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IP.Nexus 1.5 Dev Update: Miscellaneous Enhancements

Posted by Mark, 01 June 2012 · 3,107 views

To wrap up our blog entries on IP.Nexus, there's a few more additional features and enhancements that we haven't previously covered:


Custom Advertisement Zones

IP.Nexus allows you to create advertisements and even sell advertisement space on your community.
There are several different areas where the IPS Community Suite has built-in advertisement spots where Nexus can place advertisements.

In IP.Nexus 1.5, you can create your own custom "zones" and then add tags into your skin templates, IP.Content pages or even external websites outside of your community to display the advertisements in the zones you have created.


Expected Output Monitoring

IP.Nexus can monitor your servers and report to you if any of them are not responding.
Sometimes though, a site can be having issues, but not actually be reporting as down - for example, if a database table had collapsed, the server would be reporting as online, even though the site isn't actually usable.

In IP.Nexus 1.5, you'll be able to create custom "Expected Output Monitoring" rules. IP.Nexus will then call the URLs you provide at regular intervals, and if the page output is not what is expected, will notify you that there's an issue.


Transaction Review

Details on the items being purchased is now available in the transaction review screen without having to click into the invoice.


Voiding Customers

IP.Nexus has a tool to quickly ban a customer, refund their transactions, close their support requests, etc.
Sometimes however, you might want to only perform a select few of these actions. In IP.Nexus 1.5, each "action" now appears as an individual toggle when you go to void a customer.


Resource Improvements

When we work on a new release of any application, we look at the resource usage to see if any improvements can be made.
We've made several changes to improve the resource usage of IP.Nexus.

The most significant of these changes is a change to how package data is cached.
Some communities use IP.Nexus with lots of packages in many categories. Up until now, IP.Nexus stored all packages in a cache so that they didn't need to be fetched from the database on every load. However, for communities with lots of categories and packages, this can result in a large cache which ends up using more resources to process than is necessary.
In IP.Nexus 1.5 we've reworked some of the logic to make this method of caching data no longer necessary, and as a result, Nexus is able to scale much more efficiently when there is a large number of packages.






This wraps up all of the changes we're making in IP.Nexus 1.5. Keep an eye on our pre-release testing forum over the next couple of weeks for public betas :smile:




Custom advert zones :o .... This release will be AWESOME! Way to listen to your customers IPB.. Great stuff..
"Custom Advertisement Zones" is a nice feature. Really, could we use it for putting a background image on any custom page (clickable ad) or is it only for showing banners ?
So we can put it into a 'opposite side bar' type position? Nice.
eagerly awaiting this one.
Great stuff cant wait for this to come out, 2 feature i would love to come to this would be a quoting system and also if we could add pacakges to a users profile by ourselves so we can update users purchases in the admin panel.

But cant wait this is going to make a lot of differences to my store.

Great stuff cant wait for this to come out, 2 feature i would love to come to this would be a quoting system and also if we could add pacakges to a users profile by ourselves so we can update users purchases in the admin panel.

But cant wait this is going to make a lot of differences to my store.


You can add a package to a user manually by generating an invoice for them. Under the "Add Item" button click the "Package" link to add a package. I thank that's what you meant.

On a side note, can't wait to get my hands on Nexus 1.5! Thanks for your hard work, Mark.
Custom ads zone I ask for this many times! thx Mark, now you need to add the feature "change group" on donators to make me happy!! :D
Can we setup the custom zones so that *if* there is a direct ad sale then it runs, if there *isn't* a direct ad sale, it rolls over to an ad network (Google Adsense, Tribal, Burst etc)?

James

Can we setup the custom zones so that *if* there is a direct ad sale then it runs, if there *isn't* a direct ad sale, it rolls over to an ad network (Google Adsense, Tribal, Burst etc)?

James


Yes. Custom ad zones perform exactly the same as the pre-set zones.
But these custom ad zones are only displayable in the forum/content or can these also be displayed at an external page?

But these custom ad zones are only displayable in the forum/content or can these also be displayed at an external page?


From the blog entry:
"In IP.Nexus 1.5, you can create your own custom "zones" and then add tags into your skin templates, IP.Content pages or even external websites outside of your community to display the advertisements in the zones you have created."
Hey Mark, can you guys please add support for non-renewing subscriptions?

In other words, user purchases a license key, simultaneously "subscribes" for 1 day and his member permissions change for that period, after 1 day they go back -- useful for "trial" memberships