Tato.

A critical security patch has been released for IP.Content 1.2.0

IPS has been notified of a security issue with IP.Content 1.2.0 which may introduce the ability for a remote user to inject malicious SQL into a URL. This SQL could damage or compromise the security of your community.

We would like to thank for reporting this issue to us.


Patching your IP.Content Install

If you are running a version of IP.Content less than 1.2.0: upgrade your install today. The IP.Content 1.2.0 download in the client area has already been updated to include the patched files.

If you are running IP.Content 1.2.0: upload the attached file to: admin/applications_addon/ips/ccs/sources/functions.php


Please submit a support ticket if you have any questions.

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.

We are pleased to announce Invision Power Board 3.0.2 has been released.

This is the second maintenance release for IP.Board 3 and addresses various bugs and adds in some enhancements to existing features. Also, IP.Blog, IP.Gallery, and IP.Downloads have received a maintenance update.

Major Changes Since 3.0.1

Among many dozens of smaller bugs fixed, the following large changes and fixes have been made in the 3.0.2 release:

• Improved search and member list performance
  
• Date filter options for Active Content page
  
• Many improvements for Sphinx searching (i.e. ability to filter by forum, ability to search titles only, ability to group posts as topics, plugin functionality for modifying the query, and misc bug fixes)
  
• Ability to hide an application's tab on the front end, while still allowing it to be publicly accessible
  
• Improved IP address lookup tool can now support add-on applications
  
• Portal option to not pin pinned topics for articles
  
• Added link to user profile when editing a member in ACP
  
• Added display of time remaining for suspended members when editing a member in ACP
  
• Spam Monitoring Service support
  
• Ability to control image quality for Gallery images (jpg/png only)
  
• PHP version 5.3 is now supported in IP.Board except for OpenID login method. We are awaiting updates from OpenID vendors.

Downloading

You can download IP.Board 3.0.2 and any applications you have an active license for in the client area. As always, make a backup of your community before proceeding.




Spam Monitoring Service

To retrieve your key, login to your client area and go to your purchases. You will see an option to create a spam service key. Place that key in the Spam Service settings in your IP.Board 3.0.2 AdminCP.

Subscriptions Manager

The first Release Candidate of Subscriptions Manager is now available in the client area. While not the final version, feedback has been good and several clients are using it on their live site. However, we do of course suggest you wait until the final version before using it live.

MS-SQL Database Driver

The MS-SQL database driver is now available for new installations of IP.Board 3. Upgrade capability from IP.Board 2 will be available within the next two weeks.

We are pleased to announce our new Spam Monitoring Service

Our new Spam Monitoring Service will assist with the ever-growing problem of spam account registrations on communities across the web. This service will use a central database, hosted by IPS, to track those that may try to register an account on your IP.Board-powered community and stop them from registering.


How it Works

Each time a user tries to register, your IP.Board will contact the service and report the IP address and email address attempting to register. The service will scan a list of known spammers and give the account a score of 1 - 4. There are various options you can configure to control what behavior happens based on the score such as banning the account, letting it through normally, or queuing it for approval.

By harnessing the power of the many thousands of IP.Board communities, the service can "learn" over time what accounts are spammers. For example, a real human could never register on 5 IP.Board communities in just one minute so the service would see that account as a probable spam account.

The service will also monitor the "mark as spam" feature now included in IP.Board. This means that, as you and your moderators manually mark an account as a spammer, the information is reported back to the service to help stop those accounts on your community and other IP.Board communities as well!

Through these methods we are creating a service that learns from the collective data gathered from all IP.Board communities who choose to participate in the Spam Monitoring Service.



Privacy

IPS will collect various registration information to track and catch spam accounts. Information that is not from a spammer is only kept temporarily (to detect trends so we can catch spam accounts) then deleted. The only information permanently kept is for those known to be spammers. The service is completely optional and no IP.Board is required to participate.

Activating the Service

The Spam Monitoring Service will be available in IP.Board 3.0.2 and is already being tested here on the IPS company forums. Once you have IP.Board 3.0.2, simply login to the IPS client area and activate a special key used for the service and put that key on your IP.Board AdminCP.


Pricing

To further our continuing efforts to not only enhance the products we offer but also the services around those products: this service will be offered at no additional charge to those with an active support and service license for IP.Board and for IPS hosting customers!

Introducing Community Content System

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.

Our new Community Content System lets you do all of this and more. CCS is a new application that allows you to create content for your site. Blog entries over the next several days will discuss some of its powerful features in more detail along with examples showing you just how easy it is to create website pages and other content just by clicking through the admin control panel. For now in this introduction, here is a brief overview of its main features:

• 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.


Pricing and Availability

The CCS was developed completely separately from the IPB3 and applications process allowing us to develop CCS without any delay in IPB3's development time. As such, we are happy to say we will be able to release CCS about two weeks after IPB3's first supported release! Pricing will be announced at that time.


We are sure there will be many questions about the CCS and we welcome them. Over the next several days there will be blog entries on our company blog going into greater detail on each of the core features of CCS. Hopefully all of your detailed questions will be answered then. Please accept our apologies if we may sometimes ask you to wait for the next blog update before answering your questions. Thank you!

We are pleased to announce Invision Power Board 3.0.1 has been released.

This is the first maintenance release for IP.Board 3 and addresses the most critical issues discovered during the first large-scale usage of IP.Board 3's release. Also, IP.Blog, IP.Gallery, and IP.Downloads have received a maintenance update. Thanks to everyone who was an early-user of IP.Board 3.0.0 and reported issues that you came across.

Major Changes Since 3.0.0

Among many dozens of smaller bugs fixed, the following large changes and fixes have been made in 3.0.1 release:

• View new content changes so its more like 2.3.6 where it's based off last visit. Option to use the 3.0 style in user settings.
  
• Option to view search results in a view similar to a forum.
  
• More filter and sort options with search
  
• Optimized search and view new content to improve performance
  
• Sessions not clearing in some PHP versions fixed. Will improve performance on those versions.
  
• Language import / export system is much more stable now.
  
• Slow queries in the Portal have been optimized.
  
• Many Facebook Connect issues have been addressed.
  
• PM counts being incorrect have been fixed.
  
• Old media tag and quote tag issues impacting display of older posts fixed.
  
• Watched content hook in sidebar resource usage addressed.

Important: We have received reports of IP.Board 3.0.1 not working correctly on servers running PHP version 5.3. Please do not upgrade to IP.Board 3 if your host runs PHP 5.3. We are working on a fix for this issue and should have it in place for 3.0.2 release.


Downloading

You can download IP.Board 3.0.1 and any applications you have an active license for in the client area. As always, make a backup of your community before proceeding.






Subscriptions Manager

A fully supported version of Subscriptions Manager is not yet available for IP.Board 3 just yet. The first beta of SM compatible with IP.Board 3 can be downloaded in the customer lounge on the IPS company forums. A second beta of SM is expected in the next few days. As soon as possible (depending on feedback from the beta releases) we will be releasing a supported version of SM.

MS-SQL Database Driver

The MS-SQL database driver will be out as a beta release early next week. Keep an eye out for an announcement regarding this update.