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We are excited to announce the Leaderboard as the latest all new feature of IPS Community Suite. The new Leaderboard is designed to better highlight your most active members and content based on reputation and other metrics. The Leaderboard will greatly enhance both member and content discovery on your community.

Leaderboard Home
First you will notice the new feature of member leaders based on a specific time frame. In the example above it is set to All Time showing those members with the most reputation overall on your community. It also shows the content with the most reputation for the same timeframe so you get a snapshot of both popular members and popular content in one view.

Past Leaders
The Past Leaders tab shows the "winners" of each day in a history. The system counts all reputation made each day and logs the members who had the top reputation counts that day. Using reputation rather than post count encourages your members to post quality of quantity which is really important to any site.

Winner Profile Badge
Those who win the day also get a badge on their profile page to highlight that they were the member with the most reputation for a particular day.

Top Members
Top Members shows you a list of all members sorted by various metrics. By default you will see members sorted by reputation but you can also easily sort by total post content Suite-wide or per-app. All of these views can be linked directly to so if you wanted a menu item to show members who post the most files in Downloads you can just directly link to that sort view.

Leaderboard Settings
There are various settings to control the default behavior of the Leaderboard. You can define the default view and how many members to show which is helpful to tailor it to your needs.
We hope you enjoy this initial launch of the new Leaderboard feature. We are excited about the new content and member discovery abilities this offers and look forward to adding new options to the Leaderboard as we continue to develop!
 
This change will be in version 4.1.17 which is scheduled to be released in early December 2016.

In line with our aim to make incremental improvements in each release, I wanted to go over a few of the small but useful changes to the personal messenger that you'll find in our next release, 4.1.13.
 
Read/unread filtering
The first improvement is that you can now filter the message list by read and unread, making it a little easier to browse through just the messages you're interested in.
 
Search improvements
Next up, the messenger search has been improved in a couple of ways; first, you can now also search the names of both the recipients and the senders, and second, we've added a menu so you can specify which fields in particular you want to search by.
 
Easier moving
Finally, we've added a popular request - the ability to use the mass-move tool inside the messenger. You can now check multiple messages, and the usual mass-action toolbar will appear that will allow you either move them to another folder, or, has been the case in the past, delete them.
 
While these are each small improvements by themselves, we hope the incremental changes in each release add up to a more pleasant experience for users. 

Our Pages CMS is one of our most popular applications as we are continuing to improve it based on feedback. New in 4.1.13 includes:
Designer’s Mode HTML Editing
This update allows you to edit your HTML mode pages inside the designer's mode file system. Any edits you make, once saved in your text editor are instantly available which makes it much faster to build HTML pages with Pages.

 
Database Template Improvements
We listened to a lot of feedback about templating within the AdminCP for Pages and one common request was for a way to delete a group of database templates and to rename those groups. When you import databases, the template group names are created unique but you may want to change this to something more memorable. You will see here that the dialog also shows you which databases this template is used.

 
Page titles when using databases
Currently, when you add a database to a page, the page title is replaced with the database name. This may not always be desirable, and you may want the page title to remain in all database URLs (such as record view). There is now an option for this per database.

Relational Field Improvements
Now when you create a relational link between databases, you can opt to show which records link to the relational record. To give you an example, say you had a database for actors, and a database for movies, and you created a link on the actors record to show which movies they star in; now when viewing the movie, it will show you a list of the actors.

 
More Filterable Fields
We added both "Date" and "YesNo" field types to be filterable when viewing a list of records. When you use the Date type, you can select a date range for listing articles.

We also added the ability to use any custom field set as filterable to be used when creating a database feed widget.

 
Unique Fields
Another popular request was to allow a way to force unique entries for custom fields. This means that when enabled, only one record per database can have the same value. This is enabled when creating or editing a field.

 
Other improvements
You can now quickly delete an entire media folder via the AdminCP.

You can now quickly see which databases are used on which pages via the AdminCP page list.

 
And we added a way to programatically fetch a custom field value via the $record object. Currently, you need to use something like $record->field_12 which works well until you import that database to another installation. The fields are renumbered so this syntax no longer works. We made it possible to use the field key like so $record->field_{my_key_name_here}. Not only does this solve the issue when importing databases, it is also much more readable and easier to remember!

Our Pages app includes a powerful feature that allows you to create your own databases within the community. Within each database, you create custom fields (we support a number of custom types, from plain text fields, to YouTube embeds and more). And while we provide some generic, simple templates to display your data, custom templates allow you to more precisely control how your database looks in a manner best suited to your site.
Anyone who has created a Pages database will be familiar with using custom fields. You may have created a field for the title of your item, or an upload field so that the item contains a file for users to download. But beyond these straightforward uses, I wanted to explore some more advanced uses of custom fields. Fields don't necessarily have to be displayed to the user - or at least not in the usual way. We can use them as configuration options for our record display, or manipulate the data in order to show it in a different way. Let's take a look at some examples.
 
1. Adding an optional badge to records
We'll start with a fairly simple example. In our Guides section, we highlight guides that have a video tutorial by showing an 'Includes Video Guide' label on the listing:

We achieve this simply by having a Yes/No field that we turn on as needed. In the field format, we turn the Yes/No value into the label by setting the format to Custom and using this code:
{{if $formValue == 1}} <span class='ipsType_medium'><i class='fa fa-video-camera'></i> <strong>Includes Video Guide</strong></span> {{endif}}  
2. Using fields as a way to configure the record display
Fields don't necessarily need to be shown to users. Instead, we can use them as a means to configure the record display, giving us some really powerful flexibility in how we show records. In this contrived example, I'm going to create a field that changes the background color of the content.
Create a Select Box field. Each option key will be a hex color, while the value will be the name the record creator will choose. Set the field key to record_background Set the field formatting to Custom, and the format to simply: {$formValue}. This means it will output our hex value instead of the color name. In the display template assigned to this database for records, we can use the field like so: <div style='background-color: #{$record->customFieldDisplayByKey('record_background', 'listing')|raw}' class='ipsPad'> ...rest of the template... </div> Now, when you create a record, you can choose a color and that color will be used when the record is shown:
You can use this approach in others ways - toggles to control the layout of the record, or options for grid sizes, or even take an upload field for images and set the background of an element as that image.
 
3. Pass data to 3rd-party integrations
Pages has built-in support for several 3rd party integrations, such as Spotify, Soundcloud, YouTube and Google Maps. But using custom fields, you can pass data to other services too. Let's say we wanted to embed an iTunes album widget into each of our records - perhaps the album is relevant to the Pages record in some way and we hope to encourage some click-throughs. In this example, we'll use the embed.ly service. 
Create a URL custom field. Set the field key to itunes_album Set the field formatting to Custom, and the format to: <a class="embedly-card" href="{$formValue}">iTunes Album</a> <script async src="//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js" charset="UTF-8"></script> In your database display template, position the field as desired by adding: {$record->customFieldDisplayByKey('itunes_album', 'listing')|raw} Now when you add an iTunes album link to your record, you'll get an embed automatically!

This approach is great for a range of uses. Perhaps you have an Amazon Associates account and want to add a relevant product link to each of your records so that you earn a commission when users click through. Using database fields and templates in this way, it's easy to set up.
 
I hope that's given you some ideas of other ways you might use database fields in Pages. Share any interesting uses you've come up with in the comments!

For our self-hosted customers, we wanted to give you advanced notice that support for PHP 5.4 in the IPS Community Suite will be ending soon. IPS Community Suite 4.1.11 will be the last release to support this version of PHP.
PHP 5.4 was released in 2012 and reached 'end of life' in September 2015, and so we will be requiring at least PHP 5.5 from IPS Community Suite 4.1.12 onwards. We do recommend PHP 5.6 or greater as 5.5 is approaching end of life as well.
If you currently use PHP 5.4, please contact your host and ask them to upgrade to a supported version as soon as possible.
If you would rather not have to worry about server-level issues like this, consider switching to one of our Community in the Cloud plans. They include all of our suite apps and we take care of all of the server management for you, leaving you to focus on running your community. If you are currently self-hosting, we can transfer your community to a cloud plan for free, in most cases. Contact our sales team for more information.