer to the fields by the field ID. For instance, if you want to show the "content" for a database record, you may have to use a variable like so: $record[ $database['database_field_content'] . '_value' ]. In and of itself, this isn't a "problem", however when you are working with the template it's not immediately clear what variable you are referencing, and you will probably find that you need to look up what variables are available in the templates quite frequently. We have implemented a way to make this easier in IP.Content 2.1. When you add or edit fields you can now define textual keys, and then utilize these keys in your templates. For instance, the article title field has a text key of "article_title". Now, in your templates, you can refer to this value simply as: $record['article_title']. Clearly, this is easier to use, easier to remember, and easier to understand when you come back to this template at a later point to make changes. The upgrade routine will NOT update your existing templates. You are not forced to use the textual keys, and in fact you will need to add text keys to any fields you already have if you do wish to use them. However, moving forward we believe this will make it much easier for everyone working with templates to adapt the template to their needs. Overhauled Wizard Process IP.Content features a wizard process for block and page additions and edits. This wizard process is both necessary (some options can change based on previously selected options) and helpful for new users. While we are happy with how the wizard process works, we felt there were some obvious improvements that we could make, and we are happy to announce that they will be available beginning with IP.Content 2.1. Firstly, after a page or block is created, more often than not when you go edit either a page or block you are wanting to edit the content or template. We accounted for this in earlier versions of IP.Content by building a special secondary form that is loaded, and if you wanted to change anything else you needed to relaunch the wizard. In IP.Content 2.1 this is not the case - when you go to edit a page or block you are taken into the wizard process, defaulting to the page where you edit the page content or block template. This allows us to consolidate the process, giving you a more consistent user experience and reducing the total amount of code needed to deliver the same functionality. Secondly, you can now jump back and forth to any step in the wizard process at will (after the page or block is created, when editing the saved content). This means when you click on the page you will be taken to the step in the wizard where you edit the content, however if you just want to enable caching you can click on the "Caching" step, supply the values you wish to use, and hit "Save" without having to walk all the way through the wizard again. You can use a "Save and Reload" button on the wizard as well, if you wish to apply your changes, but leave the form still open. Additionally, when you are creating a new block or page for the first time, while you cannot jump ahead in the wizard, you CAN jump backwards to any previous step if needed. You can view a quick video here: http://www.screencast.com/users/bfarber/folders/Jing/media/aa2105db-7931-4364-8182-5e402e50ae0a We hope that these improvements make it easier for you to create your blocks, templates and pages, and allow you to better control and manage these resources once created. Please let us know if you have any feedback!
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The article and database functionality in IP.Content helps you manage content on your site in many ways, so one goal we work towards in each release is balancing functionality and capability with ease of use. We don't want to remove functionality to make the software easier to use, but we also don't want the functionality available to inhibit how you use the software. We also work towards integration and consistency with the forums to help deliver a consistent experience for your users. Some changes you can expect to see to the databases and articles areas in IP.Content 2.1 have been implemented to help deliver on improved functionality, consistency, and ease of use. Facebook Like IP.Board 3.1 introduced the ability to "Like" any topic on Facebook, helping to share content from your community on the world's largest social network. This functionality has been well received, and we are pleased to announce that IP.Content 2.1 will feature this same capability for any articles and database records on your site. Your users will now be able to "Like" (and comment through Facebook) any content you post in your articles and databases areas (if you have enabled the Facebook Like hook). Easier Moderation It can be challenging for your moderators to know what content is pending approval in your databases in IP.Content 2.0. We have improved moderator interaction with the databases and articles in a few key ways that we believe will help you better manage the content stored in your databases. 1) Records pending approval in the articles section are now highlighted with the "moderated" CSS class on frontpages and in archive listings in the articles section. This allows you to easily see which articles are not yet approved so your moderators know which ones require approval. 2) Records pending approval are now tracked at the category level. This allows IP.Content 2.1 to show a link below each category "There are x articles pending approval". Your moderators can click on this link, and all articles pending approval will be shown at the top of the listing, similar to how the forums function. The records pending approval tracking has also been implemented for general databases as well. Enhanced Frontpages Frontpages are a new concept introduced in IP.Content 2.0 - they act as a landing page for the articles area (or individual categories within your articles section). We have added two new key features to the frontpage feature of IP.Content 2.1 which we believe will help you better control this page and configure it to work how you like. Pinned Articles The "pinned" status on an article is honored in the archive listings, however pinned articles were not automatically pinned to the top of frontpages. We have added a new setting to the Frontpage Manager in IP.Content 2.1.0 that will allow you to choose if you want your pinned articles to be pinned at the top of your frontpages as well. Pagination Frontpages were meant to act as a sort of "portal" for your articles, and were not originally designed to allow you to walk through all of your content. You could use the archives view in order to walk through all of the submitted content, if you wanted. In IP.Content 2.1.0 you can now enable pagination in the Frontpage Manager, allowing for pagination right from the frontpage. When enabled, a simple pagination method is utilized to provide a "Next Page" and "Previous Page" (when appropriate) at the bottom of your frontpages, allowing you to walk through all of your articles right from the frontpage similar to how a blog might work. It is important that you match the number of "articles per page" setting in the frontpage manager to the number of articles that are displayed (as frontpages can show fewer articles than you configure) in order for frontpage pagination to work 100% correctly, however after you have configured your frontpages correctly your users will now be able to more easily view all of the articles on your site without having to load each category's archive view individually. Database Plugin Updates Databases support plugin callback functionality to allow advanced developers to exert more control over how IP.Content processes data before updating it's local records. We have expanded the plugin support in 2.1 to give you better control in your callback plugins. All areas that support plugins now have preX() and postX() plugin callbacks, and further to that, context-specific data is now passed to the plugin to allow you to more easily check for errors in submissions or manipulate the data that will be stored in the database. For postX() plugins, the new primary key ID for the inserted content is passed to the plugin callback so you can manipulate the new record as needed. Even better, we already have basic documentation written up for the plugin changes, so we should have all of our plugin documentation available when IP.Content 2.1 is launched! We believe these small but useful features will allow you to better control the behavior of databases in IP.Content 2.1, giving you more functionality, more consistency with the forums, and more control over how IP.Content functions on your site.
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IP.Content features robust integration with IP.Board, allowing you to promote posts to articles and allowing you to use your forums to host the comments for your articles and other database records. This functionality is important to many administrators, helping integrate these two areas of your site closely. We have enhanced the IP.Content and IP.Board integration in IP.Content 2.1.0, giving you better control over how IP.Content interacts with your forums. Better Control of Topics You can configure IP.Content to post a new topic in the forums when a new database record is saved. This topic is then used to host the comments for the article or database record, and your users can then comment on the article either from the article page directly, or within the forums. Your moderators can control the comments from both areas, giving you a lot of flexibility with regards to how your databases function. We have enhanced this integration in IP.Content 2.1.0, allowing you to better control the topics that are automatically generated in the forums. Previously, when a topic was posted, the post consisted of the article or database record "content" only. Beginning with IP.Content 2.1.0, you can now control on a per-field basis which fields are included with the automatically generated forum topic. A new "Topic Format" option is available for each field in your databases, allowing you to control how that field is represented in the topic that is posted. If you leave the "Topic Format" option blank, the field will not be included in the automatically posted topic. Otherwise, you control the format very much like you would control a profile custom field - you can define a "{key}" and a "{value}" macro which IP.Content will replace appropriately. With this new option, you can control which fields are included (or not included) in the topic that is posted, and how they will be formatted. You could use this capability to create a form on your website which in turn posts topics in a hidden forum for your staff to review, or you could include more details about an article (such as the article image) when it is posted. This new option should give you much better control over the topics IP.Content creates in your forums. Better Synchronizing of Articles IP.Content 2.1.0 will include a new hook that will allow for comment counts to be more accurate when you use the forums to manage comments. Now, if your moderators delete a comment from the forums (instead of from IP.Content), IP.Content will be properly updated so that it reflects the accurate comment count. Additionally, when IP.Content posts a topic to host the comments for the article, a link to the article is now included automatically at the end of the post. This may seem like a minor detail at first, but this will help better integrate and cross-reference the content on your site so that your users can more easily discover everything you offer. Re-Use Existing Topics Many users have requested a way, when they promote a post to an article, to be able to use the existing topic to host the comments for the new article. Currently with IP.Content 2.0, when you promote a post to an article and you use the forums for the comments, a new topic will be created. You now have more control over this process in IP.Content 2.1. There is a new configuration option in the ACP under "Promote Article Settings" to allow you to control this new behavior. The options for this setting, labeled "Allow promoter to associate article?", are "Do not associate", "Allow promoter to choose" and "Automatically associate". When you select "Do not associate", a new topic is created, just as IP.Content 2.0 currently behaves. When you select "Automatically associate", when the post is promoted to an article the existing topic is automatically associated with the article, in order to host it's comments. When you choose "Allow promoter to choose", an option is available on the promotion form allowing you to re-use the existing topic to host the comments for the article. It is important to realize some caveats with this capability: While the option to "move" a post may still be available, this could result in breaking the topic association if you promote the first post in the topic to an article. It is strongly recommended that if you are planning to associate articles with their existing topics that you disable the ability to "move" posts. Promoting a post in the middle of a topic will result in the entire topic (including posts made BEFORE the one that was promoted) to appear to be comments of the promoted post. This could result in unrelated posts appearing to be comments of your articles. Notwithstanding the above noted "gotchas", this new capability is a highly requested feature that we hope allows you to control the way your articles and forums are integrated in the manner you see fit best for your site.
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Every administrator wants to have complete control over the web pages on their site, and this is what IP.Content is all about - allowing you full control over your site's content, right from your admin control panel. While IP.Content is already extremely configurable, we have taken the software even further with IP.Content 2.1, giving you finer control over some key aspects of IP.Content. More Control Over Searching With the first release of IP.Content, the central IP.Board search routine only supported searching IP.Content "pages". With IP.Content 2.0, we added support for searching within articles, databases and comments (in addition to the existing page searching support) from IP.Board's central search area. While this has proved useful and well-received, many administrators have requested more configuration options for IP.Content with regards to searching. IP.Content 2.1.0 will include two primary, oft-requested options that allow you to better control how searching on your website responds to requests. 1) You can now configure in the IP.Content settings which area to search by default when a user searches in IP.Content. In IP.Content 2.0, "Pages" were the default and this could not (easily) be changed. Now, you can configure IP.Content to search Pages, Articles, Article Comments, any databases you have, or comments in any databases you have by default (the user can still change this from the advanced search form and the search results pages as before), depending on what is best for your site. 2) You can now shut off searching within individual databases on a per-database level. When configuring the database you just toggle a radio button, and that database is no longer searchable through the central IP.Board search routine. When you turn off searching in a database, searching in comments within that database is also automatically disabled. These two new capabilities, combined, give you much more control over how IP.Board's central search areas behave with respect to IP.Content. Multiple Domain Support When you run IP.Content outside of your forum root directory, you supply the URL to the index.php file in the admin control panel. IP.Content uses this information to format the URLs to pages, and to understand which page was actually requested by the user. Some users have expressed their desire to run IP.Content from multiple locations on their site, for instance "articles.site.com" and "media.site.com", rather than running all pages under one base URL. With IP.Content 2.1.0 we have changed the setting "URL to index.php" from a text input field (which only allows one URL to be entered) to a textarea field, allowing you to enter as many URLs to the index.php file as needed, one per line. After you have supplied the URLs to the index.php file (or files), you can upload the special index.php to each location specified, allowing you to run IP.Content from more than one location on your site. IP.Content will then be able to parse any URLs you have configured for in the ACP. Search Engine Optimization A new configuration option has been added to the page configuration wizard which allows you to omit the page's filename from the URL when generated. This option will only work correctly for pages with the same filename configured under "Default home page" (index.html by default). The purpose of this setting is to indicate to IP.Content that when it generates URLs to the page, not to add the filename on to the end. For instance, if you have configured IP.Content to run from the root of your site, you may want users to access the homepage through the URL "site.com/" rather than "site.com/index.html". This new option allows for you to tell IP.Content to do just that. We hope you will find some or all of these new options useful. While these new capabilities aren't exactly whiz-bang new features, they allow you to more finely control how your site works, and after all - that's what IP.Content is all about!
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Blocks are a core concept in IP.Content, allowing you to easily create widgets that you can embed on any page (within IP.Content or otherwise). IP.Content 2.1 introduces several useful updates for blocks that we believe will help you customize your pages even further than before. Status Updates Plugin Block IP.Board 3.1.0 improved status update functionality greatly, adding multiple status update support, commenting, and more. Along with this new functionality, the status updates sidebar plugin that is displayed on the forum index was updated to support the new features. IP.Content 2.1.0 introduces a new plugin block that allows you to display this status update plugin on any IP.Content pages you wish. New Feed Blocks As of IP.Content 2.1.0, you will now be able to create feed blocks of both profile comments and status updates (and replies). This new feed block is available in addition to the previously mentioned status updates plugin block. You can filter both feeds to control what content is pulled based on the poster and receiver information (for instance, show all profile comments made by my friends, or show all profile comments received by the admin of the site). These feed types can be useful for creating social networking style pages - perhaps you want to show a feed of all profile comments for the currently logged in user, or perhaps you want to show a feed of all recent status updates from the logged in user's friends. These new feed types can be used in creative ways to create social pages your users will love. New Filter Options: Members Feeds Beginning with IP.Content 2.1.0 some new filtering options have been added for member feeds. You can now restrict a member's feed to only show members you are friends with. This can be useful to create a "friends feed", for instance, in order to list all of a particular user's friends. You can also now filter member feeds to only show logged in users. You could, for example, combine this with the option to only show friends for a user to show all of your currently online friends. These two new filter options can be used in creative ways to make interesting member feeds for your community. Dynamic Filtering for Databases In IP.Content 2.0, you can filter database and article feed blocks based on arbitrary data in up to 5 fields. This can be useful to create content-driven feeds based on specific fields in your database, however it has the drawback that the feeds are always static based upon the configuration in the ACP. Beginning in IP.Content 2.1.0, you can now configure the database and article feeds to filter based on input variables. For instance, you can embed one of these feed blocks on a page, and then when you link to the page you can add an input variable that will allow for dynamic filtering of the content. This is probably explained easiest through an example. Let's say you have a page "results.php" that you have embedded a database feed block in. This ecan create a feed of results from your database based on the block configuration in the ACP. With IP.Content 2.1.0, you could set one of the custom filter fields to search one of your database fields for "@title". The @ symbol here tells IP.Content to obtain the filter from the input variables - in this case an input variable named 'title'. When linking users to this page, you would use a URL similar to "mysite.com/results.php?title=hello". When IP.Content loads this page and parses the block, it will use the value from the input variable ("hello" in this example) to search in the field, finding all records that have "hello" in the title. This feature may be hard to understand at first, but affords developers with powerful ways to create unique pages without having to manually configure feeds for every possible scenario. We will be posting some documentation on how to use this feature following the release of IP.Content 2.1.0. We hope you find these updates to the blocks in IP.Content 2.1.0 useful and look forward to your feedback!
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Improvements to Template Management Development of IP.Content 2.1.0 is well underway, and we've reached the point where we are ready to start sharing with you some of the things you can expect to see updated in IP.Content 2.1.0. We hope you are as excited as we are about the upcoming update, so without further ado, let's cut to the chase... Revision Support Have you ever been editing your page templates and made a change that you wish you could undo, but weren't sure what the template was like prior to making your change? Or maybe a helpful admin on your site made a change to a database template that you later discovered broke some functionality that you had previously added? There are often times when you may wish to review, or possibly even restore, a previous version of one of your templates. With IP.Content 2.1.0 this will be possible through the administrative interface. Anytime you edit a template in IP.Content 2.1.0, a backup of the template is saved in the database. A new menu option available for each template allows you to easily review all of the stored revisions. When you click on "Manage Revisions" it brings you to a new page that will list all of the stored revisions for a given template in reverse chronological order. From this page, you can edit and delete any previously stored revision. You can also restore a revision from this screen. If you restore a revision, the current copy of the template is stored as a revision for future reference. You can also compare a revision from this page against the currently active version of the template, allowing you to pinpoint exactly what has changed. In addition to all template types (page, database and article templates), revision support is also available for pages! That means if you need to restore an older copy of a page, you no longer have to worry about finding a backup somewhere - just use the revision manager to keep track of all your changes, and backtrack through them as needed. Sharing Made Easy Many of our users have asked for an easy way to share templates, and we are pleased to announce that IP.Content 2.1.0 will now include the ability to import and export any of your page, database and article templates. From the template listing screens, you can now export both individual templates AND entire categories of templates If you export an entire category of templates, the category and ALL templates in the category will be included with the export. Of course if you export a single template, only that template will be included in the export. After you export the template, you can then import the template into any IP.Content template screen. If you import an XML export that contains a category, the category will be inserted if it does not already exist. All templates that do not exist will be inserted as well, otherwise templates that already exist (based on the "template key") will be updated. We hope that the ability to export and import templates will help customers in 2 primary ways We hope these template manager updates provide you with useful tools to help you better manage your website. We also hope that the import/export functionality is utilized to build a robust collection of community-contributed templates that everyone can benefit from. If you have any questions or feedback, we'd love to hear from you! Otherwise, stay tuned for our next IP.Content development update blog entry... [*]It should now be much easier to transfer templates from a development site to your live site. After setting up your database, article or page templates how you want, you can export them and import them into your live site. [*]Skinners can now create IP.Content templates and share them easily through the resource site. This allows for skinners to share free and paid IP.Content templates with users, and allows users who are not as familiar with HTML and CSS an easy way to install templates without having to code them from scratch.
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IPS is constantly looking for ways to improve, and one area of focus is documentation. We get a lot of feedback regarding documentation, and quite frequently the feedback we receive is, unfortunately, too vague to act on specifically. It's always a pleasant delight to get specific, focused feedback on how we can improve. Last week I happened across a topic on our forums with just this kind of feedback, and after reviewing the suggestion and what it would take to implement, we agreed that the work was worth it. Cap'n Refsmmat posted some well-thought-out, clear and concise feedback on a specific action we could take that would make finding documentation easier, and I'm happy to announce that this change has been put in place on our website. It was pointed out that as a user, it doesn't matter too much where the documentation you are searching for is located specifically. Whether it is a community article, official documentation, or an error code - you just want to find out more information, regardless of where that information is located. Today I built a few Sphinx search indexes of our downloads area, our error codes database, our official documentation, and our community-submitted articles, and then built a search interface to query all of these areas at once. We have replaced the search form in our documentation area with this new search utility. Feel free to test out the new search tool and let us know what you think! Just head on over to our documentation page and use the search box at the top of the page to look for whatever it is you need to find. We may evolve this new tool further in the future, but for now we hope that it helps you find what you are looking for with less hassle and bouncing around.
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Our IP.Board 3.1 beta testing stage is well underway, and so far things are looking pretty good. We want to take a moment to thank everyone for their time and effort helping us to test IP.Board 3.1. Your contributions are appreciated and only help to ensure the quality of the software is nothing less than you would expect from us upon final release. While IP.Board 3.1 is feature locked, we recently took some time to work on the URL parsing routines to deal with a couple of issues, and thought you might like to hear about these updates. Auto parsing of media tags IP.Board 3.0 introduced the new [ media ] tag, which is used to embed multimedia, like YouTube videos and more, into posts and other areas. This tag works just great, but we've heard from many of you that you think it would be better if media that works within the special tag was parsed and displayed automatically, even if the media tag was omitted. As of IP.Board 3.1, this is now the case. If you copy and paste a link that would correctly parse inside the media tag into your post without media tags, IP.Board's bbcode parsing routine will recognize this and automatically embed your YouTube video or other media right in the post without any other user intervention! Parsing of URLs with commas We've had some passionate discussions spring up across the forums over the past couple of months discussing whether a comma character that would seemingly be part of a URL should be parsed as part of the URL. IP.Board 3.0 originally did so, however this was changed during an early 3.0 release due to a posted bug report. Regardless of the history, many of our customers felt that if a URL has a comma contained within it, that comma should be treated as part of the URL. If it contains a comma at the end of the URL, it should not. You'll be happy to know that IP.Board 3.1 will now present commas as part of the URL appropriately. Here are some example scenarios (the URL bbcode tag was not used to post these) so you can see how it will work: http://community.invisionpower.com/index.php?test=1 http://community.invisionpower.com/index.php?test=1,2 http://community.invisionpower.com/index.php?test=1,2&something=3 I like http://community.invisionpower.com/index.php?test=1, and that's all! This is a relatively minor change, but one which we feel many of our customers will be happy to hear will be included in 3.1. Just a note: if you don't know, don't care, or don't know why commas in a URL should matter to you then you can ignore this small change :) International Domain Names ICANN (the body that regulates domain names) has recently begun approving (and examples are popping up in the wild) domain names that contain non-latin characters in them (known as IDNs). While this won't affect many of our customers, we decided to take this opportunity, before 3.1 is released, to ensure that IP.Board will correctly parse such URLs. Some examples: http://παράδειγμα.δοκιμή/ http://وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر If you expect such domain names to be used on your board, you should expect that IP.Board 3.1 will be able to correctly parse such URLs. We always want to try to stay "ahead of the curve", and this is just one example where we'd rather implement expected functionality now, before our members are affected by any legacy limitations. These changes have been applied to our board here as of the time of this posting, so feel free to try out the new changes in the test posting forum. As always, we look forward to your feedback, and if you happen to find any bugs, please report them to our bug tracker.
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Our IP.Board 3.1 beta testing stage is well underway, and so far things are looking pretty good. We want to take a moment to thank everyone for their time and effort helping us to test IP.Board 3.1. Your contributions are appreciated and only help to ensure the quality of the software is nothing less than you would expect from us upon final release. While IP.Board 3.1 is feature locked, we recently took some time to work on the URL parsing routines to deal with a couple of issues, and thought you might like to hear about these updates. Auto parsing of media tags IP.Board 3.0 introduced the new [ media ] tag, which is used to embed multimedia, like YouTube videos and more, into posts and other areas. This tag works just great, but we've heard from many of you that you think it would be better if media that works within the special tag was parsed and displayed automatically, even if the media tag was omitted. As of IP.Board 3.1, this is now the case. If you copy and paste a link that would correctly parse inside the media tag into your post without media tags, IP.Board's bbcode parsing routine will recognize this and automatically embed your YouTube video or other media right in the post without any other user intervention! Parsing of URLs with commas We've had some passionate discussions spring up across the forums over the past couple of months discussing whether a comma character that would seemingly be part of a URL should be parsed as part of the URL. IP.Board 3.0 originally did so, however this was changed during an early 3.0 release due to a posted bug report. Regardless of the history, many of our customers felt that if a URL has a comma contained within it, that comma should be treated as part of the URL. If it contains a comma at the end of the URL, it should not. You'll be happy to know that IP.Board 3.1 will now present commas as part of the URL appropriately. Here are some example scenarios (the URL bbcode tag was not used to post these) so you can see how it will work: http://community.invisionpower.com/index.php?test=1 http://community.invisionpower.com/index.php?test=1,2 http://community.invisionpower.com/index.php?test=1,2&something=3 I like http://community.invisionpower.com/index.php?test=1, and that's all! This is a relatively minor change, but one which we feel many of our customers will be happy to hear will be included in 3.1. Just a note: if you don't know, don't care, or don't know why commas in a URL should matter to you then you can ignore this small change :) International Domain Names ICANN (the body that regulates domain names) has recently begun approving (and examples are popping up in the wild) domain names that contain non-latin characters in them (known as IDNs). While this won't affect many of our customers, we decided to take this opportunity, before 3.1 is released, to ensure that IP.Board will correctly parse such URLs. Some examples: http://παράδειγμα.δοκιμή/ http://وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر If you expect such domain names to be used on your board, you should expect that IP.Board 3.1 will be able to correctly parse such URLs. We always want to try to stay "ahead of the curve", and this is just one example where we'd rather implement expected functionality now, before our members are affected by any legacy limitations. These changes have been applied to our board here as of the time of this posting, so feel free to try out the new changes in the test posting forum. As always, we look forward to your feedback, and if you happen to find any bugs, please report them to our bug tracker. View full blog entry
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We introduced IP.Chat 1.0 in January of 2010 and our servers have already processed over 6 million chat messages in just a few short months and the rate of adoption of IP.Chat continues to accelerate. Many communities are making good use of the chat software and we hope you are enjoying the IP.Chat product so far. Logs of your chat room are an important tool for moderation of your community. Presently, you can download your chat logs from your client area, and while this is fine, it limits access to the account owner only. Wouldn't it be nice if you could access your chat logs right from your IP.Board ACP? Beginning with IP.Chat 1.1.0 you will be able to review chat logs right from the ACP. The Interface Chat logs will be styled similar to how you see the chats appear right from the chat room. Background coloring helps to identify /me messages, moderator actions, user has entered/left room messages, and private chats. Here, you can get an idea of how the log messages appear. There's not a lot to explain here. BBcodes and smilies will be parsed similarly to the front end, and the rows will be styled similar to the front end. Searching and Filtering By default, private chats will NOT be displayed. We debated how to handle private chats early on. We knew that some users would want them to appear in the chat logs, and some users would feel it's a breach of privacy. The way the chat logs work is that private chats are hidden by default. There is a search/filter bar at the bottom of the chat logs table allowing you to control which chats you wish to see, as well as search your logs. By default "Public" is checked, so you will only see private chats if you choose "Private" or "Both". Your selection will be remembered when browsing from page to page, but you can reset it at any time using the form at the bottom of the page. If you don't wish to review private chats made on your community that is absolutely fine - just don't check the radio button to do so and they will be kept private. In addition to controlling which types of chat messages are displayed, you can search for keywords (and/or usernames), and restrict the logs to a specified date range. You can also fill in only the "from" or "to" field (to get all chats after a specified date, or all chats up until a specified date). The javascript date picker is used to help you supply a from and to date. Pruning A new setting has been added to allow you to specify how far back to keep chat logs. By default, chat logs will be kept for 30 days, and then a task will prune any logs older than 30 days. You can increase or decrease this retention period, or disable pruning altogether. The Backend Chats are still processed through our central servers, so in order to provide this functionality, we have introduced a method for allowing you to retrieve the chat logs for your chat room from our servers. A task is added with IP.Chat 1.1.0 that will download chat logs from our servers every 30 minutes. The task will only retrieve logs saved after your most recent log entry to reduce bandwidth consumption and processing time (and to prevent pruned logs from returning at some future point). Further to this task, you can manually refresh the logs by clicking the "Refresh Logs" button you'll see in the chat logs window. This effectively executes the task immediately, downloading any logs available on the server but not yet stored in your local database. Conclusion As IP.Chat's popularity continues to grow and our customers continue to make use of the software, we felt that this small addition would aid administrators and moderators in managing their communities. Having the logs available locally to your site means anyone with ACP permissions on your board can access the logs, and review anything they need to. You also have control over how long your logs are retained this way, and don't need to visit your client center to review them. We hope you find this new feature useful in the upcoming IP.Chat 1.1.0 release.
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We introduced IP.Chat 1.0 in January of 2010 and our servers have already processed over 6 million chat messages in just a few short months and the rate of adoption of IP.Chat continues to accelerate. Many communities are making good use of the chat software and we hope you are enjoying the IP.Chat product so far. Logs of your chat room are an important tool for moderation of your community. Presently, you can download your chat logs from your client area, and while this is fine, it limits access to the account owner only. Wouldn't it be nice if you could access your chat logs right from your IP.Board ACP? Beginning with IP.Chat 1.1.0 you will be able to review chat logs right from the ACP. The Interface Chat logs will be styled similar to how you see the chats appear right from the chat room. Background coloring helps to identify /me messages, moderator actions, user has entered/left room messages, and private chats. Here, you can get an idea of how the log messages appear. There's not a lot to explain here. BBcodes and smilies will be parsed similarly to the front end, and the rows will be styled similar to the front end. Searching and Filtering By default, private chats will NOT be displayed. We debated how to handle private chats early on. We knew that some users would want them to appear in the chat logs, and some users would feel it's a breach of privacy. The way the chat logs work is that private chats are hidden by default. There is a search/filter bar at the bottom of the chat logs table allowing you to control which chats you wish to see, as well as search your logs. By default "Public" is checked, so you will only see private chats if you choose "Private" or "Both". Your selection will be remembered when browsing from page to page, but you can reset it at any time using the form at the bottom of the page. If you don't wish to review private chats made on your community that is absolutely fine - just don't check the radio button to do so and they will be kept private. In addition to controlling which types of chat messages are displayed, you can search for keywords (and/or usernames), and restrict the logs to a specified date range. You can also fill in only the "from" or "to" field (to get all chats after a specified date, or all chats up until a specified date). The javascript date picker is used to help you supply a from and to date. Pruning A new setting has been added to allow you to specify how far back to keep chat logs. By default, chat logs will be kept for 30 days, and then a task will prune any logs older than 30 days. You can increase or decrease this retention period, or disable pruning altogether. The Backend Chats are still processed through our central servers, so in order to provide this functionality, we have introduced a method for allowing you to retrieve the chat logs for your chat room from our servers. A task is added with IP.Chat 1.1.0 that will download chat logs from our servers every 30 minutes. The task will only retrieve logs saved after your most recent log entry to reduce bandwidth consumption and processing time (and to prevent pruned logs from returning at some future point). Further to this task, you can manually refresh the logs by clicking the "Refresh Logs" button you'll see in the chat logs window. This effectively executes the task immediately, downloading any logs available on the server but not yet stored in your local database. Conclusion As IP.Chat's popularity continues to grow and our customers continue to make use of the software, we felt that this small addition would aid administrators and moderators in managing their communities. Having the logs available locally to your site means anyone with ACP permissions on your board can access the logs, and review anything they need to. You also have control over how long your logs are retained this way, and don't need to visit your client center to review them. We hope you find this new feature useful in the upcoming IP.Chat 1.1.0 release. View full blog entry
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Since first unveiling the notification changes coming in IP.Board 3.1 we've received a ton of feedback from our customers to further improve the system and make the notifications more useful. We've been listening to your feedback (and often agreeing with your points) and have decided to implement many great ideas to the make the notifications system cleaner, easier to use, and less intrusive. Better defaults upon upgrading With our first beta release, nearly everything that can issue a notification did. While inline notifications were set for various less important notifications (such as "Your friend has updated their status"), this quickly proved to be intrusive for users who were regularly active on the board. We have not removed any of the notification options available, however we've defaulted many of the less important notification options to not issue notifications initially upon upgrade. Users who wish to receive notifications for these actions may still visit their user control panel and enable them. This should lead to a less intrusive (and thus, more useful) inline notification setup when you first upgrade, while still allowing users to stay informed of everything happening on the board should they wish to. Shut the popup off Another option that has been introduced is the ability to disable the popup, should you not wish to see it whenever you receive a new notification. There is a per-user setting added to the notifications configuration section of the user control panel to allow you to enable and disable the popup. If you disable the popup, your notifications are still available in your user control panel. This is a small addition that we felt would give each user more control over their browsing experience. Review all of your unread notifications in the popup Another change requested frequently since we first introduced the new system is the ability to review all of your unread notifications from the popup. Presently, only your latest notification is shown, and a link is provided to allow you to visit your notifications log area. Now, there are buttons to allow you to jump through your unread notifications directly from the popup so that you can view all of your unread notifications at once. We've made a short video to demonstrate how this works: This is another small, but useful, change that has been oft-requested, and that we're happy to provide in the next 3.1 beta release. Better accessibility And now we've saved the best for last. Many of our customers have requested that in-lieu of an intrusive popup window to alert you when you've received a new notification, that we implement a menu inline in the page, and show a count on this menu. The menu would provide for quick access to your latest notifications, providing an easy way to review new notifications, while not issuing a popup on every other page load. We're happy to report that you will see such a menu introduced in the next IP.Board 3.1 beta release, with a few extra touches to further enhance your browsing experience. A new menu has been added next to your username dropdown in the top right corner of the page. The number of unread notifications is listed on this menu so that you can quickly see how many unread notifications you have. When you click on the menu, a dropdown is loaded via AJAX displaying your last 10 notifications. Unread notifications are bolded to help you quickly identify them in the list. You'll notice that we've additionally added icons to represent each notification type. These icons can be changed per-skin, and third party developers can add and specify their own icons for their own notifications that they issue. (Please note that the icons you see in this screenshot may not be the icons used in IP.Board 3.1 final) There's a "View All" link at the bottom of the menu, allowing you to quickly go to your notifications list should you need to review further back than the last 10 notifications you received. An important note to make here - when you open your menu, all of your unread notifications will be marked as read. This is a small change that we feel helps make the notifications system more useful. It's natural to assume that when you open the menu and review the list of notifications, you've acknowledged them and no longer need them to reflect an "unread" status. You can still, of course, review them even after they've been marked as read. And finally, once you have no unread notifications, the styling of the menu will change so as to prevent it from drawing your attention as readily as when there are unread notifications for you to view. Coming in the next refresh All of these changes will be present in the next refresh of the IP.Board 3.1 beta which will be applied to our community forum later next week. We look forward to your feedback on the enhancements we've made to the notifications system. We expect these changes will prove useful and help to further polish an already powerful and exciting new feature. (Note that a beta of IP.Board 3.1 is not yet available for download while we finish polishing off these features based on your feedback. Once we have a stable product we will be releasing public betas. Keep an eye on this blog for an announcement.)
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Since first unveiling the notification changes coming in IP.Board 3.1 we've received a ton of feedback from our customers to further improve the system and make the notifications more useful. We've been listening to your feedback (and often agreeing with your points) and have decided to implement many great ideas to the make the notifications system cleaner, easier to use, and less intrusive. Better defaults upon upgrading With our first beta release, nearly everything that can issue a notification did. While inline notifications were set for various less important notifications (such as "Your friend has updated their status"), this quickly proved to be intrusive for users who were regularly active on the board. We have not removed any of the notification options available, however we've defaulted many of the less important notification options to not issue notifications initially upon upgrade. Users who wish to receive notifications for these actions may still visit their user control panel and enable them. This should lead to a less intrusive (and thus, more useful) inline notification setup when you first upgrade, while still allowing users to stay informed of everything happening on the board should they wish to. Shut the popup off Another option that has been introduced is the ability to disable the popup, should you not wish to see it whenever you receive a new notification. There is a per-user setting added to the notifications configuration section of the user control panel to allow you to enable and disable the popup. If you disable the popup, your notifications are still available in your user control panel. This is a small addition that we felt would give each user more control over their browsing experience. Review all of your unread notifications in the popup Another change requested frequently since we first introduced the new system is the ability to review all of your unread notifications from the popup. Presently, only your latest notification is shown, and a link is provided to allow you to visit your notifications log area. Now, there are buttons to allow you to jump through your unread notifications directly from the popup so that you can view all of your unread notifications at once. We've made a short video to demonstrate how this works: This is another small, but useful, change that has been oft-requested, and that we're happy to provide in the next 3.1 beta release. Better accessibility And now we've saved the best for last. Many of our customers have requested that in-lieu of an intrusive popup window to alert you when you've received a new notification, that we implement a menu inline in the page, and show a count on this menu. The menu would provide for quick access to your latest notifications, providing an easy way to review new notifications, while not issuing a popup on every other page load. We're happy to report that you will see such a menu introduced in the next IP.Board 3.1 beta release, with a few extra touches to further enhance your browsing experience. A new menu has been added next to your username dropdown in the top right corner of the page. The number of unread notifications is listed on this menu so that you can quickly see how many unread notifications you have. When you click on the menu, a dropdown is loaded via AJAX displaying your last 10 notifications. Unread notifications are bolded to help you quickly identify them in the list. You'll notice that we've additionally added icons to represent each notification type. These icons can be changed per-skin, and third party developers can add and specify their own icons for their own notifications that they issue. (Please note that the icons you see in this screenshot may not be the icons used in IP.Board 3.1 final) There's a "View All" link at the bottom of the menu, allowing you to quickly go to your notifications list should you need to review further back than the last 10 notifications you received. An important note to make here - when you open your menu, all of your unread notifications will be marked as read. This is a small change that we feel helps make the notifications system more useful. It's natural to assume that when you open the menu and review the list of notifications, you've acknowledged them and no longer need them to reflect an "unread" status. You can still, of course, review them even after they've been marked as read. And finally, once you have no unread notifications, the styling of the menu will change so as to prevent it from drawing your attention as readily as when there are unread notifications for you to view. Coming in the next refresh All of these changes will be present in the next refresh of the IP.Board 3.1 beta which will be applied to our community forum later next week. We look forward to your feedback on the enhancements we've made to the notifications system. We expect these changes will prove useful and help to further polish an already powerful and exciting new feature. (Note that a beta of IP.Board 3.1 is not yet available for download while we finish polishing off these features based on your feedback. Once we have a stable product we will be releasing public betas. Keep an eye on this blog for an announcement.) View full blog entry
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Development is under way (and wrapping up, in fact!) on IP.Chat 1.1.0, so we wanted to take a few moments to illustrate what new functionality you can expect to see with the next update of IP.Chat. If you are not already familiar with IP.Chat, we offer a javascript-based chatroom solution that any customer with an active IP.Board license (or support and services contract) can add to their site. The first level of service for the IP.Chat product allows for you to host up to 5 simultaneous chatters, and is available at no cost to you while your license is active. Other packages are also available for sites that expect more traffic to their chatroom. For more information on IP.Chat, please see our IP.Chat product information page. How many people are in the chatroom? While IP.Chat does include a hook that shows the number of users in the chatroom on the board index, many users felt that the display of this hook was too hidden (it is at the bottom of the screen, along with the other board stats), and only shows on the board index. As a result, users are frequently unaware when someone enters the chatroom, limiting the amount of activity the chatroom gets. We've implemented the most popular suggestion to counter this problem: we've added a count to the 'Chat' tab at the top of the screen that displays how many users are currently in the chatroom. This has been implemented as a hook, and as such can be disabled in the Manage Hooks page of the ACP if you have no use for the feature. You will also have the option to disable the count if no one is in the chatroom, and to hide the count on the tab when you are actually viewing the chatroom page itself. If you allow the count to display while viewing the chatroom itself, the count will dynamically update as users enter and leave the chatroom, allowing you to easily and quickly tell how many people are still in the room just by looking at the tab at the top of the page. We feel this is a small, but useful, addition to the chat software which should help spur activity in your chat room. Private Chatting Another highly requested feature has been implemented for IP.Chat 1.1: private chats. You will now be able to chat within the chat software privately with other users who are logged into chat. A new ACP setting has been added, allowing you to control which groups are allowed to initiate private chats (note: anyone can receive private chats). When your group is allowed to initiate private chats, the username menu that exists presently for moderator actions will have an option to "Start Private Chat". When clicked, a small popup box appears to allow you to fill in the private chat text you wish to send to the user. When a new private chat is started, a new tab is created within the interface. And if new messages are received for inactive tabs, a count is displayed to let you know. As the name of the feature implies, private chats are a one-to-one relationship between two users only. What if I don't want to talk to you? It's natural that you may not wish to converse privately with certain members of a community you are a part of. A "block user" feature has been added to allow you to prevent specific users from sending you private chats within the chat room. There is a new user control panel page where you can block and unblock users. You can also block and unblock users directly within the chat interface. AJAX is used to save the option, and your preferences are updated dynamically (users will be blocked immediately). The user is not made aware that you have blocked them. Instead, any private chats will simply be ignored on your part, as if it was never initiated. Wrap-up IP.Chat has proved to be a stable, useful, and popular addition to our community software line-up. Many of you are making good use of the chat software on your site, and we hope these new additions improve and expand the functionality available in the software in useful ways for you and your users. We have some good ideas for future features, however we wanted to keep a focused approach for 1.1.0 first. Stability and security is of the utmost importance to us. The new functionality introduced for IP.Chat 1.1.0 lays the foundation for many new useful features in the future.
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Development is under way (and wrapping up, in fact!) on IP.Chat 1.1.0, so we wanted to take a few moments to illustrate what new functionality you can expect to see with the next update of IP.Chat. If you are not already familiar with IP.Chat, we offer a javascript-based chatroom solution that any customer with an active IP.Board license (or support and services contract) can add to their site. The first level of service for the IP.Chat product allows for you to host up to 5 simultaneous chatters, and is available at no cost to you while your license is active. Other packages are also available for sites that expect more traffic to their chatroom. For more information on IP.Chat, please see our IP.Chat product information page. How many people are in the chatroom? While IP.Chat does include a hook that shows the number of users in the chatroom on the board index, many users felt that the display of this hook was too hidden (it is at the bottom of the screen, along with the other board stats), and only shows on the board index. As a result, users are frequently unaware when someone enters the chatroom, limiting the amount of activity the chatroom gets. We've implemented the most popular suggestion to counter this problem: we've added a count to the 'Chat' tab at the top of the screen that displays how many users are currently in the chatroom. This has been implemented as a hook, and as such can be disabled in the Manage Hooks page of the ACP if you have no use for the feature. You will also have the option to disable the count if no one is in the chatroom, and to hide the count on the tab when you are actually viewing the chatroom page itself. If you allow the count to display while viewing the chatroom itself, the count will dynamically update as users enter and leave the chatroom, allowing you to easily and quickly tell how many people are still in the room just by looking at the tab at the top of the page. We feel this is a small, but useful, addition to the chat software which should help spur activity in your chat room. Private Chatting Another highly requested feature has been implemented for IP.Chat 1.1: private chats. You will now be able to chat within the chat software privately with other users who are logged into chat. A new ACP setting has been added, allowing you to control which groups are allowed to initiate private chats (note: anyone can receive private chats). When your group is allowed to initiate private chats, the username menu that exists presently for moderator actions will have an option to "Start Private Chat". When clicked, a small popup box appears to allow you to fill in the private chat text you wish to send to the user. When a new private chat is started, a new tab is created within the interface. And if new messages are received for inactive tabs, a count is displayed to let you know. As the name of the feature implies, private chats are a one-to-one relationship between two users only. What if I don't want to talk to you? It's natural that you may not wish to converse privately with certain members of a community you are a part of. A "block user" feature has been added to allow you to prevent specific users from sending you private chats within the chat room. There is a new user control panel page where you can block and unblock users. You can also block and unblock users directly within the chat interface. AJAX is used to save the option, and your preferences are updated dynamically (users will be blocked immediately). The user is not made aware that you have blocked them. Instead, any private chats will simply be ignored on your part, as if it was never initiated. Wrap-up IP.Chat has proved to be a stable, useful, and popular addition to our community software line-up. Many of you are making good use of the chat software on your site, and we hope these new additions improve and expand the functionality available in the software in useful ways for you and your users. We have some good ideas for future features, however we wanted to keep a focused approach for 1.1.0 first. Stability and security is of the utmost importance to us. The new functionality introduced for IP.Chat 1.1.0 lays the foundation for many new useful features in the future. View full blog entry
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IP.Content has many features, and indeed it's quite possible to create a rather useful articles system using the custom databases feature introduced in IP.Content 1.1, however many of our users have been requesting a true "articles" feature since the first release of IP.Content. In typical IPS fashion, we've listened, and you will be happy to hear that IP.Content 2.0 introduces a new "Articles" module. Building on existing functionality As I mentioned, you can create a very useful and workable articles section using the existing databases features in IP.Content. The database feature accomplishes so much of what needs to be implemented for articles, in fact, that articles actually "build on" databases behind the scenes. Much of the interfaces will feel familiar, because indeed much of the code is shared between the two modules. This helps ensure consistency is met between the various sections of the site, and helps to ensure that bug fixes for one area are automatically and immediately carried over to the other. Many of the ACP pages will feel nearly identical to the databases section, and the majority of the features are available in your own custom created databases as well. We feel that the similarities with the existing functionality will help you to get started with articles quickly and efficiently, while the new features and functionality will help to set it apart from the rest of your databases. Navigational flow and frontpages In a generic custom database within IP.Content you will have a "categories" template (which displays a list of your categories, akin to the forum index page), a "listing" template (which shows the listing of records, similar to viewing a forum), and a "display" template (which facilitates displaying the actual record itself, similar to viewing a topic). The articles module separates here from the databases functionality a little, giving you some more options and flexibility. The homepage uses a new template type we refer to as a "frontpage" template. When you first visit the articles section, this frontpage template is used to show you the landing page content. By default, articles that are flagged to show on the homepage will display on the frontpage, however you can naturally change the template to manipulate the data however you like. We will ship with 3 default frontpage templates: 1x2x2 This template displays a large article summary block at the top. The next 2 rows have 2 article summary blocks side by side. Finally, two more rows can display showing article summary blocks side by side. Blog The blog-style template displays one article per row, showing the entire article text (or the first page of the article text, if it is a multi-page article). This is similar to what you might expect to see when you visit a blog. Single Column This template displays one article per row as well, however instead of displaying the full article (or first page of the article), it only displays a small summary. This is similar to what you might expect to see on a typical news site. You can of course also create your own frontpage templates, or modify our defaults to suit your own needs. It is entirely up to you, however we have included a few to help get you started. Now, a user is likely to enter an article directly from the front page, since we bring articles to the forefront with the frontpage template. If so, they will reach a "display" template, just like they would with a standard custom database. However, if a user instead clicks through to a category, they will see a layout similar to the homepage, since you now will also assign a frontpage template to each category. The category will display articles in a fashion similar to the homepage (although you can use different frontpage templates per-category), instead of just providing a listing of articles as would happen in a standard custom database. We do still have a "categories" template within the articles module, which is linked in our default site from the category block. You can make use of this if you want, however we believe you will find it secondary to the main navigation structure, instead of a primary focus as it is in other custom databases. There is also an "archives" template, which is similar to the "listing" template in any other custom database. It will list all articles within your articles section, and features sorting, filtering and pagination as appropriate. Managing articles The ACP interface for managing articles has similarly been overhauled, allowing for an easier and more efficient process of managing your articles. You can dynamically sort the listing of articles both in a lowest to highest and highest to lowest order, you can change the status of an article to published or draft using AJAX, and you can filter articles via multiple characteristics to allow you to easily and quickly find the content you need to edit. The form to add and edit articles has been cleaned up and condensed, making it a much quicker process to add or update an article. When adding or editing an article, you will be able to set certain characteristics about the article. You can control whether the article shows on the frontpage or not. You can control whether the article will allow users to comment on it or not. You can also specify a comment cutoff date, after which comments will no longer be allowed. You can control when the article itself "expires", after which it will only be available when viewing the archive listing. You can change the article author to another member (using AJAX). You can even control, per-article, which article view template to use. This means that you can create a set of pre-defined article view templates (for instance, maybe one which displays the screenshot image on the left, and one which displays it centered at the top of the article), and then when adding your article you just select which template to use from a dropdown menu. Overall, you have a lot of control to ensure that your article is presented exactly how you intend. It is important to note that, just like with your other custom databases, you can create additional custom fields for your articles if you find that you need a field which is not presented by default. There is also a frontpage manager page in the ACP, where you can quickly see all articles set to display on the front page, with the ability to remove any articles that should no longer be available on the front page. It is important to note that you can also control how many articles are displayed on the front page, and that your template can further control how many articles are displayed, based on certain conditions of the template. Thus, while you may have 20 articles set to display on the front page, only 10 may actually display. Your front page manager can help you control which articles, exactly, should display. Promoting forum content Along with the new articles section of IP.Content in version 2.0, we have added a "Promote to article" hook to the forums. Users allowed to use this new button will be able to promote any post on the forums to the new articles section of IP.Content 2.0. The promotion feature has several options to ensure that it is flexible enough to meet your needs. Firstly, as the administrator, you can control which user groups are allowed to use the feature. You can allow both copying and moving of posts to the articles section. When you allow copying of posts and a user clicks on the promote button, a new article will be posted as a copy of the post. When you allow moving of posts and a user uses the feature, instead of copying the post to the articles section, it will be moved (with the original post in the forum being deleted). You can optionally have a link left behind in the forums pointing to the new article. When a post is copied, this link is added to the end of the post. When a post is moved and a link is left behind, the post isn't actually removed, but rather replaced with the link to the new article. As the administrator, you can allow your users to specify whether to leave a link behind each time a post is promoted, or require that the link always be left behind. This new feature should help facilitate promotion of valuable content on your site, and help enable easier content discovery by your vistors, registered or otherwise. As the search engine industry often says, "content is king". The content on your site is its most valuable asset, and this feature helps you better manage that content, to ensure it is benefiting your site as best as possible. Before we move on, I would like to take a moment to mention that the articles section can also allow comments to be stored in the forums, just like your other databases. This new feature in IP.Content 2.0, discussed in a past blog entry, supports databases and articles alike. New default site By itself, we believe the new article section will help you better manage your site, and get you started using IP.Content quicker than ever. No longer will you need to manually create a database, create database templates, tweak them to suit your needs, add the database to a page, and so on. Instead, the articles section takes care of the majority of the legwork for you. So now that we've made everything easier to use from the outset, where can we go from there? Well, not content to sit back even for a moment, we have redesigned the default site that ships with IP.Content to better highlight some of the features of IP.Content 2.0. By default, you will have two "pages". One hosts the new articles section, while the other is a demo of another custom database: a media section, linking to various youtube videos. We feel that the new demo site better shows off many of the capabilities of IP.Content, so that you can better understand how to use the system. Some of the things the new default site shows off: Some default pages Some CSS "pages" Custom blocks holding variables An article category feed A "latest articles" feed A "latest article comments" feed A separate custom database The default site will also populate some basic content for the above areas so that it is not empty upon installation. We will not be inserting this default site for upgrading users (the expectation is that if you are upgrading, you're already familiar with the software and would only be deleting the default site content anyways), so we've decided to host a demo of the new default site so you can click around and see how it works. We will post some articles describing how we created some of these areas for you to benefit from near the release of IP.Content 2.0, in case you are curious how we accomplished certain functionality (such as the media database). Take a look for yourself! And with that said, head on over to our demo installation so you can take a look! This is an early look at the actual default site that will be presented with IP.Content 2.0 upon installation. We look forward to hearing your feedback, and we hope you are as excited as we are about the latest feature announcement for IP.Content 2.0. Overwhelmingly, the one thing our customers have requested for IP.Content 2.0 is a "true article system". We've listened, and a true article section is on its way.
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IP.Content has many features, and indeed it's quite possible to create a rather useful articles system using the custom databases feature introduced in IP.Content 1.1, however many of our users have been requesting a true "articles" feature since the first release of IP.Content. In typical IPS fashion, we've listened, and you will be happy to hear that IP.Content 2.0 introduces a new "Articles" module. Building on existing functionality As I mentioned, you can create a very useful and workable articles section using the existing databases features in IP.Content. The database feature accomplishes so much of what needs to be implemented for articles, in fact, that articles actually "build on" databases behind the scenes. Much of the interfaces will feel familiar, because indeed much of the code is shared between the two modules. This helps ensure consistency is met between the various sections of the site, and helps to ensure that bug fixes for one area are automatically and immediately carried over to the other. Many of the ACP pages will feel nearly identical to the databases section, and the majority of the features are available in your own custom created databases as well. We feel that the similarities with the existing functionality will help you to get started with articles quickly and efficiently, while the new features and functionality will help to set it apart from the rest of your databases. Navigational flow and frontpages In a generic custom database within IP.Content you will have a "categories" template (which displays a list of your categories, akin to the forum index page), a "listing" template (which shows the listing of records, similar to viewing a forum), and a "display" template (which facilitates displaying the actual record itself, similar to viewing a topic). The articles module separates here from the databases functionality a little, giving you some more options and flexibility. The homepage uses a new template type we refer to as a "frontpage" template. When you first visit the articles section, this frontpage template is used to show you the landing page content. By default, articles that are flagged to show on the homepage will display on the frontpage, however you can naturally change the template to manipulate the data however you like. We will ship with 3 default frontpage templates: 1x2x2 This template displays a large article summary block at the top. The next 2 rows have 2 article summary blocks side by side. Finally, two more rows can display showing article summary blocks side by side. Blog The blog-style template displays one article per row, showing the entire article text (or the first page of the article text, if it is a multi-page article). This is similar to what you might expect to see when you visit a blog. Single Column This template displays one article per row as well, however instead of displaying the full article (or first page of the article), it only displays a small summary. This is similar to what you might expect to see on a typical news site. You can of course also create your own frontpage templates, or modify our defaults to suit your own needs. It is entirely up to you, however we have included a few to help get you started. Now, a user is likely to enter an article directly from the front page, since we bring articles to the forefront with the frontpage template. If so, they will reach a "display" template, just like they would with a standard custom database. However, if a user instead clicks through to a category, they will see a layout similar to the homepage, since you now will also assign a frontpage template to each category. The category will display articles in a fashion similar to the homepage (although you can use different frontpage templates per-category), instead of just providing a listing of articles as would happen in a standard custom database. We do still have a "categories" template within the articles module, which is linked in our default site from the category block. You can make use of this if you want, however we believe you will find it secondary to the main navigation structure, instead of a primary focus as it is in other custom databases. There is also an "archives" template, which is similar to the "listing" template in any other custom database. It will list all articles within your articles section, and features sorting, filtering and pagination as appropriate. Managing articles The ACP interface for managing articles has similarly been overhauled, allowing for an easier and more efficient process of managing your articles. You can dynamically sort the listing of articles both in a lowest to highest and highest to lowest order, you can change the status of an article to published or draft using AJAX, and you can filter articles via multiple characteristics to allow you to easily and quickly find the content you need to edit. The form to add and edit articles has been cleaned up and condensed, making it a much quicker process to add or update an article. When adding or editing an article, you will be able to set certain characteristics about the article. You can control whether the article shows on the frontpage or not. You can control whether the article will allow users to comment on it or not. You can also specify a comment cutoff date, after which comments will no longer be allowed. You can control when the article itself "expires", after which it will only be available when viewing the archive listing. You can change the article author to another member (using AJAX). You can even control, per-article, which article view template to use. This means that you can create a set of pre-defined article view templates (for instance, maybe one which displays the screenshot image on the left, and one which displays it centered at the top of the article), and then when adding your article you just select which template to use from a dropdown menu. Overall, you have a lot of control to ensure that your article is presented exactly how you intend. It is important to note that, just like with your other custom databases, you can create additional custom fields for your articles if you find that you need a field which is not presented by default. There is also a frontpage manager page in the ACP, where you can quickly see all articles set to display on the front page, with the ability to remove any articles that should no longer be available on the front page. It is important to note that you can also control how many articles are displayed on the front page, and that your template can further control how many articles are displayed, based on certain conditions of the template. Thus, while you may have 20 articles set to display on the front page, only 10 may actually display. Your front page manager can help you control which articles, exactly, should display. Promoting forum content Along with the new articles section of IP.Content in version 2.0, we have added a "Promote to article" hook to the forums. Users allowed to use this new button will be able to promote any post on the forums to the new articles section of IP.Content 2.0. The promotion feature has several options to ensure that it is flexible enough to meet your needs. Firstly, as the administrator, you can control which user groups are allowed to use the feature. You can allow both copying and moving of posts to the articles section. When you allow copying of posts and a user clicks on the promote button, a new article will be posted as a copy of the post. When you allow moving of posts and a user uses the feature, instead of copying the post to the articles section, it will be moved (with the original post in the forum being deleted). You can optionally have a link left behind in the forums pointing to the new article. When a post is copied, this link is added to the end of the post. When a post is moved and a link is left behind, the post isn't actually removed, but rather replaced with the link to the new article. As the administrator, you can allow your users to specify whether to leave a link behind each time a post is promoted, or require that the link always be left behind. This new feature should help facilitate promotion of valuable content on your site, and help enable easier content discovery by your vistors, registered or otherwise. As the search engine industry often says, "content is king". The content on your site is its most valuable asset, and this feature helps you better manage that content, to ensure it is benefiting your site as best as possible. Before we move on, I would like to take a moment to mention that the articles section can also allow comments to be stored in the forums, just like your other databases. This new feature in IP.Content 2.0, discussed in a past blog entry, supports databases and articles alike. New default site By itself, we believe the new article section will help you better manage your site, and get you started using IP.Content quicker than ever. No longer will you need to manually create a database, create database templates, tweak them to suit your needs, add the database to a page, and so on. Instead, the articles section takes care of the majority of the legwork for you. So now that we've made everything easier to use from the outset, where can we go from there? Well, not content to sit back even for a moment, we have redesigned the default site that ships with IP.Content to better highlight some of the features of IP.Content 2.0. By default, you will have two "pages". One hosts the new articles section, while the other is a demo of another custom database: a media section, linking to various youtube videos. We feel that the new demo site better shows off many of the capabilities of IP.Content, so that you can better understand how to use the system. Some of the things the new default site shows off: Some default pages Some CSS "pages" Custom blocks holding variables An article category feed A "latest articles" feed A "latest article comments" feed A separate custom database The default site will also populate some basic content for the above areas so that it is not empty upon installation. We will not be inserting this default site for upgrading users (the expectation is that if you are upgrading, you're already familiar with the software and would only be deleting the default site content anyways), so we've decided to host a demo of the new default site so you can click around and see how it works. We will post some articles describing how we created some of these areas for you to benefit from near the release of IP.Content 2.0, in case you are curious how we accomplished certain functionality (such as the media database). Take a look for yourself! And with that said, head on over to our demo installation so you can take a look! This is an early look at the actual default site that will be presented with IP.Content 2.0 upon installation. We look forward to hearing your feedback, and we hope you are as excited as we are about the latest feature announcement for IP.Content 2.0. Overwhelmingly, the one thing our customers have requested for IP.Content 2.0 is a "true article system". We've listened, and a true article section is on its way. View full blog entry
