.Immortal

Invision Power Services, Inc. is pleased to announce the release of IP.Board 3.1.2 and its Applications

• IP.Board 3.1.2
  Fully featured community platform including forums, members profiles, calendar, status system, integration, and much, much more.
  
  
• IP.Gallery 3.2.2
  Categories and photo albums for your members to share their images and videos on your community.
  
  
• IP.Blog 2.2.2
  Allow you and your members to post blogs on your community or syndicate externally hosted blogs easily.
  
  
• IP.Downloads 2.2.2
  Complete file management application including file version control, commenting, and forum topic linking.
  
  
• IP.Content 2.0.2
  Content management for your community - run a full web site or a simply community portal. The possibilities are endless.
  
  
• IP.Chat 1.1.2
  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.





What's New

We have fixed many dozens of reported issues and added new features including:

• Improved SQL error display
  
• Moved topic redirect expiration, archive personal conversations, OpenID email is no longer required: full info
  
• Live search in AdminCP and Dashboard improvements
  
• Incomplete registration clarifications
  
• Various interface improvements to the SQL Toolbox
  
• Improvements to how secondary member groups are counted in the AdminCP

Donations for Autism Research and Support

Our recent fund drive for autism research has been a success. As of today, we have reached our goal of $1000! All the funds were raised from our community of customers and we would like to express our sincere thanks for your donations.

Invision Power Services is happy to be able to 100% match all donations made by our community. Therefore, we are thrilled to be able to make a donation of $2000 to Autism Speaks on behalf of the company and our customer-community. Again, you have our sincerest appreciation for your generosity during this fund raiser.

What would you think if the open comment box fields would be replaced with a reply link which shows an ajax drop down box when clicked. The purpose is a better status updates overview without disturbing the viewers eye if he doesn't want to reply to each single status update.

Thanks for commenting your thoughts about it.

Check out the screenshot for a detailed view:
http://i43.tinypic.com/1428yuo.png

This follows on from the discussion in the Customer Lounge regarding skins.. specifically my objection to there being no backgrounds and or borders on a lot of CONTENT areas of the board.

Dearest Darling Rikki....

It would appear that there are a large number of areas of Content blocks within the Default skin (upon which all skins are based) that do not have backgrounds specified.. they are relying on the body background, which is not best practice imho...If you could see your way clear to changing this, I am sure the community of skinners, and individuals trying to skin would be hugely grateful

Here is a visual example for you....

1. New Blogs screen in the IPB Default skin.



2. New Blogs screen with the base IPB default skin, but just a different darker body background - as you can see the lack of a background behind the content areas is significant when you start making any changes.. there are a lot of areas of the board like this too.


3.... You might say "well just add a background colour and a border to that div wrapper"... in this case #main_column, however that just gives one an ugly box of colour, without any ability to style it without changing the functionality of that div. (and god forbid if it is a class used elsewhere as well) It also breaks in Firefox in this case...  so then you have to fiddle around adjusting margins/padding... and hope and pray to various Greater Entities.. that it works in all browsers, and doesn't create 10 other problems in other areas.

To work around this I have included my own wrapper class in all those areas of the board thus affected (and there are a number).. however that has led to a huge workload whenever upgrades roll around, as then every template I have edited to add this wrapper has to be manually upgraded, in every skin. Additionally the blogs no longer supports this (that I can find..) I spent days trying to get it to work before giving up.. but not before much screaming and pulling my hair out and generally turning the air blue around me in the process.


4. This is something like I (and my customers) would WANT it to look like... far more styled and in keeping with the rest of the skin.. only problem is this is proving to be almost impossible to achieve (in the blogs anyway).  The other areas throughout the board the look can be achieved, but only with a lot of work.



imho... having easily adjustable and editable backgrounds to content areas is a must - I think it is pretty fundamental to have a background behind content areas, not rely on the body background. Same with borders to content areas... I haven't checked lately because I have been using my wrapper everywhere instead.. but last time I tried it you couldn't add a border attribute to the main content areas because of the border-collapse: collapse - has this changed?  If not.. could it... you should be able to add a border to content areas without drama.

To close dearest Rikki, I know I am not the world's greatest coder, and perhaps I have missed some blatantly obvious way of achieving my aims without all this rigmorole... (Highly likely - But if so you got to ask how total noobs are feeling!!!) and I also know that many of the youngie skinners and grooovsters don't feel borders or footers etc to be totally cool and web2ish etc etc.. but most of us grown ups quite like those things... as my customer base and queue for custom skins says.......and rully trullly it would be most excellent to not have to cry everytime IPS releases a new update because of all the useless non productive, non creative work it creates.



Edit to add other areas...

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So we mainly would like to store pictures in IP.Gallery and files in IP.Downloads.

One of the features I enjoy most about the IPSystem is the integration.  I can input my search criteria and it appears to search everywhere.  This is great!

I believe integration for IP.Gallery is being under utilized....

Why can we only select an entire Album to share in a Blog or Forum?  Why can't we just select a picture from an Album?  Why can't other 3rd party applications utilize that same integration (like Garage, Classifieds, etc..)  Let members store all photos in the Gallery.  Would really like the ability to upload a photo from anywhere and it would prompt you ("Which Album?") and give you the drop down of albums you have access to.  This way a user doesn't have to quit a forum or blog post to go over to IP.Gallery to upload a photo they would like to use in a blog or forum then go back...  too much work.  INTEGRATION IS GOOD!

So you are close, but not there yet for full IP.Gallery integration with the IP System...  but I have faith.

Now that IPB3 is here, I think its really time to address the way emoticons are managed because times have changed and boards no longer have just 20 of them, many have accumulated 100's of them. Large, small, light, dark, seasonal etc.

Surely there has to be a better, less confusing way of managing them for Admins, and I seem to recall suggestions in the past have been confirmed as having to wait for IPB3 because of its improved programming structure.

Sorry I'm going back to basics here, because after several years I still don't understand or have forgotten how Emoticon Management is supposed to work in the AdminCP, and there is still no documentation for it.

I don't understand why it is that you can add numerous folders of smilies in addition to the default emotion group, if IPB doesn't automatically include them (the default folder and all additional folders or child folders) when you actually come to post? I also don't understand why you can't turn entire groups of emoticons on and off.

One possible solution...

Lets say for example you have 150 smilies on your board, consisting of:

• 50 general ones
• 50 Halloween theme
• 50 Christmas themed (a little OTT but will do as an example!).

It could just as well be large, small, adult, whatever...

You wouldn't need to have the 100 seasonal emoticons available to click all year round, and you wouldn't need to have access when posting to the Christmas ones when posting near to or at Halloween, and vice versa.

So why not have a folder for each group, and have a check box in the Emoticon Manager to instantly enable or disable each group of smilies as required, and a separate sub-screen to enable, disable or delete individual emoticons within each group, either one at a time or all?

This would make things much more manageable for this with lots of smilies, and all smilies would still show in older posts because they are still on the server, just not all in the clickable list all at once.

You could take it a step further, by adding tabs (suggested so many times before) to the Show All Emoticon box, so that clicking on default or general would show those, then a tab would be available for the Halloween, large, small etc as defined by the groups in the AdminCP Emoticon Management screen.