Gärrett

Michael, on 02 August 2010 - 02:26 PM, said:

Better members, by the sounds of things, if he's having to constantly warn them!

Invision Power Services, Inc. is pleased to announce the release of IP.Board 3.1.1 and its Applications

• IP.Board 3.1.1
  Fully featured community platform including forums, members profiles, calendar, status system, integration, and much, much more.
  
  
• IP.Gallery 3.2.1
  Categories and photo albums for your members to share their images and videos on your community.
  
  
• IP.Blog 2.2.1
  Allow you and your members to post blogs on your community or syndicate externally hosted blogs easily.
  
  
• IP.Downloads 2.2.1
  Complete file management application including file version control, commenting, and forum topic linking.
  
  
• IP.Content 2.0.1
  Content management for your community - run a full web site or a simply community portal. The possibilities are endless.
  
  
• IP.Chat 1.1.1
  Engage your members in real time chat or send them private chats while in the chat room.

In addition to the core software, the following products and services are also available:

• Microsoft SQL Server Database Drivers for alternate database solutions.
  
• IP.Board iPhone App for easy mobile access for you and your members!
  
• Converter Services to convert from other community software to IPS.
  
• Skin Generator service to easily create a custom skin for your community.
  
• Spam Monitoring Service to stop spam account registration at the source.

Downloading

You can download these releases in the client area and begin enjoying the new features. You might also read our general upgrading instructions for our software.


Version 3.1.2 Coming Soon

IPS is dedicated to promptly fixing any reported issues and will do so with the release of version 3.1.2 soon after 3.1.1's release. You may also wish to keep an eye on our knowledge base where we will release patches for any critical issues that come up between the two version releases. There is no set release timeframe for 3.1.2 as we will evaluate based on feedback and and issue reports coming in. As always, follow our company blog for latest information.




What's New

In addition to all the great, new features launched in IP.Board 3.1.0 and the Applications we have fixed many dozens of reported issues and enhanced a few of the new features including:

• Improved Facebook and Twitter integration
  
• Usability improvements in the new skin merge center
  
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) improvements
  
• Admin can now modify each member's notification options when editing the member in the AdminCP
  
• A new tool to test outbound connections has been added to the support tab. Useful for license, chat, or other connection issue diagnostics.
  
• Support for Push Notifications via IPS iPhone App

tired of being rct2dotcom, on 29 September 2009 - 03:12 AM, said:

Just added that back in for 3.0.4 (locally). You're welcome.

I spent the entire time waiting for your video to get to the point, and I still didn't get it.  The only thing I could get from the video, 3 and a half minutes of it, is that you like waving your mouse pointer around icons, and somewhere on the internet is a site that uses post icons for every thread.

For bonus points, I then went on to my own IP.Board 3.0.3 installation and created a thread with a post icon, so I could see if you did have a point.

You did not.

So, could you perhaps explain what your problem is, without Youtube this time?  Because it sure isn't deprecated post icons (which are right... there...)

I just wanted to give kudos to the staff for all of their work on the new board.

We have a forum which carries a visual theme which we have kept with since the version 1.x days. Despite the skin changes that came with 3.0, we have found that skin development time was cut in half to bring our look into line with the previous layout while still keeping the improvements that were made to the software.

Our migration strategy ended up being especially fun, as we migrated to a new domain at the same time as we were applying the upgrade. The only real issues that we had in our first test run were related to not uninstalling mods in the old structure before upgrading. As long as you turn off all mods installed with the Universal Mod Installer and ensure all forums and members are set to the "use board default" skin choice before running an upgrade, things go smoothly.

We have been live for 24 hours now on 3.0.3, and have had ZERO complaints,,, in fact we have had quite a few positive comments about all of the improvements both us and IPB have made.

Kudos again to the IPB Development team - you took an impossible task and came up with a product that blows away the competition!

Charles, on 04 September 2009 - 08:17 PM, said:

this is like trying to talk to a friggin wall...

I really don't give a hoot if he's right (not in my book he wasn't), being patronised by a user who has no connection to IPS isn't going to impress me. If I had wanted to post a bug report I would have, but the fact is people don't look at those and the title of this forum section is entitled "IPS Company Feedback > IP.Board" is it not? Did I not provide feedback or am I wasting my time? Not sure why you'd let casual users patronise another user when all he was doing was "providing feedback".

Someone's a little short tempered.

Arguably your post is feedback, but it's obviously a bug in the software and would be more easily addressed in the bug tracker. And yeah, people read it, especially those who matter: people who actually fix the bugs. The very nature of the bug tracker will pretty much guarantee acknowledgement from a staff member. You posted in a public forum: expect public responses.

cargelock, on 13 September 2009 - 06:01 PM, said:

I guess being helpful is no longer acceptable.

It will be included in 3.0.3 when that is released.

Sometimes the error messages thrown by IPB can be a little bit abrupt and not very user friendly. Particularly those that involve viewing permissions. Perhaps these could be made to be a bit more helpful to the end user in a future version? For example instead of the current "[#103139] You do not have permission to view this forum." how about offering up some reasons as to why this might be the case. e.g "not logged in" followed by links to register or log in. etc.

we want the dot back

it was an important dot...

too important to be forgot like this

Yes, we should start calling it  IP.Content

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.

Since it often happens that a new version gets released, some bugs slip through the testing process and a new build of that version needs to be uploaded to our client centers, I think it would be very helpful if the Your Downloads page where we download our copies of the software showed the date (or some other such indicator) of when this particular version was last uploaded.  Maybe a build number there would be a good idea instead?

I'm just thinking of all of the topics we get where folks talk about bugs they have that have already been fixed, but they might not necessarily have known the version was rebuilt.