IPBSupport News

We've been hard at work on IPS 4.0 for some time now, and we're finally at a stage where we are ready to reveal the new AdminCP to you. I won't be showing you everything the ACP has to offer - some things will be revealed in more detail in later blog entries. But lets get to an overview. Background information IPS4 brings with it a new CSS framework that aims to modularize our styles. This is something we started to work towards in IPB 3.2, but at that time we couldn't completely replace our structure. We no longer have a monolithic ipb_styles.css file. We now have a bunch of small CSS files, and each one handles something in particular. There's one each for forms, tables, pagination, buttons, layout and so on. This brings a few key benefits. Firstly, when we need to make a bug fix in, say, the forms CSS file, IPS4 will still be able to automatically upgrade all the other css files for you. In 3.x, one bug fix in ipb_styles.css could mean the whole file had to be manually upgraded. Secondly, it will be a lot more obvious for skinners where to look for particular things. Need to style a button? Look like buttons.css. Easy. And thirdly, if you're building pages in IP.Content, and you want to use our button styles, you can simply include that one CSS file without needing to include the entire CSS framework. CSS is of course concatenated and compressed before being delivered to the browser, but in a development environment, it exists as I described it above. In IPS4, both front end and AdminCP share the same CSS (and Javascript) framework. Skinners will be able to ship skins that work on both the front end and AdminCP with only a little extra work - and, of course, when we make bug fixes to the framework, it'll fix both areas. Before we go further, I want to make this part clear: The front-end and AdminCP look different. What you'll see shortly isn't what the front-end looks like. We will reveal that separately later. While the same framework is used, the AdminCP extends and overrides parts of it to suit its needs and style. Goals What did we want to achieve with the AdminCP? Our current AdminCP is often regarded as the best out of the big forum software platforms, so redesigning is a big undertaking. Better user of space. Our current ACP uses vertical space for the main menu, and horizontal space for the application menu. In an era of widescreen desktops being standard, this could be improved.Get rid of dropdown menus. The main menu currently uses dropdowns for navigation, but this can be difficult to use - especially if you want access something in a 3rd party app, meaning you have to traverse the Other Apps menu.More consistency across pages. Our current ACP has some interactive tables (e.g. the member list) - but not every table makes use of the functionality. We should be enhancing every page with similar functionality, if it makes sense.Better styling. People aren't a fan of pink, it turns out. I guess it'll have to go. The blue gradients are showing their age too.And the big one: Better mobile support. You can't effectively use the AdminCP on a mobile device. It's time you were able to manage your entire community from your phone with all of the same functionality, right?Responsive by default That last one is what we're most excited about. The AdminCP in IPS4 is fully responsive, and allows you to do everything just on a phone or tablet. What is responsiveness? It means that the page automatically changes to better suit the device you're using. While a desktop user would see full navigation menus and tables of data, a mobile user will see a reduced view (but with all the same data present!). Whether you need to manage your members, change some settings, send a bulk email or run some diagnostics, it can all be done on the go. This is a first for the big community software platforms, as far as I'm aware. Preview Here is a sample page from the new AdminCP, as seen on a desktop, with the same page shown at a mobile resolution: Although I won't include it here, tablets will see an 'intermediate' view with a reduced menu on the left. So, let's go over some of the key features of the screenshots. Navigation First, and perhaps most importantly, is the navigation. On a desktop, your applications are now arranged down the left-hand side, with their respective section menus available simply by hovering on the application - no dropdown menus to traverse. The application menu can be reordered per-admin, allowing each staff member to set the menu up to best suit their role. On a mobile, there's obviously not the space for a wide navigation menu. Therefore, the application/module menu is activated by clicking the top-right icon. This opens a sidebar, from which you can navigate: Tables What you see in the screenshots are our new default way of displaying tables of data. On the desktop view, we have filters across the top, a search box (and advanced search popup), and table headers can be clicked to dynamically sort the data via ajax. On a mobile view, this all collapses down - filters and sorting become menus, while table rows collapse to show data in a more suitable view. Responsive tables are a tricky thing to do right and there's a few different approaches, but given the types of data our AdminCP tables typically show, we think this is the best approach for us. Forms As has been discussed in some of our developer blogs, the IPS 4.0 framework supports a wide range of form field types - everything from text inputs to tree selectors to matrices. All of these field types work both on desktop and with a responsive mobile view. Here's a simple AdminCP form on both desktop and mobile: Tabs Tabs are used extensively, where appropriate. Here's a screenshot showing a typical tabbed page (and it also shows a tree view): Video of the mobile view in action I've taken a short video of the member section in action, showing filtering, live searching and the advanced search popup. I'm using the iOS simulator here, which has some display jitters and requires me to use the mouse, but it should give you a good idea of how the AdminCP will work on a phone. Conclusion So there we go - an overview of the new AdminCP. We still have more to show you. Individual features and pages that are noteworthy will be blogged about in due course in more detail, so keep an eye on this blog and our developer blog for more. Please do bear in mind that this is pre-alpha software, and everything you see is subject to change. We look forward to your feedback! Attached Thumbnails View the full article Quelle: http://community.invisionpower.com/topic/393294-40-introducing-the-new-admincp/

We've been hard at work on IPS 4.0 for some time now, and we're finally at a stage where we are ready to reveal the new AdminCP to you. I won't be showing you everything the ACP has to offer - some things will be revealed in more detail in later blog entries. But lets get to an overview. Background information IPS4 brings with it a new CSS framework that aims to modularize our styles. This is something we started to work towards in IPB 3.2, but at that time we couldn't completely replace our structure. We no longer have a monolithic ipb_styles.css file. We now have a bunch of small CSS files, and each one handles something in particular. There's one each for forms, tables, pagination, buttons, layout and so on. This brings a few key benefits. Firstly, when we need to make a bug fix in, say, the forms CSS file, IPS4 will still be able to automatically upgrade all the other css files for you. In 3.x, one bug fix in ipb_styles.css could mean the whole file had to be manually upgraded. Secondly, it will be a lot more obvious for skinners where to look for particular things. Need to style a button? Look like buttons.css. Easy. And thirdly, if you're building pages in IP.Content, and you want to use our button styles, you can simply include that one CSS file without needing to include the entire CSS framework. CSS is of course concatenated and compressed before being delivered to the browser, but in a development environment, it exists as I described it above. In IPS4, both front end and AdminCP share the same CSS (and Javascript) framework. Skinners will be able to ship skins that work on both the front end and AdminCP with only a little extra work - and, of course, when we make bug fixes to the framework, it'll fix both areas. Before we go further, I want to make this part clear: The front-end and AdminCP look different. What you'll see shortly isn't what the front-end looks like. We will reveal that separately later. While the same framework is used, the AdminCP extends and overrides parts of it to suit its needs and style. Goals What did we want to achieve with the AdminCP? Our current AdminCP is often regarded as the best out of the big forum software platforms, so redesigning is a big undertaking. Better user of space. Our current ACP uses vertical space for the main menu, and horizontal space for the application menu. In an era of widescreen desktops being standard, this could be improved.Get rid of dropdown menus. The main menu currently uses dropdowns for navigation, but this can be difficult to use - especially if you want access something in a 3rd party app, meaning you have to traverse the Other Apps menu.More consistency across pages. Our current ACP has some interactive tables (e.g. the member list) - but not every table makes use of the functionality. We should be enhancing every page with similar functionality, if it makes sense.Better styling. People aren't a fan of pink, it turns out. I guess it'll have to go. The blue gradients are showing their age too.And the big one: Better mobile support. You can't effectively use the AdminCP on a mobile device. It's time you were able to manage your entire community from your phone with all of the same functionality, right?Responsive by default That last one is what we're most excited about. The AdminCP in IPS4 is fully responsive, and allows you to do everything just on a phone or tablet. What is responsiveness? It means that the page automatically changes to better suit the device you're using. While a desktop user would see full navigation menus and tables of data, a mobile user will see a reduced view (but with all the same data present!). Whether you need to manage your members, change some settings, send a bulk email or run some diagnostics, it can all be done on the go. This is a first for the big community software platforms, as far as I'm aware. Preview Here is a sample page from the new AdminCP, as seen on a desktop, with the same page shown at a mobile resolution: Although I won't include it here, tablets will see an 'intermediate' view with a reduced menu on the left. So, let's go over some of the key features of the screenshots. Navigation First, and perhaps most importantly, is the navigation. On a desktop, your applications are now arranged down the left-hand side, with their respective section menus available simply by hovering on the application - no dropdown menus to traverse. The application menu can be reordered per-admin, allowing each staff member to set the menu up to best suit their role. On a mobile, there's obviously not the space for a wide navigation menu. Therefore, the application/module menu is activated by clicking the top-right icon. This opens a sidebar, from which you can navigate: Tables What you see in the screenshots are our new default way of displaying tables of data. On the desktop view, we have filters across the top, a search box (and advanced search popup), and table headers can be clicked to dynamically sort the data via ajax. On a mobile view, this all collapses down - filters and sorting become menus, while table rows collapse to show data in a more suitable view. Responsive tables are a tricky thing to do right and there's a few different approaches, but given the types of data our AdminCP tables typically show, we think this is the best approach for us. Forms As has been discussed in some of our developer blogs, the IPS 4.0 framework supports a wide range of form field types - everything from text inputs to tree selectors to matrices. All of these field types work both on desktop and with a responsive mobile view. Here's a simple AdminCP form on both desktop and mobile: Tabs Tabs are used extensively, where appropriate. Here's a screenshot showing a typical tabbed page (and it also shows a tree view): Video of the mobile view in action I've taken a short video of the member section in action, showing filtering, live searching and the advanced search popup. I'm using the iOS simulator here, which has some display jitters and requires me to use the mouse, but it should give you a good idea of how the AdminCP will work on a phone. Conclusion So there we go - an overview of the new AdminCP. We still have more to show you. Individual features and pages that are noteworthy will be blogged about in due course in more detail, so keep an eye on this blog and our developer blog for more. Please do bear in mind that this is pre-alpha software, and everything you see is subject to change. We look forward to your feedback! Attached Thumbnails Kompletten Blogeintrag lesen

Introduction Modifications, add-ons, plugins, hooks - whatever your preferred name for them is - 3rd party code modifications are an important part of any successful web application. It wasn't that long ago that the way you did this was manually opening up files and copying and pasting bits of code in, or the really cool web applications had points scattered throughout the code for modifications to be injected into, or even scripts which opened up the files and made the changes for you (I'm not joking, that's seriously what used to go on!). In fact, IP.Board was one of the first web applications to, using OOP, support modifications in a more structured way. Currently, we largely have 2 types of modifications: applications, which add whole new areas and functionality to your site (all of our applications: IP.Blog, IP.Gallery, IP.Downloads, IP.Chat, IP.Content and IP.Nexus use this architecture) and hooks which modify or extend the functionality of the IPS Social Suite or of applications. Applications themselves are sort of self-governing so there isn't much to say about them, with one exception: applications will now be able to be downloaded and subsequently installed into your Admin CP as one file - you will not have to FTP upload application source files. The file will just be a regular .tar file, so course, if you were so inclined, you could open it and go old skool. For the rest of this blog entry, I'm going to focus on hooks. Though parts of this blog entry will be more technical in nature than our others, I've tried to keep it just to what everyone will be interested in, and leave the boring stuff until the end. Terminology The term "hook" in 3.x is ambiguous. Sometimes it refers to the whole thing (e.g. "install a hook") and sometimes it refers to a specific technical part of that - the code which overloads other code (e.g. "skin hook", "library hook"), which are, even more confusingly, sometimes called "hook files". In 4.0, we've decided to rename hooks to plugins. The technical parts which make up a plugin will still be referred to as hooks. Sandboxing Plugins, by their nature, extend functionality already present on your site. Up until now, if a plugin experiences a problem (for example, if a new version is installed which the plugin doesn't support) it can cause an error on your site, which disabling the plugin fixes. Starting in 4.0, plugins will be sandboxed. This means that if a plugin experiences an unexpected error (such as a database driver error), your site will automatically fallback to the default behaviour, and your users will never know anything went wrong. Simple (yet advanced) settings In IP.Board 3.x, the Admin CP maintained a massive central area for managing most (though not all) settings. Plugins could add settings to this area, though there was no real standard to where to do that. Also, because this area was separate from the area where you install plugins, it could sometimes be confusing how to configure a plugin after installing it. In 4.0, each plugin is allocated a settings page which is accessed just by hitting the "Edit" button on the list of plugins. Plugin authors can manage this page how they like - rather than being confined to the strictly tabular layout and specific input types in 3.x. Versioning In 3.x, unlike with applications, there was no particularly clear way to upgrade a plugin from one version to another. In 4.x, plugins now support full versioning, so you can just upload a new version, and an upgrader will take care of it. Hook Types In 3.x, there were several different underlying types of hooks: Action overloaders - which allowed overloading the PHP class for any controller.Library hooks - which allowed overloading the PHP class for some (though not all) other classes.Data hooks - which allowed the modification of variables at specific, defined places in the code.Skin overloaders - which allowed overloading the compiled PHP class representing a group of templates.Template hooks - which allowed content to be inserted at specific points in templates.For 4.0, we've made some quite radical changes: Code Hooks The first 3 have been merged into one concept we call "Code Hooks". Code Hooks can overload any class (even things which presently can't be overloaded like extensions) through a technique called monkey-patching (more details have been mentioned in the developer channel). This, combined with the use of Active Record models for all content items (so "Topic", etc. is a class that can be overloaded) also makes data hooks obsolete. Theme Hooks The last 2 have also been merged into a concept called "Theme Hooks" (we're also renaming "skin" to "theme"). The way the current template hooks work is to insert content around certain pre-defined tags in the template. The problem is, not always is the point the plugin author needs available, also this is done in a way the content being inserted isn't aware of it's surroundings, which makes it difficult for things like adding a button to every post, which would need to know information about that post. After thinking for ages about a better way to facilitate theme hooks (I was halfway through a system which injected hook points automatically at compile time), our designer Rikki reminded us that a pretty well-known method for selecting HTML elements already exists... CSS selectors. Video demonstration What's really cool about this is that the content used acts as if it was part of the template - if for example, it's inserted in a foreach loop, the variables created by that are available. It can also use template logic and everything else templates themselves can do. On the back-end, these are compiled into a file which behaves like a 3.x skin overloader - so if it is necessary (or just desired) to overload the compiled version of the template, that is still possible. Theme hooks work for the Admin CP as well as the front-end. Developer information Developers no doubt would like to know the technical information of how this all works. Rather than write a blog entry covering all the different parts of plugins, we thought you might be interested to just see the developer documentation. We have 2 articles we can show you - one covering all the technical details of plugins, and another which provides a step-by-step guide for how to create a plugin. View the full article Quelle: http://community.invisionpower.com/topic/394159-ips-40-plugins/

Introduction Modifications, add-ons, plugins, hooks - whatever your preferred name for them is - 3rd party code modifications are an important part of any successful web application. It wasn't that long ago that the way you did this was manually opening up files and copying and pasting bits of code in, or the really cool web applications had points scattered throughout the code for modifications to be injected into, or even scripts which opened up the files and made the changes for you (I'm not joking, that's seriously what used to go on!). In fact, IP.Board was one of the first web applications to, using OOP, support modifications in a more structured way. Currently, we largely have 2 types of modifications: applications, which add whole new areas and functionality to your site (all of our applications: IP.Blog, IP.Gallery, IP.Downloads, IP.Chat, IP.Content and IP.Nexus use this architecture) and hooks which modify or extend the functionality of the IPS Social Suite or of applications. Applications themselves are sort of self-governing so there isn't much to say about them, with one exception: applications will now be able to be downloaded and subsequently installed into your Admin CP as one file - you will not have to FTP upload application source files. The file will just be a regular .tar file, so course, if you were so inclined, you could open it and go old skool. For the rest of this blog entry, I'm going to focus on hooks. Though parts of this blog entry will be more technical in nature than our others, I've tried to keep it just to what everyone will be interested in, and leave the boring stuff until the end. Terminology The term "hook" in 3.x is ambiguous. Sometimes it refers to the whole thing (e.g. "install a hook") and sometimes it refers to a specific technical part of that - the code which overloads other code (e.g. "skin hook", "library hook"), which are, even more confusingly, sometimes called "hook files". In 4.0, we've decided to rename hooks to plugins. The technical parts which make up a plugin will still be referred to as hooks. Sandboxing Plugins, by their nature, extend functionality already present on your site. Up until now, if a plugin experiences a problem (for example, if a new version is installed which the plugin doesn't support) it can cause an error on your site, which disabling the plugin fixes. Starting in 4.0, plugins will be sandboxed. This means that if a plugin experiences an unexpected error (such as a database driver error), your site will automatically fallback to the default behaviour, and your users will never know anything went wrong. Simple (yet advanced) settings In IP.Board 3.x, the Admin CP maintained a massive central area for managing most (though not all) settings. Plugins could add settings to this area, though there was no real standard to where to do that. Also, because this area was separate from the area where you install plugins, it could sometimes be confusing how to configure a plugin after installing it. In 4.0, each plugin is allocated a settings page which is accessed just by hitting the "Edit" button on the list of plugins. Plugin authors can manage this page how they like - rather than being confined to the strictly tabular layout and specific input types in 3.x. Versioning In 3.x, unlike with applications, there was no particularly clear way to upgrade a plugin from one version to another. In 4.x, plugins now support full versioning, so you can just upload a new version, and an upgrader will take care of it. Hook Types In 3.x, there were several different underlying types of hooks: Action overloaders - which allowed overloading the PHP class for any controller.Library hooks - which allowed overloading the PHP class for some (though not all) other classes.Data hooks - which allowed the modification of variables at specific, defined places in the code.Skin overloaders - which allowed overloading the compiled PHP class representing a group of templates.Template hooks - which allowed content to be inserted at specific points in templates.For 4.0, we've made some quite radical changes: Code Hooks The first 3 have been merged into one concept we call "Code Hooks". Code Hooks can overload any class (even things which presently can't be overloaded like extensions) through a technique called monkey-patching (more details have been mentioned in the developer channel). This, combined with the use of Active Record models for all content items (so "Topic", etc. is a class that can be overloaded) also makes data hooks obsolete. Theme Hooks The last 2 have also been merged into a concept called "Theme Hooks" (we're also renaming "skin" to "theme"). The way the current template hooks work is to insert content around certain pre-defined tags in the template. The problem is, not always is the point the plugin author needs available, also this is done in a way the content being inserted isn't aware of it's surroundings, which makes it difficult for things like adding a button to every post, which would need to know information about that post. After thinking for ages about a better way to facilitate theme hooks (I was halfway through a system which injected hook points automatically at compile time), our designer Rikki reminded us that a pretty well-known method for selecting HTML elements already exists... CSS selectors. Video demonstration What's really cool about this is that the content used acts as if it was part of the template - if for example, it's inserted in a foreach loop, the variables created by that are available. It can also use template logic and everything else templates themselves can do. On the back-end, these are compiled into a file which behaves like a 3.x skin overloader - so if it is necessary (or just desired) to overload the compiled version of the template, that is still possible. Theme hooks work for the Admin CP as well as the front-end. Developer information Developers no doubt would like to know the technical information of how this all works. Rather than write a blog entry covering all the different parts of plugins, we thought you might be interested to just see the developer documentation. We have 2 articles we can show you - one covering all the technical details of plugins, and another which provides a step-by-step guide for how to create a plugin. Kompletten Blogeintrag lesen

Piracy is something that all software companies face and IPS is no exception. Our losses due to credit card fraud and software piracy are significant and to minimize passing along costs to customers, we are seeking to expand our piracy department and take a harder stance against piracy and pursue those who engage in it. The position entails: - Identifying customers, using internal tools, that have inactive licenses and are using later versions of the software than their license allows and report to customer service for license termination. - Identifying customers, using internal tools, that have shared IPS products or marketplace purchases with illegal download sites and report to customer service for license termination. - Following up on usage piracy complaints. - Vigorously pursuing distribution hubs. - Working with web hosts, ISPs and law enforcement. To qualify you MUST: - Be at least 18 years old (for legal reasons, no exceptions to this policy can be made.) - Have excellent written communication skills. English is a must. - Be familiar with identifying the owner and host of a website (i.e.: Using WHOIS and other similar tools.) - Be familiar with the DMCA and associated procedures. - Reside in the United States. If you qualify and are interested, please contact hr@invisionpower.com for more information. Thank you for your interest! View the full article Quelle: http://community.invisionpower.com/topic/392583-ips-job-opening-piracy-dept/

Piracy is something that all software companies face and IPS is no exception. Our losses due to credit card fraud and software piracy are significant and to minimize passing along costs to customers, we are seeking to expand our piracy department and take a harder stance against piracy and pursue those who engage in it. The position entails: - Identifying customers, using internal tools, that have inactive licenses and are using later versions of the software than their license allows and report to customer service for license termination. - Identifying customers, using internal tools, that have shared IPS products or marketplace purchases with illegal download sites and report to customer service for license termination. - Following up on usage piracy complaints. - Vigorously pursuing distribution hubs. - Working with web hosts, ISPs and law enforcement. To qualify you MUST: - Be at least 18 years old (for legal reasons, no exceptions to this policy can be made.) - Have excellent written communication skills. English is a must. - Be familiar with identifying the owner and host of a website (i.e.: Using WHOIS and other similar tools.) - Be familiar with the DMCA and associated procedures. - Reside in the United States. If you qualify and are interested, please contact hr@invisionpower.com for more information. Thank you for your interest! Kompletten Blogeintrag lesen

One of the things we wanted to focus on for IPS Social Suite 4.0 right from the beginning was providing better support for sites which do not use English or use multiple languages (or, as it was scribbled on my whiteboard, "++ i18n/L19n"). In this blog entry I'm going to cover some of those changes and new features. Translatable Everything Currently when you create a forum, user group, custom profile field, etc. you have to give it a title and can only do this in one language. If you have more that one language installed, you might want to provide different titles for different languages. In 4.0 you can do exactly that - if you have only one language installed, these fields will continue to show as normal text boxes - however, if you have more than one installed you'll see several text boxes like this: Visual Language Editor One feature that has been really popular in IP.Board is the Visual Skin Editor - a tool which allows you to browse your site, and click on elements to bring up a colour selector to change it. What if we could take this idea and apply it to translating as well? Allowing you to click on any word or phrase on your site and translate it there immediately. In 4.0, you can. Easier Language Management In addition to the visual translation we've also made several improvements to the traditional translation method: As you search for a language string, results appear as you type.Editing a language string saves immediately without needing to click a save button.Filter tabs can show you words/phrases which have not yet been translated or the translation is out of date (meaning we've changed the default English value for the word/phrase since it was translated).We've also made importing/exporting much faster and more reliable - no matter how large your language is (it will grow as you add more applications of course) there is now no risk of hitting an error importing/exporting (for those interested in the technical side of how this is achieved, see this blog entry). An exported language pack will also now maintain information on the version of each application it was exported from, so that the filter which shows outdated language strings is always accurate. Automatic Language Detection Let's say you have Spanish and French languages installed on your site - up until now, you'd have to choose one default language, and users who want the other would have to manually choose it (which can be extremely difficult to find how to do when you're browsing a site in a foreign language). In 4.0, we automatically examine the information that the user's browser sends (which includes their preferred language) to choose the best one out of what's available, if that user hasn't already set an explicit preference. Pluralisation In English, pluralisation is very simple - for most nouns, you just append "s" on the end, with some variation for certain words. This however, isn't the case in all languages - for example, I was speaking with the owner of a site in Slovak recently who was telling me that the word "records" changes depending on the number of records there are - for 2 records, it's "2 články", but for 5 records it's "5 článkov". Currently, most language strings only have a singular and plural form (as is all that's needed in English) - meaning having the site show "2 články"/"5 článkov" was impossible. In 4.0, we've introduced some really basic logic into language strings to accommodate this. Rather than having, for example, two language strings with the singular and the plural, there is now one with a value like this: {# [1:record][?:records]} The # indicates where the number will go, then each set of square brackets represents a possible value - the number before the : indicating the number which will cause that to show, and ? meaning "all other numbers". So for our Slovak example, we'd set the value to: {# [1:článok][5:článkov][?:články]} On display, it will automatically show the appropriate version. Lists Along a similar thread to pluralisation, we've also made the way lists are formatted to be customised through a special language string. For example, a list in English looks like "one, two and three". However, in Japanese, it's "一、二、三。" (the comma symbol is different and there's no "and") - similarly Arabic, Thai and others have similar differences. In 4.0, simply by changing an example language string, this can be changed. In the default language, this language string is: a, b and c For our Japanese example, we'd just change it to: a、b、c UTF-8 Without wanting to get into too much technical detail - UTF-8 is the most common of many ways text can be encoded for storage and display on webpages. UTF-8 has been the default encoding in our software since IP.Board 3.0. Some sites which have been around for a long while though may not be using UTF-8. This can cause issues with some features where UTF-8 encoding is expected (for example, many features which rely on JavaScript require UTF-8 due to JSON only supporting it and nothing else). In addition, some sites may try to use UTF-8, but content is actually stored differently as the database is set to a different encoding, which can also cause issues. In 4.0, we're going all UTF-8. If you're not already on it, the upgrader will convert data. This means a much more reliable and compatible way of handling text. Attached Thumbnails View the full article Quelle: http://community.invisionpower.com/topic/392090-ips-40-internationalization-and-localization/

One of the things we wanted to focus on for IPS Social Suite 4.0 right from the beginning was providing better support for sites which do not use English or use multiple languages (or, as it was scribbled on my whiteboard, "++ i18n/L19n"). In this blog entry I'm going to cover some of those changes and new features. Translatable Everything Currently when you create a forum, user group, custom profile field, etc. you have to give it a title and can only do this in one language. If you have more that one language installed, you might want to provide different titles for different languages. In 4.0 you can do exactly that - if you have only one language installed, these fields will continue to show as normal text boxes - however, if you have more than one installed you'll see several text boxes like this: Visual Language Editor One feature that has been really popular in IP.Board is the Visual Skin Editor - a tool which allows you to browse your site, and click on elements to bring up a colour selector to change it. What if we could take this idea and apply it to translating as well? Allowing you to click on any word or phrase on your site and translate it there immediately. In 4.0, you can. Easier Language Management In addition to the visual translation we've also made several improvements to the traditional translation method: As you search for a language string, results appear as you type.Editing a language string saves immediately without needing to click a save button.Filter tabs can show you words/phrases which have not yet been translated or the translation is out of date (meaning we've changed the default English value for the word/phrase since it was translated).We've also made importing/exporting much faster and more reliable - no matter how large your language is (it will grow as you add more applications of course) there is now no risk of hitting an error importing/exporting (for those interested in the technical side of how this is achieved, see this blog entry). An exported language pack will also now maintain information on the version of each application it was exported from, so that the filter which shows outdated language strings is always accurate. Automatic Language Detection Let's say you have Spanish and French languages installed on your site - up until now, you'd have to choose one default language, and users who want the other would have to manually choose it (which can be extremely difficult to find how to do when you're browsing a site in a foreign language). In 4.0, we automatically examine the information that the user's browser sends (which includes their preferred language) to choose the best one out of what's available, if that user hasn't already set an explicit preference. Pluralisation In English, pluralisation is very simple - for most nouns, you just append "s" on the end, with some variation for certain words. This however, isn't the case in all languages - for example, I was speaking with the owner of a site in Slovak recently who was telling me that the word "records" changes depending on the number of records there are - for 2 records, it's "2 články", but for 5 records it's "5 článkov". Currently, most language strings only have a singular and plural form (as is all that's needed in English) - meaning having the site show "2 články"/"5 článkov" was impossible. In 4.0, we've introduced some really basic logic into language strings to accommodate this. Rather than having, for example, two language strings with the singular and the plural, there is now one with a value like this: {# [1:record][?:records]} The # indicates where the number will go, then each set of square brackets represents a possible value - the number before the : indicating the number which will cause that to show, and ? meaning "all other numbers". So for our Slovak example, we'd set the value to: {# [1:článok][5:článkov][?:články]} On display, it will automatically show the appropriate version. Lists Along a similar thread to pluralisation, we've also made the way lists are formatted to be customised through a special language string. For example, a list in English looks like "one, two and three". However, in Japanese, it's "一、二、三。" (the comma symbol is different and there's no "and") - similarly Arabic, Thai and others have similar differences. In 4.0, simply by changing an example language string, this can be changed. In the default language, this language string is: a, b and c For our Japanese example, we'd just change it to: a、b、c UTF-8 Without wanting to get into too much technical detail - UTF-8 is the most common of many ways text can be encoded for storage and display on webpages. UTF-8 has been the default encoding in our software since IP.Board 3.0. Some sites which have been around for a long while though may not be using UTF-8. This can cause issues with some features where UTF-8 encoding is expected (for example, many features which rely on JavaScript require UTF-8 due to JSON only supporting it and nothing else). In addition, some sites may try to use UTF-8, but content is actually stored differently as the database is set to a different encoding, which can also cause issues. In 4.0, we're going all UTF-8. If you're not already on it, the upgrader will convert data. This means a much more reliable and compatible way of handling text. Attached Thumbnails Kompletten Blogeintrag lesen

We have a few updates to our services to share with you. Community in the Cloud For over 11 years IPS has provided hosting services for clients that want a turn-key approach to their online community. Over time we have become more and more focused on community hosting solutions so it seemed like a good time to drop the older "hosting" term and adopt a new name for our service: Community in the Cloud. Granted it's the buzzword of the day but we were in the cloud before the cloud was a term :smile:. Right now it's all that you had before but presented in a much easier to understand format. Check out our new information page: http://www.invisionpower.com/cloud-pricing This name and presentation change is just step one. We will soon be increasing our storage quotas and have some other great changes on the way! New Support Package We often get clients who are looking for a higher level of support beyond just tickets. They want training, schedule upgrade service, consultations, and more. Of course offering that level of support is intensive and in the past we have always custom-quoted such services. Now to streamline we we have created a new Premium Support package that includes: Implementation Scheduled installation timeInitial training & consultation by phone or live chatPost-deployment best practices trainingCustom migration from other platforms*Custom skin design*Custom single sign on (SSO)*SupportSame business day ticket responseScheduled upgrade timesCustom skin upgrades between versions*Security updates applied before public releaseMonthly MaintenanceLogs checked for signs of problemsAdvise and schedule if upgrades are availableDatabase maintenanceSettings reviewed for optimal performanceBest practices reviews* Custom services may incur additional fees The new Premium Support package is $500 every 6 months and is available for purchase or upgrade today. If you have any questions feel free to email sales@invisionpower.com and we will be happy to help. Transfer Promotion If you are interested in moving to IPS Community in the Cloud we are offering a promotion that should make now the best time to make the switch. From now until 1 September 2013 we will offer free transfers and free conversions. This means if you are already using IPS Community Suite on your own servers but want to switch to the CiC we will move your data for you. It also means that if you are using a different community software provider and are ready to upgrade to CiC we will both transfer your data and convert it using one of our pre-made converters. View the full article Quelle: http://community.invisionpower.com/topic/391708-community-in-the-cloud-new-support-package-and-transfer-promo/

We have a few updates to our services to share with you. Community in the Cloud For over 11 years IPS has provided hosting services for clients that want a turn-key approach to their online community. Over time we have become more and more focused on community hosting solutions so it seemed like a good time to drop the older "hosting" term and adopt a new name for our service: Community in the Cloud. Granted it's the buzzword of the day but we were in the cloud before the cloud was a term :smile:. Right now it's all that you had before but presented in a much easier to understand format. Check out our new information page: http://www.invisionpower.com/cloud-pricing This name and presentation change is just step one. We will soon be increasing our storage quotas and have some other great changes on the way! New Support Package We often get clients who are looking for a higher level of support beyond just tickets. They want training, schedule upgrade service, consultations, and more. Of course offering that level of support is intensive and in the past we have always custom-quoted such services. Now to streamline we we have created a new Premium Support package that includes: Implementation Scheduled installation timeInitial training & consultation by phone or live chatPost-deployment best practices trainingCustom migration from other platforms*Custom skin design*Custom single sign on (SSO)*SupportSame business day ticket responseScheduled upgrade timesCustom skin upgrades between versions*Security updates applied before public releaseMonthly MaintenanceLogs checked for signs of problemsAdvise and schedule if upgrades are availableDatabase maintenanceSettings reviewed for optimal performanceBest practices reviews* Custom services may incur additional fees The new Premium Support package is $500 every 6 months and is available for purchase or upgrade today. If you have any questions feel free to email sales@invisionpower.com and we will be happy to help. Transfer Promotion If you are interested in moving to IPS Community in the Cloud we are offering a promotion that should make now the best time to make the switch. From now until 1 September 2013 we will offer free transfers and free conversions. This means if you are already using IPS Community Suite on your own servers but want to switch to the CiC we will move your data for you. It also means that if you are using a different community software provider and are ready to upgrade to CiC we will both transfer your data and convert it using one of our pre-made converters. Kompletten Blogeintrag lesen

Security Update: Potential vulnerability in third-party Minify library A potential security vulnerability with Minify has been discovered that only affects some specific server environments. Minify is a third party app that combines multiple CSS and javascript files to help speed up the rendering of IP.Board in a browser. This issue may affect your site even if you are not making use of Minify in IP.Board. Although the vulnerability is caused by the Minify application, in the interests of our customers we felt it best to patch the issue. We have updated the zip file available from your client area and are including a manual patch in this announcement. Additionally, IPS reported the issue to the Minify developers who have released their own similar patch today in the form of a new release (version 2.1.7): https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/minify/cpN-ncKPFZE/kwYVpLMkfDwJ This issue only affects IP.Board 3.4.0 - 3.4.5. Installing the patch Simply download the attached zip file and once extracted, upload /public/min/config.php to your server replacing the one on the server. minify_patch_07_13.zip 3.68KB 496 downloads Alternatively, you may follow the instructions made available by the Minify developers in their release announcement. While our patch was developed in-house prior to the release of Minify 2.1.7, either patch will protect your board. IPS Hosting Clients If you are an IPS Hosting client you do not need to be concerned with this security issue. Our servers are not vulnerable to this specific exploit. Quelle: http://community.invisionpower.com/topic/391642-minify-security-patch-for-ipboard-34x/

I'd like to introduce two new areas we've been working on. These new areas are designed to support our developer community, while making it easier for our clients to get their custom projects taken care of. Projects http://community.invisionpower.com/resources/projects The first new area is Projects. When you have a custom project for which you need a developer/designer, this new area will allow you to gather responses from developers interested in working with you. Post your project details, choose an approximate budget and date, if applicable, and developers can then register their interest in the project. From there, you can contact developers to help you decide which to go with. Projects you post will be open for responses for 30 days, after which they'll be closed. If you agree to work with a developer before that time, you can mark it as completed by clicking the Accept link next to the chosen developer's response. You'll be notified when new developers respond to your project, too. IPS won't be involved in the communication between you and a developer in any way, so it's up to you to agree project details and exchange payment, if necessary, before work starts. We hope this will become a handy tool to help match up customers and developers on custom projects. In time we'll add more features, such as the ability to review customers/developers when a project is complete. Developer Profiles http://community.invisionpower.com/resources/developers The second new area is Developer Profiles. This new area gives developers a place to present themselves to potential customers. When a developer creates a profile, we'll automatically build a page for them that pulls in their Marketplace information, and gives them a way of highlighting one of their contributed files and a place to write about themselves. As a customer, you can browse the listings to check out the developers in our community. If you've worked with a developer or just like their files, you can Recommend them by clicking the link on their page. If a developer with a profile responds to a Project, we'll link their name to their developer profile so that you can find out more about them. We hope these two new features will help foster more growth in the development community, making it easier for customers to find developers, and giving developers a central place to find potential work. Check them out - and if you have any feedback, please do feel free to share it. We've already made many changes based on the feedback from our preview to developers, so now it's your turn :smile: View the full article Quelle: http://community.invisionpower.com/topic/388461-introducing-projects-and-developer-profiles/

I'd like to introduce two new areas we've been working on. These new areas are designed to support our developer community, while making it easier for our clients to get their custom projects taken care of. Projects http://community.invisionpower.com/resources/projects The first new area is Projects. When you have a custom project for which you need a developer/designer, this new area will allow you to gather responses from developers interested in working with you. Post your project details, choose an approximate budget and date, if applicable, and developers can then register their interest in the project. From there, you can contact developers to help you decide which to go with. Projects you post will be open for responses for 30 days, after which they'll be closed. If you agree to work with a developer before that time, you can mark it as completed by clicking the Accept link next to the chosen developer's response. You'll be notified when new developers respond to your project, too. IPS won't be involved in the communication between you and a developer in any way, so it's up to you to agree project details and exchange payment, if necessary, before work starts. We hope this will become a handy tool to help match up customers and developers on custom projects. In time we'll add more features, such as the ability to review customers/developers when a project is complete. Developer Profiles http://community.invisionpower.com/resources/developers The second new area is Developer Profiles. This new area gives developers a place to present themselves to potential customers. When a developer creates a profile, we'll automatically build a page for them that pulls in their Marketplace information, and gives them a way of highlighting one of their contributed files and a place to write about themselves. As a customer, you can browse the listings to check out the developers in our community. If you've worked with a developer or just like their files, you can Recommend them by clicking the link on their page. If a developer with a profile responds to a Project, we'll link their name to their developer profile so that you can find out more about them. We hope these two new features will help foster more growth in the development community, making it easier for customers to find developers, and giving developers a central place to find potential work. Check them out - and if you have any feedback, please do feel free to share it. We've already made many changes based on the feedback from our preview to developers, so now it's your turn :smile: Kompletten Blogeintrag lesen

Our proprietary Spam Service which was launched in 2009 has been a very popular feature for IP.Board license holders. This service (which is included at no additional cost for all active license holders) is queried during account registration on your IP.Board installation and will respond to the query with a flag to indicate the likelihood that the registration might be a spammer. You can control how your site should react to the various responses the service may return in the admin control panel, and combined with other anti-spam tools in IP.Board you can help prevent spam registrations from occurring on your site. While the system is constantly "learning" and blocking new spam signups, we have performed some updates to the service recently that we feel will help the system respond even quicker and more reliably to spam account registrations. First, Some Stats For those interested, we have some interesting statistics to share with you. To date, the spam service has responded to over 58 million requests! The service has responded to almost 163,000 requests in the last 24 hours alone, and the service continues to respond to between 5,000 and 10,000 more requests day over day. A total of over 23 million user registrations have been blocked (i.e. a status code of 3 or 4 was returned by the spam service) to date. That's 23 million spammers we've helped you prevent from disrupting your community. Quicker Responses With the recent updates we performed, the system will more quickly respond to new spammer accounts than it did previously. It is important that the system do not treat a single report of a spammer as a permanent block on that account of course, however we identified several areas where the algorithms used could be tweaked to more quickly identify potential spammers and have performed these changes. Additionally, by use of decaying flags (treating newer reports with a higher priority than older accounts), the system can more quickly respond to new spammer threats. Project Honeypot Integration We have integrated our spam service with the popular Project Honeypot service. This means that all account registrations are checked through Project Honeypot, and the threat score that is returned from this service is used to help determine the likelihood of the IP address being associated with a spammer. Stop Forum Spam Integration In addition to integration with Project Honeypot, we have integrated the IPS Spam Service with Stop Forum Spam. Our spam service will check the Stop Forum Spam email address and IP address databases and use any information found here to help weight and score the likelihood that the registration is coming from a spammer. It is important to note that we do not rely directly on the Stop Forum Spam data to determine a spammer status, but are instead using the data from this service to help weight the overall score based on all of the flags we have available. Enterprise Spam Mitigation If you are in a load balanced or cloud environment, you may wish to take advantage of this new offering which allows calls to the spam service from multiple origins using the same license key. Additionally, this service allows greater control over your spam mitigation service including weighting algorithm preferences and customized blacklists and whitelists. This addon service is available for $100/6 months. For more information, please contact our sales department. Collectively we feel the changes we have made to the service will benefit all IPS customers who are making use of our IPS Spam Service. We hope these changes help your community fight the threat of spam more rigorously and more reliably than ever before. View the full article Quelle: http://community.invisionpower.com/topic/388399-spam-service-updates/

Our proprietary Spam Service which was launched in 2009 has been a very popular feature for IP.Board license holders. This service (which is included at no additional cost for all active license holders) is queried during account registration on your IP.Board installation and will respond to the query with a flag to indicate the likelihood that the registration might be a spammer. You can control how your site should react to the various responses the service may return in the admin control panel, and combined with other anti-spam tools in IP.Board you can help prevent spam registrations from occurring on your site. While the system is constantly "learning" and blocking new spam signups, we have performed some updates to the service recently that we feel will help the system respond even quicker and more reliably to spam account registrations. First, Some Stats For those interested, we have some interesting statistics to share with you. To date, the spam service has responded to over 58 million requests! The service has responded to almost 163,000 requests in the last 24 hours alone, and the service continues to respond to between 5,000 and 10,000 more requests day over day. A total of over 23 million user registrations have been blocked (i.e. a status code of 3 or 4 was returned by the spam service) to date. That's 23 million spammers we've helped you prevent from disrupting your community. Quicker Responses With the recent updates we performed, the system will more quickly respond to new spammer accounts than it did previously. It is important that the system do not treat a single report of a spammer as a permanent block on that account of course, however we identified several areas where the algorithms used could be tweaked to more quickly identify potential spammers and have performed these changes. Additionally, by use of decaying flags (treating newer reports with a higher priority than older accounts), the system can more quickly respond to new spammer threats. Project Honeypot Integration We have integrated our spam service with the popular Project Honeypot service. This means that all account registrations are checked through Project Honeypot, and the threat score that is returned from this service is used to help determine the likelihood of the IP address being associated with a spammer. Stop Forum Spam Integration In addition to integration with Project Honeypot, we have integrated the IPS Spam Service with Stop Forum Spam. Our spam service will check the Stop Forum Spam email address and IP address databases and use any information found here to help weight and score the likelihood that the registration is coming from a spammer. It is important to note that we do not rely directly on the Stop Forum Spam data to determine a spammer status, but are instead using the data from this service to help weight the overall score based on all of the flags we have available. Enterprise Spam Mitigation If you are in a load balanced or cloud environment, you may wish to take advantage of this new offering which allows calls to the spam service from multiple origins using the same license key. Additionally, this service allows greater control over your spam mitigation service including weighting algorithm preferences and customized blacklists and whitelists. This addon service is available for $100/6 months. For more information, please contact our sales department. Collectively we feel the changes we have made to the service will benefit all IPS customers who are making use of our IPS Spam Service. We hope these changes help your community fight the threat of spam more rigorously and more reliably than ever before. Kompletten Blogeintrag lesen

To round up our previous blog entries on the post editor in IPS Social Suite 4.0, there's just a few extra features not previously mentioned to show off. @mentions @mentions are a common feature on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. If you type an @ symbol and then start typing the name of a friend, an autocomplete menu shows so you can quickly then click on the user and they'll receive a notification that they've been mentioned. In 4.0 you can do exactly this to mention any user. Automatic Saving Currently, when you're typing a post, every 2 minutes the content of the post is saved, so that if you accidentally navigate away from the page, your post content can be recovered. The content is saved by making an AJAX request. In 4.0, we've rewritten this to use HTML5 web storage. This unloads this work to the browser, meaning no call needs to be made to the server. Because this is much more efficient, the save can be done much more frequently (every few seconds). This makes the autosave feature much more useful. In addition, we've expanded the feature to support attachments. So if you've uploaded files, these too will be automatically recovered. Essentially if you're in the middle of typing a post and you refresh the page, everything will reappear exactly as you left it. HTML Posting If you allow some users (like administrators) to post arbitrary HTML, they will see an additional "Source" button on the editor. When clicked, this will show them the raw HTML for the post and they can manipulate it here Attached Thumbnails View the full article Quelle: http://community.invisionpower.com/topic/388306-ips-40-editor-part-4-special-features/

To round up our previous blog entries on the post editor in IPS Social Suite 4.0, there's just a few extra features not previously mentioned to show off. @mentions @mentions are a common feature on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. If you type an @ symbol and then start typing the name of a friend, an autocomplete menu shows so you can quickly then click on the user and they'll receive a notification that they've been mentioned. In 4.0 you can do exactly this to mention any user. Automatic Saving Currently, when you're typing a post, every 2 minutes the content of the post is saved, so that if you accidentally navigate away from the page, your post content can be recovered. The content is saved by making an AJAX request. In 4.0, we've rewritten this to use HTML5 web storage. This unloads this work to the browser, meaning no call needs to be made to the server. Because this is much more efficient, the save can be done much more frequently (every few seconds). This makes the autosave feature much more useful. In addition, we've expanded the feature to support attachments. So if you've uploaded files, these too will be automatically recovered. Essentially if you're in the middle of typing a post and you refresh the page, everything will reappear exactly as you left it. HTML Posting If you allow some users (like administrators) to post arbitrary HTML, they will see an additional "Source" button on the editor. When clicked, this will show them the raw HTML for the post and they can manipulate it here Attached Thumbnails Kompletten Blogeintrag lesen

Introduction Joining my previous entries about content and uploading features in post editor in IPS Social Suite 4.0, I'd like to take you through the customisation features on the editor. Toolbar layout The buttons that appear on the toolbar are completely customisable in 4.0 and you can set different layouts for desktop, tablet and mobile (so that you don't show more buttons than the device can show). This is what the management screen looks like: (This is an unfinished design - the tabs won't be be like that in the final version.) To move a button you just drag and drop. The buttons on the right allow you to add more rows or separators. Clicking on a button brings up a dialog where you can adjust where and to whom it shows: Adding Buttons There are two ways to add a button to the editor. The easiest way is to install a CKEditor plugin. CKEditor has loads of plugins, and installing is as easy as uploading the zip file from their site. Here's a screenshot of the symbol plugin being used: The second way is similar to how custom BBCode currently works, you specify the HTML code to be added when the user clicks on the button. Manually created buttons can optionally have a dialog popup to ask for an option. Design Just as you can install CKEditor plugins by uploading the zip file, you can do exactly the same with CKEditor skins to change the design of the editor. You then simply set for each skin on your community which CKEditor skin to use for it. BBCode Though no features in IPS4 insert BBCode-style tags into the editor (like is currently done for attachments, etc.) users can still type BBCode into the editor and it will work fine. We've rewritten how BBCode is parsed to be much more secure and reliable and produce more standards-compliant HTML (for those who are interested, it parses the post content into a DOM Document and examines only the text nodes for BBCode tags, then either splits the nodes surrounding it and inserts one for block-level elements, or wraps all subsequent text nodes in the appropriate formatting element until the end BBCode is found). The benefit to this is that there now no longer needs to be a "BBCode mode" - you can type BBCode straight into the editor, even complicated stuff like lists spanning multiple lines, and it comes out looking great. The downside to this approach is that custom BBCodes can no longer be added through the Admin CP. However, as mentioned above, we now have the ability to add custom buttons to the editor which work in a much more intuitive way, and can do everything that custom BBCodes could and more. For those who really want to be able to add the ability for custom BBCode, we've isolated the method that returns the supported BBCode (and information needed to parse them) into a specific method so that custom BBCode can be added with a very simple hook specific to that purpose. Conclusion There's still one more blog entry to go in our series on the editor. To finish up I'll be showing off some cool special features including how you can post using regular HTML. Attached Thumbnails View the full article Quelle: http://community.invisionpower.com/topic/388214-ips-40-editor-part-3-customisation-and-bbcode/

Introduction Joining my previous entries about content and uploading features in post editor in IPS Social Suite 4.0, I'd like to take you through the customisation features on the editor. Toolbar layout The buttons that appear on the toolbar are completely customisable in 4.0 and you can set different layouts for desktop, tablet and mobile (so that you don't show more buttons than the device can show). This is what the management screen looks like: (This is an unfinished design - the tabs won't be be like that in the final version.) To move a button you just drag and drop. The buttons on the right allow you to add more rows or separators. Clicking on a button brings up a dialog where you can adjust where and to whom it shows: Adding Buttons There are two ways to add a button to the editor. The easiest way is to install a CKEditor plugin. CKEditor has loads of plugins, and installing is as easy as uploading the zip file from their site. Here's a screenshot of the symbol plugin being used: The second way is similar to how custom BBCode currently works, you specify the HTML code to be added when the user clicks on the button. Manually created buttons can optionally have a dialog popup to ask for an option. Design Just as you can install CKEditor plugins by uploading the zip file, you can do exactly the same with CKEditor skins to change the design of the editor. You then simply set for each skin on your community which CKEditor skin to use for it. BBCode Though no features in IPS4 insert BBCode-style tags into the editor (like is currently done for attachments, etc.) users can still type BBCode into the editor and it will work fine. We've rewritten how BBCode is parsed to be much more secure and reliable and produce more standards-compliant HTML (for those who are interested, it parses the post content into a DOM Document and examines only the text nodes for BBCode tags, then either splits the nodes surrounding it and inserts one for block-level elements, or wraps all subsequent text nodes in the appropriate formatting element until the end BBCode is found). The benefit to this is that there now no longer needs to be a "BBCode mode" - you can type BBCode straight into the editor, even complicated stuff like lists spanning multiple lines, and it comes out looking great. The downside to this approach is that custom BBCodes can no longer be added through the Admin CP. However, as mentioned above, we now have the ability to add custom buttons to the editor which work in a much more intuitive way, and can do everything that custom BBCodes could and more. For those who really want to be able to add the ability for custom BBCode, we've isolated the method that returns the supported BBCode (and information needed to parse them) into a specific method so that custom BBCode can be added with a very simple hook specific to that purpose. Conclusion There's still one more blog entry to go in our series on the editor. To finish up I'll be showing off some cool special features including how you can post using regular HTML. Attached Thumbnails Kompletten Blogeintrag lesen

Introduction In the last blog entry I introduced some of the features in the post editor in IPS Social Suite 4.0. In this blog entry I'd like to show you the uploading features in the editor. Using the "Image" and "Attachment" dialogs Along the bottom of the editor there are two buttons that deal with uploading files: image and attachments. Both present a dialog which looks like this: We decided to keep both an images and an attachments dialog as users wanting to insert an image will naturally look for the "Image" button - if however, you upload an image to the attachments dialog, it will work completely as expected. The upload panel here is based on HTML5 which supports drag and drop uploading, if your browser doesn't support this, it will use Flash, Silverlight or Google Gears if you have any of those installed, and if not it will fallback to a HTML4 & JavaScript implementation (none of these support drag and drop, but instead you click the "Choose Files" button just as you do now - the label in the box will change to reflect this). Uploaded files then show below the box (images will get a preview), and you can click on any to add them into the editor, or click the "Insert All" button. When you insert an attachment into the editor, it displays either the image if it's an image, or a link if it's anything else, just as it will actually appear in the post (rather than the current " " tag). You can also of course delete the attachment, which will automatically remove it from the editor if you've already inserted it. Video Demonstration Quick drag-and-drop In addition to interacting with the panels, if you're using a supported browser, you can drag and drop straight into the editor. It will automatically figure out whether the uploaded file(s) are images or other files and add them to the appropriate panel automatically. Video Demonstration Image URLs In the image panel, there is an additional "From URL" tab which allows you to insert an image from a URL, as you type the URL a preview is shown, and you can optionally link to the image. Video Demonstration My Files In IP.Board currently, there is a "My Media" button which allows you to insert content submitted either in other posts or elsewhere in the community (images in IP.Gallery or files in IP.Downloads for example) into the editor. In 4.0, this feature is found in the images and attachments dialogs. Just with normal attachments, the content is inserted as it will be shown rather than the current " " tag. Conclusion Please let us know what you think of the uploading features in the comments. Remember though that we're only half way through our series on the 4.0 editor. In my next blog entry I'll be talking about customising the editor and the place of BBCode. Attached Thumbnails View the full article Quelle: http://community.invisionpower.com/topic/388043-ips-40-editor-part-2-uploads/

Introduction In the last blog entry I introduced some of the features in the post editor in IPS Social Suite 4.0. In this blog entry I'd like to show you the uploading features in the editor. Using the "Image" and "Attachment" dialogs Along the bottom of the editor there are two buttons that deal with uploading files: image and attachments. Both present a dialog which looks like this: We decided to keep both an images and an attachments dialog as users wanting to insert an image will naturally look for the "Image" button - if however, you upload an image to the attachments dialog, it will work completely as expected. The upload panel here is based on HTML5 which supports drag and drop uploading, if your browser doesn't support this, it will use Flash, Silverlight or Google Gears if you have any of those installed, and if not it will fallback to a HTML4 & JavaScript implementation (none of these support drag and drop, but instead you click the "Choose Files" button just as you do now - the label in the box will change to reflect this). Uploaded files then show below the box (images will get a preview), and you can click on any to add them into the editor, or click the "Insert All" button. When you insert an attachment into the editor, it displays either the image if it's an image, or a link if it's anything else, just as it will actually appear in the post (rather than the current " " tag). You can also of course delete the attachment, which will automatically remove it from the editor if you've already inserted it. Video Demonstration Quick drag-and-drop In addition to interacting with the panels, if you're using a supported browser, you can drag and drop straight into the editor. It will automatically figure out whether the uploaded file(s) are images or other files and add them to the appropriate panel automatically. Video Demonstration Image URLs In the image panel, there is an additional "From URL" tab which allows you to insert an image from a URL, as you type the URL a preview is shown, and you can optionally link to the image. Video Demonstration My Files In IP.Board currently, there is a "My Media" button which allows you to insert content submitted either in other posts or elsewhere in the community (images in IP.Gallery or files in IP.Downloads for example) into the editor. In 4.0, this feature is found in the images and attachments dialogs. Just with normal attachments, the content is inserted as it will be shown rather than the current " " tag. Conclusion Please let us know what you think of the uploading features in the comments. Remember though that we're only half way through our series on the 4.0 editor. In my next blog entry I'll be talking about customising the editor and the place of BBCode. Attached Thumbnails Kompletten Blogeintrag lesen

Introduction The post editor is undoubtably one of the most frequently used features of the IPS Social Suite as it's the way users submit content to your community and functionality has evolved dramatically from the early days of forum software which consisted of a plain textbox in which users would type BBCode into the feature-rich WYSIWG (What You See Is What You Get) editors prevalent on the web today. For the IPS Social Suite 4.0 we really wanted to focus on making the editor as good as it can be: feature-rich, intuitive to users and highly customisable. Over the next 4 blog entries I'm going to cover the functionality of the editor and related features (attachments, emoticons, etc.) and the customisation options that will be available in 4.0. The theme of each blog entry will be: ContentUploadsCustomisation and BBCodeSpecial featuresHere's a screenshot of what it looks like (by default, on a desktop, more on that later): Quotes A feature added to IP.Board in the 3.x series was "visual quotes" - when adding a quote the box shows directly in the editor as it will show in the post, rather than as just normal text with a quote BBCode wrapped around. In 4.0 we've rewritten how this works to use a CSS3 based solution rather than JavaScript to keep the citation header attached to the quote, which makes the feature much more reliable and easy to use when splitting quote boxes, moving the cursor before or after the quote box or dealing with embedded quotes. Code We've also rewritten how code can be inserted into the editor to be more reliable. Adding code now initially brings up an editor which supports syntax highlighting: And after inserting, you'll see the code exactly how it will be displayed after posting and you can interact with it exactly how you'd expect: Spoilers Spoilers are now also visual (though of course they're not true WYSIWYG as you need to be able to see what you're typing) and a built-in feature enabled by default. When you click the spoiler button you'll be given a darkened box in which to type the content: The spoilers display in the post as the same coloured box with a "click to view" message. When clicked, the dark box fades away revealing the content underneath. Emotions We've completely overhauled emoticon management in 4.0. You can now create multiple "groups", drag and drop to reorder and (using the same uploader as shown above) quickly upload loads of emoticons at once. Video Demonstration When you click the emoticon button in the editor, you'll see a popup with an overview of all the groups. If your community only uses the default emoticons, this is big enough to show all the emoticons, however, if you like to install lots of emoticons, you can select any group from the dropdown menu to show all emoticons in that group, or use the search bar to find a particular emoticon. In addition, your most recently used emoticons will show right at the top. Video Demonstration Embedded Media In 3.0 we introduced a media BBCode tag. By wrapping a URL to media such as YouTube or Vimeo videos in media BBCode tags, the correct embed code would automatically be worked out and embedded into the post. In later versions, we added automatic embedding support, so just pasting the URL into the post would cause the video to be embedded. This still works exactly the same in 4.0 with a couple improvements: Previews If you type the URL to a supported media in the "Link" dialog, a preview will be shown in the dialog - you can choose to insert the embedded media or just a regular link. If you insert the embedded media, it will show directly in the editor. Video Demonstration oEmbed Currently URLs which gets picked up for media embedding and the output they produce are managed in the Admin CP. The idea was that this would allow admins to add support for additional services, however, it has caused some problems when for example, YouTube has added new URL formats or changed their embed code and they don't work on most communities until we release an update to change the default record for YouTube. oEmbed is an API which allows you to make a call to the provider giving them the URL and they respond with the best embed code to use, if that URL can be embedded. In 4.0, if a URL for YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, College Humor or Hulu is inserted, we make a call to their oEmbed provider to obtain the embed code, so it's always up to date. Conclusion This is just the first in our series of blog entries on the editor in IPS4. Please do let us know what you think in the comments, but remember there's much more to come! Attached Thumbnails View the full article Quelle: http://community.invisionpower.com/topic/387966-ips-40-editor-part-1-content/

Introduction The post editor is undoubtably one of the most frequently used features of the IPS Social Suite as it's the way users submit content to your community and functionality has evolved dramatically from the early days of forum software which consisted of a plain textbox in which users would type BBCode into the feature-rich WYSIWG (What You See Is What You Get) editors prevalent on the web today. For the IPS Social Suite 4.0 we really wanted to focus on making the editor as good as it can be: feature-rich, intuitive to users and highly customisable. Over the next 4 blog entries I'm going to cover the functionality of the editor and related features (attachments, emoticons, etc.) and the customisation options that will be available in 4.0. The theme of each blog entry will be: ContentUploadsCustomisation and BBCodeSpecial featuresHere's a screenshot of what it looks like (by default, on a desktop, more on that later): Quotes A feature added to IP.Board in the 3.x series was "visual quotes" - when adding a quote the box shows directly in the editor as it will show in the post, rather than as just normal text with a quote BBCode wrapped around. In 4.0 we've rewritten how this works to use a CSS3 based solution rather than JavaScript to keep the citation header attached to the quote, which makes the feature much more reliable and easy to use when splitting quote boxes, moving the cursor before or after the quote box or dealing with embedded quotes. Code We've also rewritten how code can be inserted into the editor to be more reliable. Adding code now initially brings up an editor which supports syntax highlighting: And after inserting, you'll see the code exactly how it will be displayed after posting and you can interact with it exactly how you'd expect: Spoilers Spoilers are now also visual (though of course they're not true WYSIWYG as you need to be able to see what you're typing) and a built-in feature enabled by default. When you click the spoiler button you'll be given a darkened box in which to type the content: The spoilers display in the post as the same coloured box with a "click to view" message. When clicked, the dark box fades away revealing the content underneath. Emotions We've completely overhauled emoticon management in 4.0. You can now create multiple "groups", drag and drop to reorder and (using the same uploader as shown above) quickly upload loads of emoticons at once. Video Demonstration When you click the emoticon button in the editor, you'll see a popup with an overview of all the groups. If your community only uses the default emoticons, this is big enough to show all the emoticons, however, if you like to install lots of emoticons, you can select any group from the dropdown menu to show all emoticons in that group, or use the search bar to find a particular emoticon. In addition, your most recently used emoticons will show right at the top. Video Demonstration Embedded Media In 3.0 we introduced a media BBCode tag. By wrapping a URL to media such as YouTube or Vimeo videos in media BBCode tags, the correct embed code would automatically be worked out and embedded into the post. In later versions, we added automatic embedding support, so just pasting the URL into the post would cause the video to be embedded. This still works exactly the same in 4.0 with a couple improvements: Previews If you type the URL to a supported media in the "Link" dialog, a preview will be shown in the dialog - you can choose to insert the embedded media or just a regular link. If you insert the embedded media, it will show directly in the editor. Video Demonstration oEmbed Currently URLs which gets picked up for media embedding and the output they produce are managed in the Admin CP. The idea was that this would allow admins to add support for additional services, however, it has caused some problems when for example, YouTube has added new URL formats or changed their embed code and they don't work on most communities until we release an update to change the default record for YouTube. oEmbed is an API which allows you to make a call to the provider giving them the URL and they respond with the best embed code to use, if that URL can be embedded. In 4.0, if a URL for YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, College Humor or Hulu is inserted, we make a call to their oEmbed provider to obtain the embed code, so it's always up to date. Conclusion This is just the first in our series of blog entries on the editor in IPS4. Please do let us know what you think in the comments, but remember there's much more to come! Attached Thumbnails Kompletten Blogeintrag lesen

Invision Power Services, Inc. is pleased to announce the release of the following applications: IP.Board 3.4.5 IP.Blog 2.6.3 IP.Calendar 3.3.4 IP.Chat 1.4.4 IP.Content 2.3.6 IP.Downloads 2.5.4 IP.Gallery 5.0.5 IP.Nexus 1.5.8 IP.Board 3.4.5 IP.Board is a fully featured community platform including forums, members profiles, calendar, status system, integration, and much, much more. The release of IP.Board 3.4.5 is a maintenance release and includes bug fixes. IP.Blog 2.6.3 IP.Blog enables users to create and maintain their own individual or group blogs right from within your community, to share ideas & thoughts. The release of IP.Blog 2.6.3 is a maintenance release and includes bug fixes. IP.Calendar 3.3.4 IP.Calendar is an integrated calendar and event management for your IP.Board. The release of IP.Calendar 3.3.4 is a maintenance release and includes bug fixes. IP.Chat 1.4.4 IP.Chat is integrated chat software for your forum. Allow your members to chat to each other in real time. The release of IP.Chat 1.4.4 is a maintenance release and includes bug fixes. IP.Content 2.3.6 IP.Content is our community content management platform for IP.Board allowing you to create content for your site ranging from a simple portal to a full website with custom databases and more - the possibilities are endless! The release of IP.Content 2.3.6 is a maintenance release and includes bug fixes. IP.Downloads 2.5.4 IP.Downloads is an integrated download management for IP.Board allowing you and your members to upload files for sharing in an organized category listing with permissions, version control, and more. The release of IP.Downloads 2.5.4 is a maintenance release and includes bug fixes. IP.Gallery 5.0.5 IP.Gallery is a fully-featured photo and multimedia sharing app for the IPS Community Suite. Create albums, upload photos, discuss the hottest shots and much more. The release of IP.Gallery 5.0.5 is a maintenance release and includes bug fixes. IP.Nexus 1.5.8 IP.Nexus is our fully featured commerce system to sell products, membership access, advertising, digital downloads, and more. Includes tools like a support desk to help manage your clients. The release of IP.Nexus 1.5.8 is a maintenance release and includes Bug fixes Minor workflow enhancements How to Upgrade To upgrade simply log into your client area, click on "Purchases" from the menu and select the community you wish to upgrade and click "Upgrade Now". You can read more about upgrading in our documentation. Quelle: http://community.invisionpower.com/topic/387226-ipboard-345-and-application-maintenance-updates-released/

Security Update: 3rd May 2013 A critical security issue has been reported to us which may allow unauthorized access to an administrator account. We are releasing a security patch to address this issue. In the interest of allowing customers ample amount of time to apply the patch, we are not disclosing further details at this time. Instructions We are providing a patch for IP.Board versions 3.4, 3.3 and 3.2. If you are running a version less than 3.2 you should upgrade to get this and other security enhancements. While IPS does not apply patches for you, patching is very easy: Identify the version of IP.Board you are running. Download and unzip the appropriate patch file below that matches your version. Upload the contents of the extracted zip folder to your IP.Board home directory If you have renamed your admin directory, then copy the files manually to the appropriate admin folder. IP.Board 3.4.x 3.4.zip 76.46K 1095 downloads IP.Board 3.3.x 3.3.zip 70.88K 257 downloads IP.Board 3.2.x 3.2.zip 64.78K 146 downloads Important Notes: When you apply the security update, the bulletin in your AdminCP will still display. We keep the bulletin in place for at least a week after a security release. Our main software packages accessed via the client area have already been updated with this security update. If you are an IPS Hosting client your community has been automatically patched. No further action is needed. As this is not a full upgrade but a simple upload a file and you're done patch, IPS staff will not apply this patch as part of our support services. We would like to thank security researcher John JEAN for his responsible disclosure of this issue to us. His information is as follows, and shared with permission: Author: John JEAN Twitter account: @johnjean Occupation: Security researcher Company: Wargan Solutions Company's website: http://www.wargan.com Quelle: http://community.invisionpower.com/topic/385207-ipboard-32x-33x-and-34x-critical-security-update/