Marc Stridgen

Moving your site to another server / Server Transfer is a relatively simple task with regards to the way in which your software works. In order to do this, you would follow the process below. Step 1 - Your old hosting Switch your site offline ready for transfer to your new server Make a full backup of your database. Make a full backup of your files and folders. Step 2 - Your new hosting Create a new database Restore your backup from the above steps to the new database you have just created Upload your files and folder, which you backed up from your old server Ensure any folders which should be writable, remain writable on your new server. The folders which should be writable by the software are as follows applications datastore plugins uploads recursively (all contents) Step 3 - Software configuration Open your conf_global.php file, which can be found at the root of your installations folder on the new server. In here you will need to edit the mysql username, password, and database name, to match the new database you have set up and restored to. Log into your admin control panel and run through the support tools by visiting System>Support>Support, and selecting "something isnt working correctly". You will need to select next only until it states cache has been cleared. Other considerations If you have also changed the URL of your site, or the folder in which your site will be in (for example moved it from a subfolder into root), then you will also need to change the site URL within your conf_global.php file. You should do this prior to running the support tool in the steps above. If you have a constants.php file (not all configurations will have this), then please ensure that you check any paths which may be present within this file as they will likely need to be updated. If you are using .htaccess for friendly url rewrites you may also need to adjust the path in the .htaccess file or download a new one from the admincp > Search Engine Optimization > Friendly URL sub-tab. ----------------------- Test installations Creating a test installation would be the same process as above, however you would be copying, rather than moving the software. You would need to ensure you have changed your URL within your conf_global.php file as described above. In addition, you need to ensure you change to your test license key from the following location system>settings>license key Your test key, would be your current license key, suffixed with -TESTINSTALL . So for example, if you have a license key of the following 000-000-000 then your test key would be 000-000-000 -TESTINSTALL All test installations should be protected by htaccess, and not available to the public, as per your license agreement.

There may come a point after the installation of your product, that you wish to purchase another part of the IPS community suite. The following instructions will show you how to do this. Purchasing a new product Purchasing a new product for your suite can be done directly from your client area, in the following manner Log into the client area, using your client credentials Go to the "Manage purchases" tab Select the license in which you would like to add the new application Select "Manage your community" From this page you can add any product you have not already purchased for that license. In addition, you can purchase any extras from that area, such as priority support, copyright removal, or even an increate in your chatroom limit. Once selected, you will be given the option to pay for the new product in the top right, as seen below. Applications Page Adding a newly purchased application If you have purchased a new application, you then need to add this to your community suite. In order to do this, you would do the following. Download a fresh set of files from your client area. If you are unsure on how to do this, please see the following guide which will show you how to get this. https://invisioncommunity.com/4guides/welcome/install-and-upgrade-r259/ Unpack, and uploads the files. Do not delete any existing files, however please do overwrite where there are files that already exist on the server. You may find this guide helpful if you are unsure on this https://invisioncommunity.com/4guides/welcome/install-and-upgrade-r259/ Log into your admin CP, and visit "System>Site Features>Applications". From here you will see that you can install your new application, using the install button provided. For example here, we will install the gallery application, using the + icon shown. Installing an Application

Within the downloads system, you can allow using URLs for download submission, and also link things directly from your file system. If you edit any of your groups, and select the downloads tab, you will see a series of options which can select on a group by group basis. Submission Permissions Charging for files If you have a license for the commerce application, you can allow users to charge for files. This is similar to how it is used within the marketplace on our own site. You can see more information on this in the following guide Can submit multiple files at once? People without this setting, will only be able to upload single files at a time. Can submit URLs? This option will allow for people to use a URL to a file, rather than uploading a file. Note that people can only link to an external URL, if that setting is allowed within the main Downloads settings. Can import files from the filesystem? This will allow linking to files which are already uploaded somewhere onto the server, using your servers internal filesystem. Note that you should only ever enable this for trusted groups such as staff groups. When additional ways of submitting files, such as URL and filesystem, are allowed. The user will see further options above the upload window that can be selected to use these options, as shown in the screenshot below. Submission Screen

Often when you are reading a topic, comments, or other posts, you will see team members replying. Although IPS Community Suite already allows groups to set up custom images and member titles, these replies can get lost in the noise. Within IPS4, you can switch on post highlighting per member group. This makes sure the reply stands out from the rest of the replies, as shown in the images below. Highlighted Post Of course, this feature works everywhere; from calendar comments to article replies. Highlighted Calendar Comment The feature is switched on via the Group form in the ACP. You can get to this from Members>Members>Groups, and editing the group you wish to highlight. This can be fount on the content tab. Group Highlighting Option Settings for the color of highlighted posts, can be found within your themes settings in customization>Appearance>Themes, by editing the relevant theme, and editing the 2 settings shown below, in the "front end colors" tab. Highlighted Post Theme Settings We have also ensured that theme designers can get the most out of the system by embedding a data attribute noting the group of the author. This means that you can add custom CSS to use different colours per member group. We think post highlighting will be a simple way to bring attention to member posts in groups that you define.

About caching With todays emphasis on speed being important to people when browsing websites, it can often be of benefit to add caching services to your site once your site increases in size. IPS4 is no exception to this, and we have therefore added the ability to use the redis caching method, which may be available to you on your hosting environment. Before setting up any caching, we advise you consult with your hosting company to see which is best suited to your particular environment . Setting up You can switch on any of these that are available on your server, by visiting the following location in your ACP System -> Settings -> Advanced Configuration -> Data Storage From here you can set up Redis, if available on your server configuration. If this is not detected by PHP will not be selectable. If you believe it should be available for use, you will need to contact your hosting company. Cache settings Once you have selected a caching method, and filled in any relevant options for that method, you will be asked to download a new constants.php file, which must be uploaded to the location in which your installation resides. Using sockets You may be given a socket by your hosting company for items such as redis, rather than an address in some cases. If this is the case, you would enter that socket address into the 'servers' section, and set any port to 0 where there is a port field to enter.

It may be handy at times, to be able to add some of the blocks you see in pages, or even your own custom blocks, into external webpages. Within IPS4 we give you the ability to choose any block to embed externally directly from the admin CP. In order to embed one of your blocks on an external page. First log into your admin CP and visit Pages>Page Management>Blocks. Once you are in here, select the dropdown box next to the block you wish to embed externally, and select "External embed" Selection Menu Once you have selected this, you will be presented with a screen similar to the below. Embed Text Copy the code into the relevant areas of your own website code to embed the block. Note that there is a checkbox to "Inherit key styles from parent page". If this is selected, then the styling of the block will also be brought across. If not, then you would need to style the block from your own websites code.

When a new version of the software is released, there will inevitably be changes to the default templates in which would need to be replicated in your own custom themes. On an upgrade, only unedited templates would be upgraded automatically, and therefore this would be for yourself to upgrade any templates which cannot be upgraded. There are a couple of tools available for you in order to achieve this. Each of which is explained below. Theme differences The theme differences tool is an external tool which can be found in the following location on our site https://invisionpower.com/index.php?app=core&module=system&controller=plugins&do=diff This tool will allow you to see the differences between any 2 versions of the 4.x software, from 4.0.0 right up to the current version. Once you have selected the versions to compare, you will then be shown all changes between templates on the 2 versions in which you selected in a similar format to the below. Red showing what has been removed, and the green showing what was added Comparing within the admin CP Whilst within a template in your custom theme, you can compare that to the default, unedited version of the same template directly from the admin CP. First of all, you would take a look to see which items within your custom theme have been modified. You can do this using the selection menu at the top of the template list, to select only modified templates. This will enable you to quickly find all templates that you may need to look at after an upgrade. Once you have found and opened a template that you are working on, you will see a tools button in the top right of the screen. Clicking on this will show an option for you show the default. Tip If you simply need to change the template to be that of the default template, you can use the Revert button, also shown in the image below, to achieve this. Once you have selected this, you will see the default template is placed alongside, with any changes to the default indicated, as shown below. Note that you can edit directly on the right hand side to make any changes needed.

Date formats in IPS 4 can be formatted and translated by changing language strings to any format you wish to show them in. You can find date related strings prefixed with _date within your language pack. If you are unsure on how to manually translate language strings, you will need to read the following guide first of all Language strings are made up of separate elements relating to the day, month, and year. In this example I will be editing the language string _date_last_year_long . The default for this is as follows, which I will explain in parts {!1#[1:January][2:February][3:March][4:April][5:May][6:June][7:July][8:August][9:September][10:October][11:November][12:December]} {0#} %s Re-formatting To explain this I have colorized the relevant items within the language string we are using as an example {!1#[1:January][2:February][3:March][4:April][5:May][6:June][7:July][8:August][9:September][10:October][11:November][12:December]} {0#} %s In this example we have 3 parts, and I will explain this showing March 1 2016 RED - This is the simplest of the 3 sections, as you can see the months clearly. This is the "March" month part of the string above BLUE - This is the day part of the string, in this case simply the number 1. PURPLE - This represents the year part of the above date, being 2016 As you can see here, you can quite simply rearrange the above by changing the order in which the parts are set within your language string. So if we wanted to switch this to "1 March 2016" we would re-arranged as follows. Again colorized to emphasize the individual parts. {0#} {!1#[1:January][2:February][3:March][4:April][5:May][6:June][7:July][8:August][9:September][10:October][11:November][12:December]} %s Tip You will note before the months that there is a "{!1#" displayed. This means that it will not display the numbers in that section, so will only show February for the language string part, rather than showing the number 2 Note: Some dates are controlled by the locale set within your language pack. You can edit this from Customization>Localization>Languages, by selecting the edit button on your language pack

There will be times when topics and replies can become quite large in nature. They may contain BBCode and other elements which cannot be seen in the editor at the time of writing. In addition you may want to see how your topic/post/other looks on a mobile or tablet. For this purpose we have introduced a post preview button for the editor, which will allow for quick and easy previewing of posts. Previewing content You will see in the image below, I have created a small post using some old BBCode tags. Preview Button Clicking on the icon provided for post preview. This will allow me to see how it will look on desktop, mobile, and tablet views. Giving me an easy way to see how it looks on each. You can use the x in the corner to close the window and return to the editor. Previewing Content Cant see the preview button? If you cannot see the preview button within your editor, then you may have upgraded from an earlier version and had already. You will need to add this using the toolbar editor within your admin CP. If you are unsure on how to add new buttons to your toolbar, you can see the guide referenced below, which will show you how to do this.

Installing Note that on our cloud services we install Invision Community for you so this entire section on installing may be skipped. Applies to self-hosted customers only Installing Invision Community on your server is very easy. Just follow these steps: Ensure your server meets the system requirements. Download our compatibility checker. Download the latest version from the client area by selecting Manage Purchases then your purchased license. Unzip the download and upload the contents to your server in the directory where you want your Community to run. Simple visit /admin/install in your browser from that directory where you uploaded. At this point the installer will make sure all your directory permissions are correct and prompt you to correct any issues. You will then be asked for your MySQL database issues and various other information the system may need to proceed. Your license key can be found on the same page in the client area where you downloaded the software. Test Install Your self-hosted license allows you to have one live installation (your actual community) and one test installation. We also allow an unlimited number of installations on "localhost" domains so you can test locally without restriction. If you are installing on a test install, enter your license key with -TESTINSTALL on the end. If you are installing on localhost (it must be "localhost" specifically, not "127.0.0.1" or any other alias), this will not count towards either of your installations, however, if you are installing on any other domain, it will count as your test installation. This means that if you already have a test installation at a different URL, you will receive an error message that says "A test installation has already been activated for this license key. Your license key entitles you to one test installation only." There are three ways to overcome this: 1. You can delete your current test installation and reinstall at the same URL. For example, if your Test URL (as shown in the client area) is "example.com/test", you can install at example.com/test (meaning of course you'll have to delete whatever is there first) and you will not get the error message. 2. You can install on a localhost installation: localhost installations do not count towards your allowed usages. 3. Test installs are a one time url, so you should use a sub domain of your live site as an example, so in the future if you need to test a new server or setup, you can adjust your DNS to point that sub domain anywhere as needed. Automatic Upgrade When you see an upgrade is available you can simple follow the steps in the AdminCP to initiate an automatic upgrade. Always be sure to read the release notes so you are aware what has changed in the new version. The basic steps of an automatic upgrade are as follows: When you see an alert that an upgrade is available click to proceed to upgrade system. Enter the email and password you use for the client area on our site (where you purchased your service) not your AdminCP login. The system will then fetch needed files, scan your install for any issues, and redirect you to the upgrade system. From there just follow through the upgrade prompts until it confirms upgrade is complete. During the upgrade process your Community will show an offline message stating that an upgrade is in progress. Applies to self-hosted customers only The automatic upgrade process assumes that it can write files to your local system. If it cannot it may prompt you for FTP/SCP logins to attempt a remote upload of files. Sometimes both of these automated methods may fail for various, technical reasons and you will need to use the manual upgrade process. Manual Upgrade Simply login to the client area and download a full package of software, much like you would if doing a fresh install, and unzip the archive to your computer. It will create a folder named "ips_xxxxx" where xxxxx is a random string of characters. Then use an FTP client such as Filezilla and upload the contents of the ips_xxxxx folder (not the folder itself) to your forum main directory, overwriting when prompted and making sure all files transfer without error. You will then go to your site and /admin/upgrade such as example.com/admin/upgrade and login with your AdminCP credentials. The upgrade system will scan you install to confirm that all files are up to date before proceeding. If it reports any are wrong then be sure you uploaded all files properly. In 4.3 and higher, when logging into the upgrader, you will need to use an email address / display name and password using the standard, internal login handler. If you normally use a different method for logging into your community, you can bypass logging into the upgrader by adding this line to constants.php: define( 'BYPASS_UPGRADER_LOGIN', TRUE ); 4.5 Upgrades and the Marketplace Starting at version 4.5, we introduced a new Marketplace feature directly into the AdminCP area of your site. When upgrading from a prior version for the first time, you will be required to match up your existing 3rd party applications and plugins to the marketplace items, so that the system knows which marketplace applications they are for upgrades. After upgrading, you will see a notification within your dashboard, that you need to set up the marketplace Setup notification Once selected, you will see a list of your applications. Each of these needs to be matched up using the tools provided on the right of each. The system will try to automatically match these where possible, but you must confirm they are correct. Go through each step to do the same for plugins, themes and languages Onboarding Screen If you wish to see more about the 4.5 marketplace, you can see this in the following guide Install Apps and Plugins You can download third party applications from our Marketplace or other source and install them your community. Just visit Applications or Plugins to do this. You can also upload new versions and upgrade if the author provides updates. Applies to self-hosted customers only Adding an Invision Community Application Does not apply to cloud Community as all apps are automatically installed. You may decide to add on new Invision Community applications after you initially setup your Community to expand the capabilities. To do this, simply download the full zip from the client area, upload all files, and then go to Applications. At the bottom of that page you will see a list of available but not installed applications. Just click the application you want to install. Unsupported Legacy upgrades to Invision Community If you are upgrading from IP.Board or below to Invision Community 4, there are special considerations you should take. Support We do not provide support for IP.Board product (3.x downward) product in any way. This guide is provided purely as a knowledgebase article on how you would go about this, should you wish to attempt to do so. If you feel you may require assistance, please take a look at the providers section, where you may find 3rd parties who offer this service. A direct link to this can be found here https://invisioncommunity.com/third-party/providers/ IP.Board 3.x An unmaintained upgrade path from 3.x is available for use directly from invision community using the above mentioned manual upgrade path. 3.x items that are not compatible with 4.x: Skins Skin images Third party hooks Third party applications Languages All base data, including: members, forums, topics, posts, etc. will remain intact and upgrade to Invision Community Backups Please ensure that you have a full backup of your database and file system your community prior to upgrading. Requirements for Invision Community You may wish to use our requirements checker to be sure your server supports our software before proceeding. IMPORTANT: Upgrades to PHP and MySQL that show in the requirements checker must be done prior to upgrade. You need to be aware once you upgrade these, your 3.4 installation will not work. This is because 3.4 is not compatible with the latest versions of PHP and MySQL, and is nothing to worry about. Just continue with uploading the 4.x files, and running the upgrade as normal. UTF8 Requirements Invision Community requires UTF8 when upgrading, if your current database is not UTF8, during the first steps of the upgrade process, you will be prompted to run a UTF8 conversion, this is all built into the upgrader and works very well. Once this step is completed, you will be taken back to the upgrade routine. Checking URL's and storage paths prior to upgrading It's important to check your urls and upload paths in your admincp on 3.x prior to upgrading, for example if you have more than one url parked on your hosting configuration, the upload paths and urls should only match your current url of the site. User / Display Names Usernames and display names have been merged in Invision Community. As the administrator, you may select which to keep during the upgrade process. Please note that this field will be the publicly displayed field for the user. Friends / Followers Instead of friends, Invision Community features followers. A member now has the ability to follow another member without that being automatically reciprocal. You have the option of converting friends to followers. Question and Answer Forums Previous versions of the software allowed enabling of "Mark as Solved" on a per-forum basis. Invision Community enhances this functionality by allowing members to ask questions and rate their answers. Validating Group When upgrading to Invision Community, the validating group is merged into the members group with a "Validating Flag" these users will be prompted to validate their account or continue as a guest on the forum until they do so, using the guest group permission set. IP.content > Pages Upgrading ip.content to pages will upgrade your ip.content database, and content to the new Pages Application, however all blocks and templates will need to be re-created in IPS4 after the upgrade. Moderator CP - Deleted Content If you have any items in the deleted content before upgrading, these items will be removed on upgrading to Invision Community, so in some cases you may have this set to a long period before it's actually deleted, if so, and you need these items, restore them before upgrading. This is not common and in Invision Community when you delete an item, it's deleted instantly, so there is no "removed content" section in the modcp anymore. IP Board 2.x There is no direct upgrade path from 2.x to our latest products. However you may find a 3rd party who can do this. Please take a look at the providers section, where you may find 3rd parties who offer this service. A direct link to this can be found here https://invisioncommunity.com/third-party/providers/

While installing your IPS Community Suite, you will be given the opportunity to choose your default application. However, we realize you may not know at that point in time, or indeed change your mind on what you want the default application for your suite to be. What is your default application? In a nutshell, your default application is what your user sees when they visit your sites main URL. So for example, if you set this up as gallery, then the first thing that people will see on your site would be the gallery home page. Setting your default You set up a default application from your applications section within the admin CP. This can be found at System>Site Features>Applications, and will look similar to the following. Applications Screen In the above image you will see one of the stars is selected on the right. This is what denotes the default application on your site. You can select any of the star icons to change the default application. Module Defaults Each application is built up of modules. For most, you may only see one module under that application. For example, the forums application only contains a single forums module. In some application such as commerce and system, you will see more than one. For example, you may wish to set commerce as your default application and have the subscriptions module as the default module to be viewed when commerce is visited. You will note you can set up the system application as the default application, but then what would that show? If you expand the system application, you will see that you can also set a default module. In the example below, I have set this to be the status updates page. Application Modules

Whilst the IPS4 product provides most of the functionality that you will need, there may be niche items that you would like to add to your site. This means there are times you will want to add 3rd party content, created by external developers, to your site. Applications will generally add new areas to your site, while plugins will tend more to add to existing areas on your site. Warning 3rd Party applications and plugins are not supported by IPS and are used at your own risk. Uploading 3rd Party Items Applications To add a 3rd party application you have downloded, you will need to visit "System>Site Features>Applications" in your admin CP. From here you will be able to select the install button to install a new application. If you already know that you have the application and you are looking to upgrade, you will need to select to upgrade in the menu next to the application you are upgrading. (Note this relates to 3rd party items only) In the popup that you are given, you will select the tar file from the application that you have downloaded. Warning These are basic guides to installing and upgrading 3rd party applications. Always ensure that you follow the instructions of the applications developer when installing 3rd party products. Plugins To add a 3rd party plugins you have downloded, you will need to visit "System>Site Features>Plugins" i your admin CP. From here you will be able to select the install button to install a new plugin or select the upgrade button to upgrade an existing plugin Once you have selected one of these items, you will then need to select the xml file that you downloaded which will install your plugin. Warning These are basic guides to installing and upgrading 3rd party plugins. Always ensure that you follow the instructions of the applications developer when installing 3rd party products. 3rd party items are not supported by IPS.

In addition to the standard features of the suite, Invision Community Suite provides a variety of ways in which to add enhancements to your platform, and indeed customisazations from 3rd party providers. For example adding giphy support, or adding google map support for your calendars. Community Enhancements Community Enhancements are items which are provided by the suite as standard, to allow you to integrate into external items. You can see and add these in the following location. System -> Site Features -> Community Enhancements Once in this location you will see a screen similar to the below. You can enable and configure these using the links provided. Community Enhancements 3rd Party Enhancements At times, you may wish to add something to your site, which is not provided by the IPS platform. For this, you may add 3rd party items from our marketplace, or even write your own if you are a developer yourself.

Within IPS 4 you can use an external database as a login handler. You would do this from the following location in your admin CP System>Settings>Login & Registration From here you can then set up the relevant details needed for connection Database Connection Details In the first section you will need to enter all the details to connect to your mysql data. Ensure these details are 100% connect and can be connected to from the server where your IPS installation is located. Connection Details Schema Information This is where you will set up the information related to where your users are located. You will need to provide the Table and at minimum either an email address or username column. You can of course use both if you are using both methods of login. You will need to add in the password column and tell the system how this password is stored. If this is encrypted you will need to ensure you provide the correct Encryption type. There is also an additional clause which will allow you to add to the end of the query which returns users. So for example, you may have users who you do not want to have access and have a column named 'active'. This will allow you to add active=1 and it will add to the end of the sql statement 'WHERE active=1" Schema Details Login Settings You will need to set up which authentication type is being used, and whether or not to allow Admin CP login with this method. Account Management Finally, there are various options available to determine what happens in various situations, such as changes are made on the local account to a display name or email address. Account Management

After purchasing your cloud community, or anytime you would like to change your domain or sub domain of your cloud account, you can see the below steps. Our cloud communities only support a Root domain (domain.com) or a sub domain (sub.domain.com) so one of these options would be your choice on selecting a url. (We do not support a sub folder of something like domain.com/mycommunity) 1. Using a root domain a. Set your name servers to the following, (this will use our DNS system for your domain, so if you have any other records that are needed for Email or other sub domains, please do provide these other records on your support ticket in step b. and we can add them for you). ns1.invisioncic.com ns2.invisioncic.com ns3.invisioncic.com ns4.invisioncic.com This can be done at the site that you used to register the domain name (domain registrar.) If you have any questions about this change or how to carry it out, please contact the domain registrar for further assistance. b. Submit a support ticket in the client area, letting us know you would like to use your own root domain, please provide the name of the domain, and let us know that you have already set your name servers as in step a. above. 2. Using a Sub Domain a. Submit a support ticket in the client area, letting us know the name of your sub domain you would like to use for your cloud community. At this time we will provide you with two CNAME's that will need to be created at your DNS. Here is an example below. b. If you selected the following sub domain, community.mydomain.com the records we will provide will look something like below, this will be different for each site/url, so these are only examples (do not use them for your site) This first CNAME directs your url to the proper path/url in our system. community CNAME s54107.tryinvision.com. The second CNAME we will provide will be for our auto approval of our SSL Certificate, this is needed at generation of the certificate and also needs to remain in place for the Certificate to auto renew. (this is an auto generated url that will vary for each url) _2a3d95a4f7479c8de59adc0d585ba6eb.community CNAME _13c01faf855f4afc0a6598e8d835d347.auiqqraehs.acm-validations.aws. Here are some examples on how these are entered at your DNS. cPanel Example One > + CNAME Record cPanel Example Two Directadmin Example One Directadmin Example Two AWS Example After creating the CNAME's then reply to the ticket letting us know you are ready to go, at that time we will generate the SSL certificate and apply the url and SSL to your community.

S3 is a reliable, scalable cloud storage service provided by Amazons AWS platform. Using AWS, for some, may be a cost effective and faster way to store data outside of your usual hosting environment. The following guide shows how to set up S3, alongside your Invision Community setup. Note that this guide is correct at the time of writing, and screens may vary from time to time on the AWS console. If you have not set one up already, please first of all ensure you have created an amazon AWS account. You can do this at the following location. (If asked, please ensure you select to use the new management console) https://portal.aws.amazon.com/gp/aws/developer/registration/index.html Creating an S3 bucket When you first log into AWS, you will need to add an S3 storage service to your account. Using the search box provided, type in S3, and select the S3 service Finding S3 in AWS Once you have selected the S3 service, you will be able to create a new S3 'Bucket'. A bucket is simply an area where you will store your data, within the S3 service. Click on create bucket to get started with its creation. Create a New Bucket On the first screen you will be asked for a bucket name, and a region. Choose the region which is closest to the majority of your users, and give your bucket a name. The name can be anything you wish. In this example I have used 'myinvisionbucket' Choosing Name and Region Once you have added the name and chosen your name, select "ACLs enabled", as this is required for the invision applications to function correctly. Enabling ACLs As your items are Accessible on the web, you need to enable public access. Deselect the blocking options, as shown here, and select the checkbox to confirm Ensuring Public Access Finally, select "Create bucket" to create the new S3 bucket you will be using on your site Creating Credentials Before we can go ahead an set up the storage method in our admin CP, we need to create a set of credentials to use with the S3 bucket. In order to do this, you need to visit the Identity and Access Management (IAM) settings page of your AWS account. You can find a direct link to this here https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/ Once here, we need to first create a group which has full access to your S3 location. Select Access Management -> Groups from the menu on the left. Then Click on "Create New Group" Creating a Group Give it a group name, and then click next step. You will then be given a list of items to select from. Search for S3, click the checkbox at the side of "AmazonS3FullAccess" and click next. Policy Selection You can now click on create group, which will take you back to the first page. On the left, you now need to click on users, and click "Add User" Create User Give the user a name, select "Acccess Key ID - Programmatic Access" then click "Next: Permissions" User Setup Screen On the next screen you will see the name of the group you previously created. Select Group Click the checkbox for this and Click "Next: Tags", then "Next: Review" and finally "Create User" Here you can see your Access ID, and Secret Access Key (click show). Copy these out somewhere so that you have these in the next steps. Setting the storage method In order to set up the new storage method, visit the following location within your Admin CP System -> Overview -> Files -> Storage Settings -> Configurations Once in this location, select to create a new storage method Creating New Storage Method Once you have done this, select "Amazon S3" from the storage method options at the top of the page. We then need to set up an access key and add the information into your Admin CP as we go. The items in the image below are numbered corresponding to the descriptions below Storage Method Options The first item you need to add is a bucket name. This is the Bucket Name you used in the first step of this guide. In our example case, we used myinvisionbucket. The endpoint will be different depending on what you have set up as your region in previous steps. The link below this item will take you to the AWS help guides where you can find the end point name. First of all find this in the list. I have used Europe (Ireland), and therefore I need eu-west-1 for part of my endpoint URL The 'Endpoint' you will enter is the following, where {yourRegion} is replaced with the region name you got above. s3.{yourRegion}.amazonaws.com So in our scenario, we will be using s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com The 3rd and final part of setting up the storage method, is to enter the access key and secret. These are the values you copied from creating your user in the previous stage of this guide. Choosing what to store Now that you have created a new storage method connected to your S3 bucket, you can choose what you wish to store in amazon S3. Go to the following location to do this System -> Overview -> Files -> Storage Settings From here, use the dropdown on any of the items to change the storage method to your amazon S3 bucket. If there are items which exist already, a background task will be created to move these to the new location. Changing Storage Method

Creating calendar events is quite a simple process, yet also feature rich. Below shows the basic creation tools available for creating events within your calendars How to create an event You can create a new calendar entry by selecting the "Create Event" button as shown in the image below Click to Create Once selected, you will be shown the Event creation screen. Fill in the relevant details for your event within the form provided to create your event. Some of the finer elements of this page are discussed below. Basic event creation Timezones You may also notice in the bottom left, you can select a timezone. This is handy if you have an event going on in another part of the world, and you are not currently in that location. You can change this so it shows correctly to the correct people. Using correct timezones Repeating Events You will see you can select "This event repeats" in the checkbox above. This will show you options to repeat an event. As you can see in the image below, this can be quite powerful and you can create these in many different ways. Save time by repeating events Event Locations You can optionally add the location of the event and an album which shows images of the event. When adding the location it will show a handy map of the location in which the event is located. Set venues may also be set up within your ACP if you have specific locations which are used on a repeated basis You can also allow people to RSVP the event to say whether or not they are attending. Enter the location to show this on your event Adding a location will show a map to the event location. Note you must ensure you enable mapping for this functionality Maps will be shown of the location if mapping is enabled Similar Events If an event has been done in the past, you can save time by selecting to create a similar event from an old event. Within each calendar event, you will see a button to create a similar event. This will pre-populate the details in event creation, with those same details. Add a similar event

There are various over all settings on the calendar application that you can set up to your liking. You can find these within the following location on the admin CP Community>Calendar>Settings From here you can set up various different items, such as the format of dates on event, the way in which your calendars show (month, week, day, stream) and more

With the new calendar application, you can create calendar events from iCalender feeds should you wish to do so. You would do this from the following location. Community>Calendar>iCalendar Feeds Once you go to this location you will be presented with the following screen. Feed List From a File You will notice from this screen that there are 2 ways in which to add feeds to your calendar. The first of these is by selecting the "Upload iCalendar File" button, which will allow you to simply select a file, a calendar, and a member in which the entries will appear from iCal From File From a Feed The second method of adding these is from a calendar feed which you can add using the "Add iCalendar Feed" button and filling in the details requested. iCal Feed

Blogs can be created in a few different ways, and there are few different types of blogs to consider, depending on their use. Basic Blogs Creating a blog from the front end can easily be done using the Create Blog button on the blogs page. Create Blog Once this is selected you will note that you can create a blog that everyone can view, or you can selectively create a blog that can be viewed only by certain people. This can be handy if for example you have a blog only for your staff to see. Create Blog Privacy Entries and Importing from Feeds Once a blog is created, you can add entries into that blog, but one important other item to note is that you can also create blog entries automatically from an rss feed if you wish to do so. In order to do this you would enter that blog, select manage block, and "Atom/RSS Import" as you can see below. RSS Import Menu Once selected, you can then enter the details of your feed, in which entries will automatically be created. RSS Blog Import Group Blogs From the admin CP, you can also create group blogs. These would be blogs that are created for use by various groups, but would show as owned by a group name. You can add these using the create blog button in Community>Blogs>Blogs within the admin CP. From here you would then select the groups you wish to use this blog along with the owners name that will show. Group Blog

Before you let people loose on creating blogs on your site, there are various settings that you will want to ensure are set up to your liking. Basic Settings First of all, you can set up some global settings for the blogs within the following area in your admin cp. Community>Blogs>Settings Blog Settings This will then allow you to set up whether or not to allow RSS imports and exports, along with globally switch ratings on and off. Group Settings Group Settings Once you have set the basics up, you can then set up your options on a member group level so allow different levels of member access to do different things. You can access the member groups from Members>Members>Groups. There is more about this in the following guide. Once you visit the blog tab, you will see something similar to the below, where you can set up what you would like the members of that group to do. Group Blog Settings

Within downloads there are various other global settings that can be applied to your downloads area, and also setting regarding paid files which you can set. Warning Paid files will be unavailable if you do not have the commerce application installed, as there is a tight integration between the two applications. All sections below are found within the following area of your admin CP Community -> Downloads -> Settings Downloads Index Page On the first tab, you can set up which items you wish to be able to see on the index page of your downloads section. By default, all items are switched on, and selected to show from all categories. This can be changed to show only certain categories and sections, as per your own preference. Index Page Settings Basic Settings Within the basic settings From here you can set up whether or not watermarks are applied to any uploaded screenshots, and other global settings such as allowing direct linking to files on other sites. Basic Settings Paid Settings If you have the commerce application installed, you can also allow paid files to be added to the downloads are by your users. You can find these settings within Community>Downloads>Settings>Paid Files Settings. You will notice within here, you can set commission for the site to earn on whatever is sold by the user within your downloads area. This can be a good source of revenue for your site. Paid Settings

Within the download area on your site, you may find that there is additional information you wish for people to be able to enter on their downloadable items. For example, you may have an area where people produce their own applications and need to add co-authors or version numbers. The downloads application allows to to achieve this by adding extra fields. These can then be used per category. Adding Extra Fields To add some extra fields, you will need to visit the following area in your admin CP. Community>Downloads>Extra Fields Once you are in this area, you will see a list of any existing extra fields. You can create a new on by selecting "Create New" Extra Field Setup You can then fill in the details for your new field, including the field type. As an example below I have added one of field type "Member" which will allow the user to select a members name for the co-author of their application. Adding an Extra Field Displaying Fields You will note that within the setup, you can set where you would like this to display within the download item. Currently you can choose for this to show in the download item sidebar, just below the description of the item, or in a separate tab entirely. Display format for topics can be set using HTML. For example the following would show the field name in bold, a colon, and then the value the user has entered <strong>{title}:</strong> {content} These will be updated whenever the main download item is updated. Adding To a Category Once you have set up extra items, you can choose which categories they show in, by selecting that item to be used on that particular category setup page. So below you will see I have selected for the Co-Author field to be available within my "Files" Category. Adding to a category

The first thing you will need to set up within downloads are your categories. You can set these up from the following location in your admin control panel. Community>Downloads>Categories Creating Once you are here, you will see a screen similar to the below image. To create a new category, simply select the "Create new" button. You can also create sub categories to existing categories if you wish by selecting the + icon next to any existing category. Category List Once selected, you can give the new category a name, and you will see various settings that can be altered to your liking depending on what you are trying to achieve on your site. Category Settings Submission Options On the submissions tab, you can limit what is allowed to be submitted to the category by filetype and size, along with allow for versioning of uploads. You will note that we actually use versioning on our own Marketplace using downloads ourselves. Tip It can be useful to limit allowed extensions on categories. For example if you have a category for ebooks, you know that an ebook is not likely to be an exe file, and you will likely have a predefined list of file extensions they use, such as epub, pdf etc. This then helps with moderation of the sections by ensuring incorrect files are not submitted in an incorrect location in the first place. Submissions 1 In the same section, you can set up whether files must be approved, whether screenshots are needed or allowed, and various other limits on people submissions. Submissions 2 Error Messages Within the error messages tab, you can customise what a user will see if they have no permissions to download or view the files within a category. Tip Adding custom error messages can be useful if you require a subscription of download certain items. You can then tell them about your subscriptions within the message itself, and inform your members how to gain access. Error Messages Forum Submission In addition to other settings, you can have the system automatically create a topic in a forum of your choosing upon submission. This is used in our marketplace to create support topics for individual files. Forum Topics Permissions Once you have created the categories that you wish to have on your downloads system, you will want to set up permissions for these. If you select the dropdown at the side of any category, you will see a permissions button which will take you to the permissions screen for that category. Permissions Link This will then allow you to select the permissions required on each of your user groups. Permission Matrix

Whilst the conversion process itself can take a while on a large system, and can appear complicated, the process is actually quite simple to do. In my example below, I will be starting the conversion of another Invision community database into a new installation of the Invision community software. The process itself is very similar for any conversion. So for example, if you are converting from a vbulletin installation, or a xenforo installation, the process is the same. The only difference is that the questions asked by the converter will be relevant to that specific converter. Important If you have not read the previous step in this guide, we would advise you to do this now. Reading that step will save you a lot of time. Starting a new conversion Select your software To start a new conversion, visit the following location within your admin cp System -> Conversions > Manage Conversions -> Start New Conversion You will then be asked to select the software that you are converting from. Please select this from the list provided. Select Software Items to convert On the next screen, you will be asked to select the items you wish to convert. By default all items are selected, however, you can uncheck anything you wish not to convert. Note that some items, which are required by the converter, cannot be deselected. Select Items Database details Next you will be asked to provide your database details. These are the details of the database in which you are converting. So it would be the database you are using for your current installation, and not your Invision Community installation. Database Details Conversion Details On the final page, before you begin the conversion, you will need to provide the details for each item you are converting. This will include things such as paths to your uploads or attachment folders, paths to creations, group mappings and more. It is highly important that you go through this page carefully, and ensure that the details you provide are correct. Conversion Details Once you click to submit this page, you will see the converter start the conversion process. Please do not close this page until it is completed. Conversion Progress After conversion After the conversion has completed there are two things that you should note. Applies to cloud customers only Cloud customers should note that the background tasks mentioned below, will run through regardless of traffic, automatically. They can however still take some time to progress While the conversion process is complete, the software will now be rebuilding all your content. Until these are complete, you may find some posts may not look quite right, counters may be incorrect, and search will not be up to date. You can see this on your Dashboard by expanding the "Background processes" section, as you can see in the image below. By default, these will run with traffic. Therefore if you have no traffic on your site, they will not be running. In this scenario, you can either set up a cron task on your server, by clicking the link provided to get the details for this, or you can select "Manually run them now" and leave this open on the page. You should now set up the permissions for your usergroups, in order to ensure people have access to what you would like them to access. You can see how to do this in the following guide