Matt

I blogged just before Christmas about the improvements to the status update feature in IP.Board. A recent addition is the ability to locks a status update. A normal member can lock their status to prevent comments from other members, although a super moderator (and admin) can over-ride this and reply and/or unlock the status. When a super moderator (and admin) lock a status, it means that in addition to other members being able to reply, the status owner can not unlock it. I have also improved the sidebar hook to allow on-the-fly commenting, updating and deleting without leaving the page. You can see it in action, here: We feel these minor 'social networking' style features add interest and a secondary reason to re-visit your forum. Members can receive email notifications when a reply is made to their status, or a reply is made to a status they have commented on. This will continually drive traffic back to your site and encourage more interaction between members. View full blog entry

As we near the release of IP.Blog 2.1.0 final, I wanted to run through some of the new features you can expect to see after upgrading. This is a very substantial upgrade that gives your blog a major facelift as well as drastically improving functionality. User Interface The user interface has had a complete facelift to bring it up to standard. The new look feels more 'bloggish' and enhances the experience. I've added drop down menus at the top so that you can quickly access common areas and start new entries where you have permission to. The post screen has been overhauled to add functionality. You should find the new version much easier to navigate and easier to use. Group Blogs This is a new feature that allows you, the admin, to set up a group-wide blog. This blog is a normal blog in every other way. For example, you could set up a blog for your staff and everyone in the staff group will instantly be able to start writing new blog entries and managing comments, etc. Blog This! This is a brand new feature that adds a "Blog This" button to every post. This allows you to use post content in your blog entry. Furthermore, the relationship is remembered and all linked blog entries appear at the bottom of the topic when viewed. Per-Entry Rating You can now rate each blog entry rather than just the entire blog itself. The blog rating is still shown on the homepage as an aggregate of all rated entries. Report Item and Reputation You can now report an entire blog entry, or just a single comment. You can now also give someone a reputation increase/decrease in comments. List View A common request was the return of a fully sortable and filterable list view for blogs that emulated a forum view. I have added this in. You'll notice you can click the table headers to sort on that column and click again to reverse the sort. There is also a "List Blogs" sidebar block to quickly filter and list the blogs. There's even a little 'preview the latest entry' icon that shows the entry excerpt in a pop-up so you don't have to leave the page to preview it. Dynamic Sidebar I've moved some the footer links (Top 10 bloggers, etc) into a dynamic sidebar along with Recent Entries. This makes it easier to locate and saves a bit of space. RSS Imports Another long requested feature was to be able to create entries from an RSS feed. This is now a feature. You can control which member groups have access to this as well as limit the number of items imported on each cycle. Banish Entries You can now banish entries from the front page to remove any 'clutter' such as 'testing' blogs or other unsuitable content. ACP Clean-up I've gone through and cleaned up some of the Admin CP pages to make them a little easier to understand and navigate. I've added explanations to the 'Headers' / 'Dynamic Headers' pages so it's clear what they do. Efficiency I've removed several slow queries and introduced several more caching layers to substantially reduce SQL overhead when dealing with large numbers of blogs. We hope you find the updates useful, and we look forward to your feedback to continue improving the product. View full blog entry

Laurel resting isn't an activity we do at IPS and we're all very hard at work on IP.Board 3.1.0 now that we've finished primary development on our suite of applications. We've got lots of exciting things planned and progress has already been made on a few key features. As an early Christmas present to our community and to continue our honest and open development, I wanted to show you one of our already completed 3.1.0 features: Enhanced Status Updates During the latter stages of IP.Board 3.0.0's development, we added in very basic status updates in users profiles that was further enhanced by the index page sidebar hook. We've seen this feature get a lot of use on our own community and we wanted to take it to the next logical step and allow archived statuses and status replies. There is a new tab in a member's profile for recent status updates and recent status actions. As one would expect, this is all handled via Ajax with normal post operations for those who do not have javascript enabled. Replies appear instantly, comments are deleted instantly and even status updates are removed instantly. See it in action below: There is also a new page for all status updates: You can even receive email notification on any replies to your statuses or any replies to statuses you've replied to: This takes a minor feature and gives it a little more focus and should help increase traffic between user profiles and give more of a social feel to your bulletin board. Your status can also be updated automatically from Facebook if you are using Facebook connect. As always, please keep in mind these are early preview screenshots and may change between now and the first public release of IP.Board 3.1.0. As always, we'd love to know what you think. View full blog entry

Also please, please, please keep in mind that you guys are the first to *ever* install this chat app. Also keep in mind this is the first time we've opened up our chat server publicly. We truly appreciate the testing but try not to get too wound up if it doesn't work for you. You guys are on the bleeding edge here, more so than usual. With our usual applications we know that the IP.Board framework is well tested so the worst that can happen is a SQL error here and there.

That's correct. Features addition is done, it's just bugs and tweaks from this point onwards.

You may have noticed that I've updated our blog installation again. This brings many new features sine the last update. This update pretty much wraps up principle coding for new features and although there are a fair few tweaks and bugs to be fixed, we should see a beta release fairly soon. The new feature highlights are: List View Returns A common request was the return of a fully sortable and filterable list view for blogs that emulated a forum view. I have added this in. You'll notice you can click the table headers to sort on that column and click again to reverse the sort. There is also a "List Blogs" sidebar block to quickly filter and list the blogs. There's even a little 'preview the latest entry' icon that shows the entry excerpt in a pop-up so you don't have to leave the page to preview it. Dynamic Sidebar Block I've moved some the footer links (Top 10 bloggers, etc) into a dynamic sidebar along with Recent Entries. This makes it easier to locate and saves a bit of space. RSS Imports Another long requested feature was to be able to create entries from an RSS feed. This is now a feature. You can control which member groups have access to this as well as limit the number of items imported on each cycle. Banish Entries You can now banish entries from the front page to remove any 'clutter' such as 'testing' blogs or other unsuitable content. ACP Clean-up I've gone through and cleaned up some of the Admin CP pages to make them a little easier to understand and navigate. I've added explanations to the 'Headers' / 'Dynamic Headers' pages so it's clear what they do. Please have a click around and let us know what you think. We've tried very hard to incorporate a lot of commonly requested features in this release and we'll continue to do so over several subsequent releases. As always, this is late alpha software so please report any bugs into the Blog bug tracker as normal. View full blog entry

Yes, you need to create a blog before you can "Blog This" :)

The thumbs will display similar to the images you posted. Clicking on remotely linked images will simply expand them. Clicking on attached images will launch the lightbox.

IP.Board is a framework, but we've tailored its implementation to serve up forum-ish content. It is a very flexible framework in that you can drop in new apps but we've made a deliberate effort to keep forums at the front as that the main module that 'ships' with the framework. To really make it a true framework (in the sense of zend, etc) would require epic levels of abstraction that would just add overhead to each request. That said, the tabs thing is just a presentation 'issue' in that that's how we coded the default templates. You can create your own templates to totally change the ordering and presentation.

Ok.... You can now set a fixed size for resizing images. So, if you wanted images to be no bigger than 600px wide or 600px tall, you can now do that. " alt="" class="ipsImage" width="1000px" height="145px"> " alt="" class="ipsImage" width="1000px" height="651px"> I have also added a "save" button into the lightbox which opens the original image in a new window

Most likely because IP.Downloads uses LIKE for that particular search.

We've just upgraded the IP.Blogs application we use on these forums to 2.1.0 beta 1. As you can see, it's a fairly substantial upgrade with many new features and improvements. This blog entry will run through the main ones: Efficiency I've added several more caching layers for commonly requested data from blogs and entries. This, along with significant SQL query work makes this version the most efficient yet. The improvements are obvious even here. Pages load much quicker with much fewer queries. User Interface The user interface has had a complete facelift to bring it up to standard. The new look feels more 'bloggish' and enhances the experience. I've added drop down menus at the top so that you can quickly access common areas and start new entries where you have permission to. The post screen has been overhauled to add functionality. You should find the new version much easier to navigate and easier to use. Group Blogs This is a new feature that allows you, the admin, to set up a group-wide blog. This blog is a normal blog in every other way. For example, you could set up a blog for your staff and everyone in the staff group will instantly be able to start writing new blog entries and managing comments, etc. Blog This! This is a brand new feature that adds a "Blog This" button to every post. This allows you to use post content in your blog entry. Furthermore, the relationship is remembered and all linked blog entries appear at the bottom of the topic when viewed. Pre entry Rating You can now rate each blog entry rather than just the entire blog itself. The blog rating is still shown on the homepage as an aggregate of all rated entries. Report Item and Reputation You can now report an entire blog entry, or just a single comment. You can now also give someone a reputation increase/decrease in comments. There are also countless other improvements and enhancements. Keep in mind that this is very much early beta software so expect bugs! Please report them in the tracker as usual. View full blog entry

Appreciate the Radiohead song title. But I'll still move it into feedback as it's not a pre-sales question. :D

Ah yeah, keep meaning to fix that.

Thanks WTG, I appreciate your feedback. :)

Thank you for your feedback, it's really appreciated. I'll go ahead and move this into our feedback forum so that others can chime in with their opinion.

Allow me to move this into our feedback area where customers and visitors can leave replies without need the need moderator approval.

Welcome Joseph! We're very pleased to have you as a customer. If there's anything you need, please let me know.

Thank you all so much for your comments. I'm genuinely thrilled that you are having such a positive experience. I was just on one of your forums this morning, BSchwarz, and it's looking great. Please do let us know if you need any assistance or if you have some feature improvements / suggestions. We do listen and we're all active in the feedback areas so we'll definitely see it.