The Development Channel

At IPS not only do we create market leading products, we also use them heavily ourselves. In doing so we often identify problems and needs in the software very early on. Two of the minor changes we've introduced with Nexus 1.5.8 are a direct result of management and support staff feedback during their use of the product internally.
 
Separating...

Introduction
 
I previously wrote a blog entry  about building tables in IPS Social Suite 4.0. Similar to tables, we also have trees . Trees in many ways look and behave similarly to tables, but can be distinguished mainly by the fact that trees show a collection of objects in a fixed order (often, though not always the order can be changed by...

A few weeks ago, I posted a blog entry  mentioning a new feature in 4.0 which aims to make development of applications within the IPS Social Suite (both for us and third party modification authors) easier. We focussed on managing the database schema in that blog entry and I'd now like to take you through the other features.
 
 
Modules
 ...

Login Handlers  are the different methods for logging into the IPS Social Suite. We currently support:
" Internal", which is for accounts created natively through the suite.
Facebook
Twitter
Microsoft (this is currently referred to as "Windows Live", though they rebranded to "Microsoft Account" a short while ago)
LDAP
"IPS Connect", which is our SSO...

We've just rebuilt IP.Board 3.4.4 for further beta testing.
 
Thanks to everyone who has tested this release so far and for reporting the bugs you've found. We've fixed a good portion of these and would like for you to update your test installations with the latest release.
 
All customers with an active IP.Board license can download the beta at...

IP.Board 3.4.4 is now available for beta testing!
 
We have been hard at work on IP.Board 3.4.4, and following a good week of testing here on our company forums, we have built a downloadable IP.Board 3.4.4 package for you to test on your own servers.  We appreciate any testing you can perform.
 
Please report any bugs you find with the beta...

The eagle eyed among you may have spotted that we've just upgraded our company forums to IP.Board 3.4.4.
 
We routinely do this during a development cycle so that we can get some extended testing prior to a beta release. When we write new features and fix bugs we do test ourselves but of course we can't replicate the testing hundreds of active users...

There's a table in the Admin CP of the IPS Social Suite that I really like - the members table. It has some really cool options - you can reorder the data just by clicking on a column head; you can quickly search for a member by typing a name into a search box at the top; there's some filter options to quickly show banned, locked, spam and validating memb...

One question I have seen surface in the past (and present), revolves around how we decide when to use a third party library or framework, and how we decide when to develop something in-house entirely.  For instance, in the 4.0 Suite we will utilize jQuery  (a third party javascript framework), however we will build our underlying PHP framework in-hou...