Charles

IPS is changing the name of our new IP.Commerce (as yet unreleased) application to IP.Nexus. We have received an exceptional amount of interest in this product to date and many have been a bit confused with the name. The major confusion lies in the fact that this application is not just an ecommerce application but also used for advertising, metrics, customer interaction, and more. So, we thought that a more generic name suited well and hope this will remove the "commerce-only" connection that the old name created. Also, there are many similarly named products out there that we wish to avoid confusion with. As the product has not yet been released this is the best time for such things. Note that all previous blog entries have been updated. Long-time IPS customers may be familiar with the IP.Nexus name as it was the name of a previous product (fairly similar to this one) that we decided not to release. We thought the nostalgia factor would be a great benefit to this new product. Thanks for your interest!

IPS has a fully featured community suite of products including forums, blogs, image galleries, file management, live chat, and content management. We felt the clear missing piece to this product line was an application that allowed you to monetize and promote your community. We are happy to introduce IP.Nexus to fill that space! The new IP.Nexus application is designed to help you earn money from your community both directly and indirectly. Direct options include features such as payment processing and shopping carts whereas indirect methods may be banner tracking and donations. Everyone here at IPS is very excited to introduce this new application and hope our customers will be able to take advantage of the variety of features in the product such as: Shopping cart functionality. Pre-defined packages and custom packages for purchase. Custom fields for package definition for great flexibility when creating packages to purchase. Purchase standalone items. Purchase packages to upgrade to a "higher" member group and automatic downgrades on expiration. Support ticket system including incoming email parsing. Community donation system with goal support. Ability to give members "credits" for commissions, awards, or other purposes. Credits can be used for future purchases or member can request a payout. Payout support included. Members can give out a referral link and can earn commission on sales that members they refer make. Multiple payment gateways including PayPal, Authorize.net, and offline payments. More gateways will be added based on feedback. Global search box on every page of IP.Nexus admin area to easily lookup customers, invoices, or support tickets. Stock actions/replies for support ticket system on admin side. Multiple status types for tickets. Ability to track tickets for future follow-ups. Upload banner images for display and tracking using IP.Board's ad management system. Customer overview page showing complete customer history, current orders, and options. Audit new transactions and purchase to catch fraud. Integration with IP.Downloads to handle purchasing of files. Support for sales commission in the IP.Downloads integration. Functions available for third-party developers to initiate payment processes in other applications. Payments are handled by IP.Nexus creating a central payment system. We are quite sure you will want to see it to believe it and, over the next few weeks, we will be posting individual blog entries going over the features listed above (and others) with screenshots and videos. Subscribe to the IPS Company Blog to get email updates when an entry is posted or subscribe to the Blog RSS feed. When will it be available? As always that's very hard to say. The good news is that every single feature listed here is already completed! We are not announcing a future product being worked on: we are announcing a product nearly done. In fact, IP.Nexus will be given to our internal beta testing team very soon. From there we will collect the feedback from you and integrate any features we missed. We expect a final release before the end of summer 2010 and beta releases within the next month. How much will it cost? No price has been set as yet but you can expect it to be priced similarly with our other applications. As is our tradition, we will offer a very good early-adopter discount price. What about Subscriptions Manager? We have a product, Subscriptions Manager, available for free for IP.Board that handles upgrading/downgrading member group permissions with paid packages. Nothing will change with this product and it will be available just as it is today. We will continue to make maintenance and compatibility releases. Those of you who are currently using Subscriptions Manager and may want to upgrade to IP.Nexus will be able to do so without data loss. I have a question, comment, cheer, or suggestion... Great! One reason we are announcing IP.Nexus now is to get feedback on how our customers may see themselves using a product such as this. We want to create a system you will want to use that suits your needs. Obviously handling the profit and promotion aspects of your community is something we are taking very seriously and we will be actively seeking your feedback on the best way to do this. You will notice comments are disabled on this blog entry as we do expect a lot of feedback so please use the newly created IP.Nexus feedback forum. Looking forward to hearing from everyone!

The first public beta release of IP.Board 3.1, applications, and related services is fast approaching. This blog entry will let you know what to expect and what you can do to help us in the process. We believe, as most other responsible software development companies do, that releasing beta versions is the best way to ensure that the software is as stable as it can be before a final, supported version is released. These beta releases are for testing purposes and allow our customers who are interested in testing them prior to release a chance to let us know what problems they may find so we can fix them before the software goes out to the many thousands of casual users all over the web. A beta release will always have issues with the software that need to be addressed so, as always, we do not suggest using beta software on your live site. Please do not use the beta software unless you are comfortable working with software that may have various issues that will need to be addressed in updates. Over the next two weeks you can expect to see public beta releases of the following: IP.Board 3.1 (see this announcement for a list of what's new) IP.Gallery 3.2.0 (maintenance release for IP.Board 3.1 compatibility and bug fixes) IP.Blog 2.2.0 (maintenance release for IP.Board 3.1 compatibility and bug fixes) IP.Downloads 2.2.0 (maintenance release for IP.Board 3.1 compatibility and bug fixes) IP.Content 2.0 (please see our blog to find info on what's new) IP.Chat 1.1.0 (please see our blog to find info on what's new) CleanCut Skin for IP.Board 3.1 MS-SQL Database Driver for IP.Board 3.1 and Applications As you can see, that is quite a list of new versions coming out so we will certainly appreciate everyone assisting with testing and reporting any issues you come across in our bug tracker. The announcement for these beta releases will be made here on our company blog so be sure to track or subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog. Beta versions will be available to those customers with an active license to those products. The announcements of each beta release in this blog will also contain information on what you should (and should not) do with the beta releases. We will also let you know if there will be upgrade options from Beta 1 to Beta 2 of the various products. Please (we beg of you) read those announcements very carefully before downloading the betas to save yourself time. Take this time between now and the beta releases to prepare your testing environments on your hosting and make backups of everything so you are ready to go on beta day. We are very exited to be entering the public beta phase as this means the final release is just around the corner!

The new mobile skin for IP.Board 3.1 is now available for viewing right here on our community! Just visit on a popular mobile device and the skin will load automatically. Separate Skin The mobile skin shows as a separate skin in your AdminCP so you can edit it as you see fit. Change the colors, put up your own logo, or even put in mobile ads to monetize your community. Support for Popular Mobile Devices IP.Board 3.1 has built in support for a list of many popular mobile devices. Keep in mind it's easy to add support for even more right in the AdminCP. Included with IP.Board 3.1 This new mobile skin is included for free with IP.Board 3.1 when it is released. It will install right along with the upgrade and be available for your members to enjoy. If you find any issues please report them to the bug tracker. Enjoy!

While not a particular interesting blog entry :) I wanted anyone interested to know that our demo service term has been extended from 24 to 48 hours. As always, you can email sales for a further extension if you might need more time. If you are considering using IP.Board now is a great time to get your proverbial feet wet on version 3.0.5 so you are ready as soon as the upcoming version 3.1 is released! If you have any questions, feel free to email [email protected] to speak to our sales staff or post in our pre-sales forum for friendly help from the community.

For those of you having issues posting a blog entry using IP.Blog with a year of 2010 a patch has been posted to fix these issues. Please see this post for patch information and instructions.

The beta testing for the new IP.Chat service is now open to all active IP.Board and IPS Community Hosting customers. For full information please read the topic in the IP.Chat forum.

O'Reilly Answers is a community site for sharing knowledge, asking questions, and providing answers. The site is powered by IP.Board using creative application of hooks and skinning logic. It also uses the IP.Board OpenID authentication for single-sign-on with O'Reilly. The site is a great demo of what you can do with the new software platform from IPS. Read the full announcement from O'Reilly From the O'Reilly announcement: Visit O'Reilly Answers

Origins of IPS offering hosting services IPS has always considered itself a services company above and beyond a traditional software company. Through the years we have always found ways of providing offerings to our clients from phone and ticket support all the way to our new spam monitoring service and upcoming chat service that extend our software beyond a standalone application. Soon after IPS was founded we started offering hosting services. We wanted to bring a complete experience to our customers who were interested in both using our software and the advantages of a managed hosting environment that went along with it. The response was immediate and, to this day, IPS hosting provides these great managed hosting approaches to communities. Over the years IPS grew and we decided it was necessary to stop renting servers from third-party providers. Not only would this reduce our operating costs but, by owning our own hardware, would offer us great flexibility for our service offerings. In 2006 we began leasing space in a quality data center in Reston, VA outside Washington DC and started the process of purchasing, configuring, and installing all the various hardware required. From servers and switches through our core routers and load balancers. Growth brings us to today It is now late-2009 and three years after we started, our data center facilities now include: Fully redundant, multi-honed 10 Gigabit connections to providers such as Level 3, Global Crossing, Nlayer, Savvis, and Cogent. Cisco 6509 core router Cisco 3500 distribution switches Foundry networks load balancing and failover equipment Internal and external network separated for fast backups and restores In addition to these capabilities, the facility in which we locate our equipment also features everything one would expect from backup power to high security entry requirements. Here are a few actual pictures of our racks and servers: (For those of you interested: The RES.S#### means "RESton" - with the servers at our backup facility starting with a different prefix plus - "S" for server (routers, switches, KVMs, etc. marked differently) and the number is the ID of that hardware. For example, if you're hosted on "server40" here at IPS, that's actually RES.S1048.) Managing our own network connections, network hardware, and server hardware has allowed IPS to provide everything from shared hosting to high-traffic, load balanced solutions. We have experience hosting everything from fun, hobby sites all the way to highly visible communities owned by corporations with tens of thousands of online users. Today we provided managed hosting and services for everyone from national sports teams to world-famous music artists. In addition to community hosting, operating our own facility allows IPS to offer additional services to enhance our software. Services like our spam monitoring service and upcoming chat service were made possible for free or low-cost to our customers by leveraging the resources available to us in our own facility. Enhancing our software by using our software Above all else the most important advantage of our own hosting facility is constant, first-hand knowledge of our software's operations. Because we host our own software on the order of thousands of installations the performance of the software is paramount. Our hosting staff and development staff constantly work together to target areas of the software needing optimization. We do not resort to the simple approach of telling customers to "add more server power" if they are experiencing performance issues as we know, first hand, how much traffic a server should be capable of handling using IPS software and can advise our customers accordingly. We run our own company forums on a simple VPS setup without any fancy optimizations like Sphinx search, memcache, and other specialized server software. By keeping the setup simple we can emulate what a customer would have on the average hosting provider and learn how to optimize our software in a normal environment. We certainly could implement multi-server clusters for our own company sites but we think it's important to use our software as others do and learn from that experience. Over the years, our hosting facilities have allowed us to grow our offerings and learn how to create a software platform that can scale with that growth. We will continue to leverage our unique position to develop software and host it all in one, managed environment. Those clients who choose not to host their community with IPS can always be assured that our constant monitoring and learning process will benefit them as well through our continued software updates.

We have added the ability for those that submit downloads to our community resources database to submit blog entries on the community resources blog. This new feature will allow resource authors a great place to update users on their work and promote new features or updates. We hope resource authors will take advantage of this new option to reach out to fans of your offerings. You can find the link to submit an entry on the community resources home page. If you are interested in resources for IPS software, don't forget to track (requires account on IPS forums) the community resources blog or subscribe to its RSS feeds for updates. Also have a look around the community resources section of our site for articles, ideas, and more for your IPS-powered communities!

bbAuthority.com has posted an interview with Matt Mecham, CSA and Chairman of IPS: http://www.bbauthority.com/interviews/interview-with-matt-mecham-founder-of-ipb

The CleanCut skin has been updated on our company forums and in the client area under: Downloads / IP.Board / Development Releases This version will work with 3.0.4 of IP.Board. We hope you enjoy!

Good news: Our demo system has been upgraded to IP.Board 3.0.4 and IP.Content 1.1.0 and the standard time for a demo increased from 8 to 24 hours. Feel free to create an account to have a look. As always, certain functions do not work on the demo system for security and other general oddities can pop up because of the restrictions. Of course you will not have such issues on a real install of our software. Temporary bad news: The demo system has been completely overloaded the past few days. We have to limit the number of accounts on the system just because of simple storage space and resources. If you get the "system full" message just check later - accounts are constantly cycled off the system as they expire.

We have created a new directory for sites that provide custom skin design and/or programming services for IPS products. Custom Services Directory If you provide custom skin design or programming services for IPS products please submit your site or service today. It's a great way to increase your business and get more referrals directly from IPS!

We've been hard at work on the next version of our Community Content System which we have formally renamed to IP.Content. There are many exciting new capabilities with the latest version of IP.Content that we think you will like. For the most part, our efforts into 1.1.0 have centered around one new major feature: custom databases. In IP.Content 1.1 you will be able to create an unlimited number of custom databases from within your admin control panel, allowing you to easily organize and manage your data using IP.Content. For instance, let's say you run a site about pets. You might want to create a database that contains records about all the different breeds of dogs out there, another database that contains records about all the different breeds of cats, and then yet another database that users can submit to in order to share information about their own pets. The first two databases you may only want administrators to add records to, and you may want to order by breed name, while the last database you want users to submit records to, and you may want to order by date the records were added to the database. IP.Content 1.1.0 can easily manage all of this. When you create your custom databases you can decide which permission masks can see and view the database, who can add and edit records within the database, and who can rate records and comment on records within the database. Commenting and rating functionality is built in (if you enable it for the database). You can set whether users can submit to a database (or you can set a database so that only administrators can submit to it), and you can even set a database to be editable in a wiki-like manner (i.e. any user can edit any record within the database). You control the default sorting and ordering options for the database, and you control whether records and comments should require moderator approval before becoming publicly visible on a per-database level. You can also enable revisions for records within a database (that is, when users edit the records a backup of the copy they edited is saved in case you need to review it later, compare it to the current version of the record, or restore an older copy of the record). After creating a database, you then create each field within the database yourself. IP.Content 1.1.0 supports the following field types: text input, textarea, radio buttons, checkboxes, select lists, multi-select lists, date input (i.e. an input field with a calendar overlay to select the date), WYSIWYG editor areas, and attachments. There are a few limitations on how many and which fields you can add (for instance, you can have as many WYSIWYG fields as you want, but you may only add one attachments field per database), but for the most part the number of fields and specific configuration is up to you. The field types framework is extensible, so developers can easily add new field types in the future simply by uploading a single file to a specific directory. You can create unlimited categories and subcategories on a per-database level as well. Note, however, that you are not required to create and use categories should you not need to. When creating categories, you can opt to simply honor the database's permission settings, or extend those permissions - that way you can have some categories that are available to all users, and some categories that are only available to VIP members, or staff members, for example. You also control moderators on a per-database level, with support for both member and group moderators available. You can control whether moderators can approve records, approve comments, edit records, delete records, delete comments, pin/unpin records, lock records, and unlock records. This leads us into how records are handled and the functionality available for them. You can add, edit, delete, approve/unapprove, pin/unpin, lock/unlock, sort and search for records all within the ACP if you like. Full ACP management is available in 1.1.0. You can also manage comments for records within the ACP, allowing you to view, edit and delete the comments without having to view the record on the public side. Additionally, you can view all revisions of a record, and even run comparison reports to see exactly what has changed between each revision if you wish. You can restore a specific revision at any time, should you have a need. From the front end, users with appropriate permission can add and edit records as well. Users can also rate each record, and even comment on the records, if the features are enabled and the proper permissions are set. Sorting and filtering from within CCS is fully supported, allowing users to control the order of results, how many are listed per page, and allowing users to search through those results to return more relevant results. Users with appropriate moderator permissions can delete, approve/unapprove, pin/unpin, lock/unlock records, and delete and approve/unapprove comments from the front end as well. Navigation support is built in, and databases can be embedded into any new or existing page, allowing you full control over the layout of the entire page. Plugin callback functionality is also possible, allowing you to write your own custom code to extend certain database actions (on a per-database level) should you need to. Additionally, "item marking" support is built into IP.Content 1.1.0, allowing your users to easily see which categories have new information they haven't yet read, and easily identify the articles within the listing that haven't been viewed yet. The category view, listing view, and record display templates can be shared across all databases, or can be customized on a per-database level, allowing you fine-grained control over how your content is displayed to users. We've recently moved over our resource site into the new IP.Content 1.1.0 framework here at http://community.invisionpower.com/resources. You can see a live demo of the new features by browsing our custom databases. Articles Our articles section, which contains user submitted tips and documentation, highlights many of the capabilities of IP.Content 1.1.0. Wiki-style editing (and revisioning) is enabled, allowing users to self-manage a repository of information for other users to take advantage of. Commenting and rating is also enabled for the articles, and a category structure including subcategories is utilized to help organize the information. Articles use stock templates, giving you an idea of how content will be displayed if you do not customize the default database templates. Links The links section displays customer-submitted links that users can visit. The links section also uses categories to organize data, and also supports commenting and rating. Only the original submitter (and moderators) can edit records, however. Custom templates are utilized to make the links database look a little more unique, compared to the other databases. Error Codes Our error codes database lists all of the known error codes that can be generated by IPB (and the first party addons such as Gallery and Blog). Similar to the Articles database, stock templates are used, however commenting and rating are disabled. While the articles database orders articles by "last updated date", the error codes database orders records by the error code itself. Guides and Tutorials This database of official IPS guides and tutorials houses official documentation that we at IPS have written and will maintain. Customized templates are used to control the output, and ratings and comments are enabled. (If you are familiar with SQL already, consider a "database" in IP.Content to essentially be a "table", while "fields" are "columns" within the table, and "records" are "rows" within the table.) As you can see, the features new to IP.Content 1.1.0 can allow you to greatly extend and much more easily control custom data on your website. Users can practically create entire applications through a few clicks in the ACP, giving you a lot of power. We are excited about this new functionality, and can't wait to see how our customers make use of it. While the first release of IP.Content focused largely on static content (allowing dynamic content through custom PHP code), IP.Content 1.1 focuses on the dynamic features that many users need to manage their websites.

We have made two sections of resources available on our site: Official and Community. Official Resources These are resources made by IPS staff and include everything from getting started guides to developer documentation. We are still populating our database of documentation and appreciate your feedback on what sort of information you might be looking for. What seems easy to IPS staff can often be confusing to those not living our products daily as we are so please speak up regarding specific areas you need to have better documentation. Thanks! Community Resources Made by the community of IPS customers and include tips, skins, hooks, applications, and more. There is a great number of interesting articles and fun downloads to choose from there. Try one our or submit your own. Visit: Customers Resources