Bobbins

http://community.inv...content-blocks/

Some are block templates while some are full blocks

Invision Power Services, Inc. is pleased to announce the release of IP.Nexus 1.0.0!

The new IP.Nexus application is designed to help you earn money from your community both directly and indirectly. Direct options include features such as payment processing and shopping carts whereas indirect methods may be banner tracking and donations. Everyone here at IPS is very excited to introduce this new application and hope our customers will be able to take advantage of the variety of features in the product such as:

Introduction
Our first blog entry introducing IP.Nexus and a quick overview.

Developer Extensibility
Third party developers can easily extend the functionality of IP.Nexus into their own applications.

IP.Downloads Integration
Through integration with IP.Downloads you can charge your visitors for access to file downloads.

Package Types
Many package types including virtual items, physical items, recurring payments, and more.

Storefront
Easy to use storefront so your visitors can quickly order new products and services.

Processing Orders
Administration tools to make it easy for you to fulfill and review your orders.

Managing Invoices
Generate new invoices and keep track of pending invoices on existing sales.

Client Area
A single client area for your customers to manage purchases, submit support tickets, and purchase additional packages.

Donations
Set donation goals and allow your members to contribute to that goal right on your community.

Referrals
Your members can refer new members to your community via a referral link and receive commissions.

Credits
Assigning credits to an account either manually or through commissions allows a member to use their credit balance to purchase new packages or pay for renewals.

Support Desk Management, Support Desk Client Area, and Support Desk for Staff
IP.Nexus includes a robust support desk to manage interactions with your clients via a support-ticket system.

Alternate Contacts
Your clients can specify additional contacts who have the option to submit tickets and manage other account aspects on their behalf.

Incoming Email
Create support, sales, billing, and other contact email address that will route emails into IP.Nexus Support Desk

Customer History
Nearly every action performed on an account, from both your staff and your clients, is logged to provide a clear account history.

Advertisements
Expand the capabilities of IP.Board's built-in advertisements feature by uploading banners, tracking, and more.

Customer Page
A detailed overview of a customer all on one page to allow you and your staff to easily service their account.



Server Requirements

As IP.Nexus deals with financial transactions we wish to do everything we can to ensure the security of your community and business. To further this goal, IP.Nexus source will be encoded using Zend Guard. This means that your server will need the appropriate PHP capabilities installed to run IP.Nexus. You can download our system requirements script which will check your server for Zend Guard encoding support.


Purchasing

You can purchase IP.Nexus right in your client area by clicking the green New Purchase button in the upper right corner. New clients can purchase IP.Nexus right along with IP.Board. If you an IPS Community Hosting client, the IP.Nexus features are coming soon to select packages (more information will be posted regarding IP.Nexus on hosting).

Don't forget to try our free demo to see IP.Nexus in action for yourself.

If you have already purchased IP.Nexus, you can download it in your client area.






Version 1.0.1 Coming Soon

IPS is dedicated to promptly fixing any reported issues and will do so with the release of IP.Nexus version 1.0.1 very soon.

As mentioned in the release notes: because this is the first widely-distributed release there will be as yet undiscovered issues. You can expect several maintenance releases over the next several weeks. We appreciate your understanding and hope you can assist us in identifying any problems in this first supported release so we can quickly remedy them in our next updates.

All in good time

We'll be dong a lot of blog entries over the next few weeks detailing features a little more and I expect we'll get more feedback from that.
Once we're happy to say 1.0 is "done" we'll start doing a pre-sale and a beta.

It's hard to say when that'll be as it really does depend on the feedback we get between now and then. We're not in any rush, we want to make sure we've got the product you want before we start thinking about betas

There's too many suggestion and question threads going on here, just wanted to make one to say how much I love the thought of IP.Commerce. You guys really did hit the nail on the head and filled a nice big gap in your product line. I'm sure the implementation will be great just like your other products. Here's to looking forward to downloading the BETA  

It's on my list for 1.1. Like anything, if demand is high enough, we can bump it.

Am sure this is not in version 1.0

But it would be nice to have a stock level on items. So one could have say 10 items to sell and then show a 'currently out of stock' and not allow the item to be ordered.

Likewise there should be an over-ride so that items could still be ordered even when stock was 0 when you knew you were getting more in or could order more easily. In this situation it should suppress the 'currently out of stock' message.

Hosting integration is something we will surely be adding to a future version. It's just a bit too big of a thing for a 1.0.0 release

Welcome to IP.Board 3.1.0 Beta 1!
Welcome to the latest development version of IP.Board 3.1.0. We're excited to reveal the product we've been working on for the past few months. This build contains all the features we've blogged about recently including the search improvements, Twitter integration, Profile Customization and more.

As always, this is a very early beta build so please expect to find the odd bug here and there. Please report any bugs found into the tracker as usual.

As always, we'd love to hear your feedback. Happy clicking!

Note: Please perform a hard refresh / delete temporary items in your browser to ensure you get the correct CSS and JS

Preview Only: IP.Board 3.1 is in preview only. It is not yet available for download. Keep an eye out for a future announcement.

What's New
Link Sharing
Easily share links from your community to Facebook, Twitter, and more. Great way to drive traffic to your community!

Status Updates
Enhancements to the existing member status system in IP.Board to include the ability to reply and more.

Topic Preview
Preview the first few lines of a topic without loading the entire topic.

View Reputation
Optionally allow your members to see who gave reputation points on their posts.

Twitter Integration
Your members can now link their account with their Twitter account!

Improved Facebook Integration
Further enhance the link between your community and Facebook to drive traffic.

Advertising Code Integration: Part 1 and Part 2
Easily place advertising code throughout your community with simple settings in the admin area.

Profile Customizations: Part 1 and Part 2
Allow your members to customize the look and feel of their profile page.

Skin Upgrader
Upgrading your skin between versions of IP.Board just became a lot easier.

Soft Delete Posts and Topics
Rather than actually deleting a post or topic you can now hide it from view to easily restore it later.

Notification System
An easier way to be notified of all the various events that happen in your community.

Modification Development Enhancements
Great tools for those that create modifications for IP.Board

Hook System Improvements
Improvements to the IP.Board hook system to make it easier for modification developers to expand the functions in the software.

Search Engine Optimization: Part 1 and Part 2
Allow search engines to better index and rank your community in results.

Search Engine Overhaul
Search engine rebuilt from the ground up introducing more flexibility and power.

We are pleased to announce IP.Blog 2.1.0 has been released.

The following is a list of what's new in this version of IP.Blog:

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. We have 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. We 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
We have 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
We have gone through and cleaned up some of the Admin CP pages to make them a little easier to understand and navigate. We have added explanations to the 'Headers' / 'Dynamic Headers' pages so it's clear what they do.

Efficiency
We have removed several slow queries and introduced several more caching layers to substantially reduce SQL overhead when dealing with large numbers of blogs.


Downloading

You can download IP.Blog 2.1.0 if you have an active license in the client area. As always, make a backup of your community before proceeding.


NOTE: IP.Board v3.0.5 is required to be installed, before you upgrade to Blog 2.1.0.

We are pleased to announce IP.Gallery 3.1.0 has been released.

The following is a list of what's new in this version of IP.Gallery:

Friendly URLs
We've integrated gallery into the global FURL system used by IP.Board 3, this will allow gallery to create friendly URLs for categories, albums, and images.

Category/Album Covers
When viewing an image, you will have a new option to set that image as the 'cover' for the category or album that contains the image.  When a cover image is specified for a category or album, that image will always be displayed, in place of the last uploaded image thumbnail.

Sub Albums
Albums now support unlimited sub albums, which work exactly like gallery sub categories.

Profile Picture Album
You can now create a new kind of album, a 'Profile Picture' Album. After this album has been created, any images that you upload to it will be displayed on the change picture page in your User CP, making them easy to select as your profile image.

Image notes
Image owners are now able to add notes to sections of their images, positioning and resizing them to suit. Other members will be able to see the notes when hovering over the image. (An example)

Image rotation
Images can now be rotated in 90° increments, to compensate for those photos taken in landscape or portrait, but saved in the wrong orientation.

New slideshow
We have completely rewritten the slideshow feature! It is now a unified interface, loading images on demand as necessary. Users can play or pause the slideshow at will, or jump to specific photos using the thumbnail bar.

Friends-only albums
When creating an album, users can now choose to restrict viewing to only those users who are on their friends list.

Reputation support in comments
We have added support for IP.Board's reputation feature in comments posted within IP.Gallery.

Interface tweaks
We have updated the style of categories so that larger versions of the image are used, to give more impact. The image listing has also been updated, and will now show as many images on a row as the users browser can fit. This should improve the display of IP.Gallery for users who have higher screen resolutions. The image view screen has also been improved, including support for those features mentioned above.


Downloading

You can download IP.Gallery 3.1.0 if you have an active license in the client area. As always, make a backup of your community before proceeding.

Community Content System 1.0.0 Released

Many clients have expressed interest in tools that would allow them to extend IP.Board's traditional forum community functionality by providing methods of creating new pages within the IP.Board framework.  Uses for such a system span from a simple custom portal all the way through to a complete website built utilizing IP.Board's powerful backend codebase.  When your community and site systems are truly integrated, single sign on and a matching website/forum theme become much easier.

• Page Templates
  If you are creating many pages for your website you will find that they generally follow a similar structure each time.  By utilizing page templates, you can create templates complete with the full functionality of our skin system, including use of template conditionals and plugins. You can create the HTML structure once, and reuse it for some or all of your pages. Novice users can type in normal HTML code or power users can choose to use the powerful skin tags.
  
  
• Page Manager
  The core of CCS: this tool allows you to create pages, plain and simple. No fancy terminology or new methods to learn. A wizard will guide you through creating your pages, and allow you to configure things like permissions for who can view the page, which page template to use, and more. Pages can be edited as raw HTML, raw PHP, or through our traditional WYSIWYG editor using BBCode. You can also set page-types as JavaScript or CSS and the system will automatically detect those special types.
  
  
• Media Manager
  A tool to allow you to manage images and other media for your site.  You can define the root path to your file storage directory, and then create folders and upload image files within that directory via the ACP. You can move and delete files and folders from the ACP as well.
  
  
• Block Manager
  An extremely powerful tool that allows you to create "blocks" for your pages. Blocks are inserted utilizing template plugins so you can insert blocks anywhere in the CCS content or even anywhere in your forum community using the skin manager in the admin control panel. This means that content blocks you create in CCS are not just limited to that application!  There are three types of blocks you will work with:
  
  
  • Custom - create blocks by editing BBCode (using our WYSIWYG editor), raw HTML, or raw PHP. Input any information you like.
    
  • Plugins - some blocks require code to execute in order to determine what should be shown.  For instance, you may wish to show a mini-calendar on one of your pages or a login box so users can login right from your home page.  Plugin blocks allow developers to create blocks that can easily plugin to the system without having to create code modifications.
    
  • Feeds - not just limited to RSS.  You can create "feeds" of almost any type of data - forums, topics, replies, calendar events, blog entries, gallery images, download manager files, and of course traditional RSS imports.  A wizard will guide you through creating these feeds, allowing you to specify how the feed should be pulled (do you want to show the last 5 gallery images?  what about a random sampling of forum topics? how about all topics from the visitor's friends list since their last visit?) to make it simpler for you to define the block.

The system is very flexible, allowing you to do nearly anything you want, while at the same time providing a simple user interface and wizard-based approach for creating content to keep things easy for newer users. Power users can ignore all the special features and just type in raw-PHP if they prefer. The choice is up to the administrator.

The CCS supports friendly urls (you define the folders and page names while creating pages), and does not require the page output to be accessed through your forum directory. This means you can have your community at example.com/forums but your main web site can show under just example.com easily. You can use IP.Board's skin system (inheriting the forum skin) or you can elect to create raw pages without inheriting any CSS, wrapper, or JavaScript from IP.Board.

More Information

Check out these blog entries for more information:

• Blocks Overview
  
• Pages Overview
  
• Media Manager
  
• Templates

Also, our own web site (http://www.invisionpower.com) is now powered by CCS.

Pricing and Availability

As CCS is a new product and will require time to mature into the fully-featured content system we know all of our customers expect, we are introducing the product at a greatly reduced price. We have many great ideas to enhance CCS as we continue to develop the system and made a decision for this 1.0.0 release not to go overboard with features but focus on creating a stable "core" product to work with. Just wait for version 1.1.0 where we have all sorts of fun additions planned.

The introductory price for those of you wanting to start using CCS right now is just $35 with a yearly renewal of $30 for support/services/upgrades.

Not only does this reduced price give those of you who decide to buy early a great discount but it also allows us to phase in some of the product enhancements over time without having pricing pressures at the very start. As for the final price in the future: we have not yet set it so take advantage of this low price if you are interested in CCS.

Existing clients can login to the client area, click New Purchase, then choose Invision Power Board Optional Addons to purchase. Our web site will be updated with CCS information in the next week.

If CCS is going to pull any kind of data, with exception of RSS feed, from your forum, it's going to have to be on the same domain or the same server for pathing issues, I believe.

Also, CCS is a part of the forum as far as I can see and will use IPB's login system, so I suppose it has to reside on the same server. Otherwise, I don't see the point of CCS because it's expanding your forum to beyond just mere forum.

At least, that is how I understand it from general scripting.

CCS needs to be able to access the IPB source files to operate so, although it does not have to be in the same directory, it does need access to the same directory as IPB.

For the first part of your question: CCS does support friendly URLs so you can do that. It also supports meta information:



CCS doesn't directly control your images so you can put any img tag you want.


Note: Moving this to new CCS forum in feedback as its first topic