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Back in June, we announced several updates to our proprietary Spam Service, which includes influences from existing spam mitigation services (Project Honeypot and Stop Forum Spam). Today, we are announcing the release of more options to help you fine-tune the spam service for your site. These features are being released as a part of our new Enterprise Spam Service package, which is available now. Weighting The first feature added, as a part of this new package, is “Weighting.” With this feature, you will be able to adjust how influential the Spam Service is against registrations to your site. As you can see, the slider here presents several options to help fine-tune the service for your site. The options presented are fairly straightforward. If you find your site to be a heavy target of spam, you can adjust the slider to Strict or Very Strict as a means of telling the spam service that registrations to your site should be evaluated more vigorously than normal, and treat all registrations with higher caution than normal. Conversely, if you find the spam service to be too rough on registrations to your site, you can adjust the slider to Loose or Very Loose. Doing so will tell the spam service to take a step back on registrations, and treat them with less verbosity than normal. And finally, the middle option (Normal) will simply tell the spam service to act as it does now, with no preferential influence one way or another. Whitelisting / Blacklisting Another feature added as the ability to define your own custom White and Black Lists for your site, providing even more granular control in addition to weighting. First, you can define your own custom Whitelist entries. Using this interface, you will be able to add any Email Address or IP Address to your own custom whitelist. If a member registers, and is using any IP Address or Email Address defined here, then they will automatically be flagged as Not a Spammer, and no action taken against the account by the spam service. This is useful for Administrators, Moderators, and Developers who frequently test registrations on their own sites, allowing them to do so without turning the service off. Further, you can also define a custom Blacklist. If you find that the spam service may not be catching a newly released spammer fast enough, and need to prevent them from accessing the site immediately, then you may add their email address or IP Address to the Blacklist. Once added, any registrations from either of those will be flagged as a spammer and will be denied registration (depending on your community settings for Code Level 4). Calls from multiple origins As mentioned in the previous entry, this service also allows administrators to use the spam service in Load Balanced and Cloud environments with ease, using the same license key. The Enterprise Spam Mitigation is now available for $100/6 months as an additional add-on to your license. Please feel free to contact Sales for any additional information regarding this new service. Attached Thumbnails View the full article Читать дальше

We are releasing patches for IP.Board 3.3.x and IP.Board 3.4.x to address two cross site scripting issues recently reported to us. IP.Board takes precaution against cross site scripting issues by ensuring sensitive forms and buttons have a unique key in them and also by ensuring that sensitive cookie data is not readable by javascript. However, we feel that it is in our clients best interest to have these issues resolved. To apply the patch Simply download the attached zip for your IP.Board version and upload the files to your forum server. You do not need to run any scripts or the upgrade system. IP.Board 3.3.x ipb33_patch_dec_13.zip IP.Board 3.4.x ipb34_patch_dec_13.zip If you are an IPS Community in the Cloud customer running IP.Board 3.3 or above, no further action is necessary; we have already automatically patched your account. If you are using a version older than IP.Board 3.3, you should contact support to upgrade. If you have installed or upgraded to IP.Board 3.4.6 today, no further action is necessary; we have already updated the main download zips. We extend our thanks to indistic for notifying us of the BBCode issue and Artur Czyż for notifying us of the search issue. Читать дальше

We have seen a huge increase in people switching to us over the last year or two and want to take advantage of this momentum and offer an exciting conversion promotion. But first some information... Our Pre-Packaged Converters Our conversion scripts make it very easy to convert your existing community to the IPS Community Suite. The process is very simple: just install IPS, upload the converters, and then tell the converters what software you're coming from. It will ask you a few questions and then copy over your data to our format. For many systems we even include scripts to 301 redirect your old links so internal references and search engines don't get lost! Our converters are free to use and well-tested with thousands of successful conversions. Of course converting is not an exact science and things change all the time so we are always releasing updates to make them better and faster. Need some help? But some clients really do not have the desire to take on the process of converting data themselves. In this case we do offer professional services for a fee to have us do it for you. Normally these fees range from $500 - $1000 but for the month of December we are offering a flat-rate fee of $350 to convert your community to IPS if it is on the list of one of our pre-made converters. Just contact [email protected] to get started. Even better news: if you're converting to IPS Community in the Cloud we will convert your existing database at no cost! Contact [email protected] for full information. Converting from something else? If your software is not listed on our pre-made converter list we can still assist in converting. Maybe you're using something that's old, niche, or even custom. We have a lot of experience converting people to our platform and would love to assist you. Contact [email protected] with questions. What about 4.0? If you follow our blog entries you know we are hard at work on the next version of our software: IPS Social Suite 4.0. When version 4.0 is released if you have an active license you will of course get access at no extra charge! Upgrading from 3.4 to 4.0 will be very easy and our staff can even do it for you if you like. vBulletin Converter Update Over the last several months we have seen a huge increase in interest from vBulletin users wanting to convert to IPS. As we are asked so often, we want to highlight some of the key reasons to switch to us. We do not make you re-buy with each new major version release. So long as your IPS license is active you get access to new versions. We do not limit your support ticket access or charge extra fees. With an active license you get private access to our support staff. Our staff will install our software on your server at no extra charge. Our staff will even install major upgrades on your server at no extra charge. We have a whole community suite: forums, blog, gallery, CMS, chat, ecommerce, support, and with the flexibility of our platform the possibilities are endless. The IPS Marketplace is a great resource for our clients to get enhancements for their community. Think Apple's AppStore but for IPS products. IPS makes community software and services. That's all we do and our focus is helping you succeed not working against you. Ready to convert? Have Questions? You can download our free converters to give them a try. If you have questions about IPS before purchasing please email [email protected] and we would be happy to assist. And as a reward for reading through the end there's one more thing: use the coupon code SWITCH through the end of December for 10% off your order. View the full article Читать дальше

IPS is happy to offer 15% off starting now through Monday on all new purchases for both new and existing clients! This includes all software licenses and Community in the Cloud hosting. This is a great time to add on those extra Suite applications you're missing or to go ahead and try out IPS if you have always been considering us. Just use the coupon code HOLIDAY2013 at checkout. Conversion Promotion Coming Soon... Are you using another community software and thinking of switching to IPS? We will be posting a great conversion promotion on Tuesday for those wanting help in converting their community data to our format. So take advantage of the 15% coupon above to order your licenses or hosting services now and then stay tuned for our conversion promotion next week! View the full article Читать дальше

In IP.Board 3.x, we have a setting group where you can specify some global advertisement HTML. You can enable and disable advertisements, and you can specify code to insert into the header and footer of the page. For the forum index, forum listings and topic view pages, you can override these header and footer ad codes, and you can specify advertisement code to insert into a couple of other areas specific to those pages. If you install IP.Nexus, this setting group redirects you to the IP.Nexus advertisement control panel where you can effectively do the same thing, but with a few more options (including click and impression tracking, advertisement image uploading, automatic cutoffs for advertisements, and more). We felt that the entire system and process was too basic when IP.Nexus was not installed, and too disorienting once you do install IP.Nexus. This setting group suddenly redirects you to another application and configuring the advertisements is an entirely different experience prior to installing this application. Subsequently, we have done the only logical thing and consolidated the two systems and improved the functionality. (Please be aware that, as with all early screenshots of the 4.0 Social Suite, the interface displayed in the following screenshots is very much subject to change before release) Advertisement Configuration First and foremost, we have consolidated the functionality provided by IP.Board and IP.Nexus in previous software releases into one control panel. Now, whether you install IP.Nexus or not, you can have powerful advertisement management at your fingertips. Installing IP.Nexus still provides additional enhanced functionality, such as the ability to sell advertisements to your members. You can now have both HTML and image-based advertisements available, and you can create multiple advertisements for the same "location" (more on this in a minute). There is a setting available to tell the software how to pick which advertisement to show if more than one is configured for a single area (options include picking one at random, showing the newest advertisement, showing the oldest advertisement, and showing the advertisement with the least number of impressions). You can configure start and end dates for advertisements, set them to cut off after a certain number of impressions (or clicks, in the case of image advertisements), and you can filter by status (and toggle the status from this page). If IP.Nexus is installed, an additional status of "pending" is present and supported for advertisements that have been purchased but not yet approved. Naturally once you reach any cut offs specified or the end date has passed, the advertisement will no longer be rotated. As you can see in the screenshot, javascript is removed from the preview for security reasons. If you have a caching engine enabled, advertisement data will be cached to improve performance. Some new functionality If you are already familiar with the feature set of the current release of IP.Nexus, the advertisement functionality you already know and love will be carried over to the 4.0 Suite. You can still specify which groups are exempt from seeing advertisements, for example, to help you upsell subscription packages to users on your site. In addition to the current functionality, however, we've made some great improvements. Ability to specify SSL advertisement code Google Ads does not have an SSL version of its advertisement code, and including their advertisements on secure pages can lead to browser warnings for your visitors. This is especially troublesome when you only use SSL for logins or for your store (IP.Nexus), as it gives an impression that the page is not secure. Now, you can specify an alternative secure page advertisement code if you wish, or choose not to show a specific advertisement on secure pages at all. Ability to specify multiple images When uploading an image advertisement, you now have the option to also upload a small and/or medium version of the advertisement image. The small and medium versions, if present, will be used on the responsive layout on the alternate views for mobile devices and tablets. If not provided, the software will simply use the next best size available. We have NOT included the ability to specify alternate HTML for the different resolutions. In our research, most advertisement partners either (1) already handle responsiveness with their own javascript code or (2) provide alternative instructions for responsive ads. If you use a CDN such as Amazon S3 for your file storage in the 4.0 Suite, your advertisement images will be served from the CDN. Extendable application support As of 4.0, any and all applications that wish to support advertisements can do so via the extension system built into the software. All an application will need to do is provide an extension for the advertisement system, and then call the advertisement location in the template where they feel the advertisement should display. You can even add custom settings (so for example, the forum application can allow you to configure which forums an advertisement will be displayed in...). Skinners can move the advertisements around however they like in their skin templates simply by moving the appropriate custom tag. Custom locations You can now define entirely custom locations for advertisements easily in the advertisement configuration page. Once you have defined a custom location for the advertisement, defining where to show that advertisement in your themes is as simple as inserting a tag where you want the advertisement to be displayed. Closing We hope these small changes will help you better manage your advertisements and provide you with the options you need to capitalize upon your community. If you have no use for advertisements, you can completely ignore this area of the software and no resources will be used by it, but if you do utilize advertisements on your community, the new tools should make it much easier to manage your site. Attached Thumbnails " title="ads1.png - Size: 219.87KB, Downloads: 0"> View the full article Читать дальше

Invision Power Services, Inc. is pleased to announce the release of the following applications: IP.Board 3.4.6 IP.Nexus 1.5.9 IP.Board 3.4.6 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 3.4.6 is a maintenance release and includes bug fixes. IP.Nexus 1.5.9 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 1.5.9 is a maintenance release and includes bug fixes. 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. Читать дальше

Last week I attended ZendCon 2013, a prominent PHP developer-oriented conference designed to give industry professionals information on tools, practices and trends which will help them deliver enterprise-class software to customers. During the conference, many sponsors set up booths in order to demonstrate new products and services, and many industry professionals hold tutorials and sessions that attendees can attend in order to learn more about our trade. The conference was held in Santa Clara, CA (about an hour south of San Francisco, just outside of San Jose) from October 7th through October 10th. I spent a lot of time at the conference focusing on tutorials and sessions that I felt might provide the most value for our company, in order to deliver better, faster and more stable software for our clients. One tutorial that I attended, for instance, focused entirely on best practices for implementing caching into software (and at the server level), and tuning settings in PHP, MySQL and Apache/NginX to deliver the highest possible performance. Another session I attended focused on Object-Oriented Javascript Programming and the future of Javascript (or, more specifically, ECMAScript 6). By the very nature of the conference, all sessions were very technical in nature, so don't feel too bad if any of this sounds like Greek to you. The point I want readers to take away is that we take our profession seriously, and IPS feels that an investment into continuing education is important for our clients. I had the pleasure of meeting many industry professionals in the PHP world, including Andi Gutmans (CEO and co-founder of Zend Technologies), Zeev Suraski (CTO and co-founder of Zend Technologies), Elizabeth Smith (very active contributor to the PHP project and various PHP extensions), Derick Rethans (creator of XDebug, MongoDB PHP extension, and other PHP project contributions), John Coggeshall (active lead for the PHP Tidy extension) and many other wonderful contributors to the PHP ecosystem. The passion that these people share for the products and services is just amazing, and serves as a great role model for developers everywhere. I won't spend much time getting into the nitty gritty details of each session I attended. Some were very technical in nature, while some focused on more abstract necessities of running a team of developers and managing day-to-day development duties (for example, discussing things like time management, gathering project requirements effectively, and so on). All in all, every session I attended provided useful information that I feel we can make use of to better our processes and delivery of future software releases. As I said, here at IPS we take our profession very seriously. We will always strive to deliver the best possible software, and are thankful for the contributions of our third party developer community as well as the rest of our clients, whom provide us with bug reports and feedback that help to improve our products. We have many exciting things in store in the coming months, so stay tuned by subscribing to our company blog to be notified of changes and updates. View the full article Читать дальше

Introduction The IPS Social Suite needs to store lots of different files - there's attachments and profile photos uploaded by members, CSS and JavaScript files, emoticons, etc. In IP.Board 3.x, various images got stored in different places: Files uploaded by users get put in the /uploads directory. If you have a complicated setup, it's difficult to handle these. If you have a load-balanced cluster you need to set up an environment whereby all files are stored on a single server, or all uploaded files are synched between servers, but serving these files over a high-performance CDN can be difficult. CSS, JavaScript files, images and emoticons get put in /style_* directories. If you want to serve these over a CDN, you can do so, but you need to copy the files over yourself. Other pieces of data are written to disk as a caching mechanism. This has the same issue with load-balanced environments as file uploads. Some applications had other methods - for example, IP.Downloads allows you to store files on a remote server using FTP. In 4.0, we wanted to pull this all together and build a much better system for storing files and build the whole system with high-performance environments in mind. File Storage In 4.0, you have several different ways to store files: On a local server On a remote server using FTP (which you can use to upload files to many CDN services) As binary data in the database On Amazon S3 You can set up different configurations and choose which configuration to use for different types of files. For example, if you want to store user's profile photos on Amazon S3, but you want attachments to be on the local server, or even a different Amazon S3 bucket - 4.0 can handle that. And if at any point you change your mind about which storage method you want to use, the system will automatically handle moving all the files for you. Everywhere that writes a file will use this central system - so IP.Downloads and IP.Gallery are included too. Caching There are lots of places throughout the suite where the same stuff needs to be retrieved or calculated over and over - for example, certain configuration settings, language data, information about the installed applications, etc. If this data can be cached, not only does it alleviate database load, it means the PHP code doesn't need to re-process the data. In IP.Board 3.x, some of this was stored in a particular database table and could be cached using a proper caching system - but it was difficult to configure, and not everything used it - compiled HTML templates, language strings and more were saved as files in the /cache directory, which causes difficulties for load-balanced cluster environments. In 4.0, we've overhauled all of this. For things that need cold storage (like compiled HTML templates) - you can choose either the file system or the database for storage. The data can then cached, along with anything else which might benefit from caching (like settings, application data, etc.) using one of 5 supported caching methods: APC eAccelerator Memcached Wincache XCache Attached Thumbnails " title="storage-settings.png - Size: 134.26KB, Downloads: 0"> " title="add-storage-configuration.png - Size: 147.95KB, Downloads: 0"> " title="caching.png - Size: 246.89KB, Downloads: 0"> View the full article Читать дальше

IPS Social Suite 4 is a modernization of our software line and rather than just refactor existing work, we are rewriting the code from scratch which gives us a chance to really evaluate the interface elements and labels. We felt that "themes" was a much more modern and better understood term than "skins". Of course, the name is just the start, here are some of the other improvements: Managing Themes in IPS Social Suite 4 As you would expect, the interface has been completely overhauled in IP.Social Suite 4. All the familiar elements are there but we've simplified areas and made it easier to manage your themes. As you can see from this screen shot, theme authors can now inform customers when they have an update available for them. The interface makes use of the new IPS Social Suite 4 Trees model which means you can quickly search for theme names and re-order themes. In IP.Board 3, you could change the logo of the suite. We've made this even easier in IP.Social Suite 4. The upload fields are easily accessible on the edit theme form. You can even upload a Facebook sharer image and favicon! Downloading and Uploading Themes In IPS Social Suite 4, downloading and uploading a new version of a theme could not be easier. Just select the menu item and it's done. You no longer need to navigate to separate areas of the Admin CP to do this. Conflict Management What happens if you upload a new version of a theme but it contains changes to templates you have also changed? You'll get a chance to review these changes and select which version to use on the conflict management page. Editing templates and CSS The template and CSS editor should be familiar for any existing customers. The editor is now fully syntax highlighted which will make writing and editing code so much easier. The template syntax is now much more compact as you can see from the above screen shot. We've also added a few things to reduce the amount of template logic required. A common need is to load a template if a condition is matched: {{if member.isAdmin()}} {template="admin_bar"} {{endif}}You can now put the conditional inside the template tag like so: {template="admin_bar" if="member.isAdmin()"}This is much easier to read and reduces a lot of visual clutter. The combination of the better template syntax and HTML 5 mark-up results in a dramatic reduction in size and complexity of often edited templates such as the globalTemplate which is commonly used to add your own site chrome. The screenshot below shows all of the IPS Social Suite 4 globalTemplate and for comparison, part of the IP.Board 3.4 globalTemplate which is over 340 lines long! The CSS framework much like the javascript framework has been completely rewritten and is now modular. This means that most CSS files are very small which makes looking for specific selectors much easier. In addition, upgrades are less destructive to your themes. If you made edits to the button styles, then only that one style sheet is altered leaving the rest as default. Of course, IPS Social Suite combines and minifies these separate CSS into fewer files when saved. This blog entry is just an overview of the theme section in the Admin CP. We'll go into more detail in a later entry on the new tools available designed to make theme creation and management a breeze for theme authors. We know you will have a ton of questions but please be patient with us if we keep saying "wait for next blog entry" Attached Thumbnails " title="Themes_conflict.png - Size: 686.4KB, Downloads: 0"> " title="Themes_home.png - Size: 49.83KB, Downloads: 0"> " title="Themes_logos.png - Size: 68.4KB, Downloads: 0"> View the full article Читать дальше

We are releasing security patches for IP.Board 3.3.4, IP.Board 3.4.5, IP.Gallery 4.2.1 and IP.Gallery 5.0.5 to address four cross-site scripting issues recently reported to us. It has come to our attention that an unpatched security issue exists in a third party script included with the IP.Board release called "Flowplayer". While this script is included with IP.Board, it is presently only utilized by IP.Gallery to facilitate embedding of certain media files when the administrator allows them to be uploaded. The exploit that has been reported to us may expose a specific type of cross-site scripting vulnerability through Flowplayer and requires a certain level of user-interaction to trigger (in other words, a user must follow a link to the affected target - to our knowledge this issue cannot be triggered automatically by viewing a page normally accessible through typical navigation of the software). It has come to our attention that an unpatched security issue exists in a third party script included with the IP.Board release called "swfupload". The cross site scripting vulnerability, like the one described above, requires a user to visit a specially crafted link to the swfupload flash file directly, where-by arbitrary javascript may be executed. It has come to our attention that two potential cross site scripting vulnerabilities exist within the IP.Board editor routines. These vulnerabilities are not persistent (meaning you can only trigger them against yourself, as opposed to causing them to be stored in the database and triggered against another user), however we feel that it is in the best interests of our clients to release an update to address the issues reported. We are releasing patches today to address all four issues. To apply the patch, please perform the following steps: Identify which version of IP.Board you are running. If you are running IP.Board 3.3.x, you will also need to identify which version of IP.Gallery you are running. Download the appropriate patch file below Extract the contents locally on your computer Upload the contents of the "upload" folder to your forum root directory (where conf_global.php is located), overwriting any files when prompted. Please refer to If you are an IPS Community in the Cloud customer running IP.Board 3.3 or above, no further action is necessary; we have already automatically patched your account. If you are using a version older than IP.Board 3.3, you should contact support to upgrade. If you are running IP.Board 3.4.x, please use the following zip: ipb3_4_and_gallery_5_0-9-13-2013.zip If you are running IP.Board 3.3.x without IP.Gallery, or with IP.Gallery 5.0.x, please use the following zip: ipb3_3_and_gallery_5_0-9-13-2013.zip If you are running IP.Board 3.3.x with IP.Gallery 4.2.x, please use the following zip: ipb3_3_and_gallery_4_2-9-13-2013.zip As of the time of this post, the full IP.Board and IP.Gallery packages in our client center have been updated. If you are running any version of IP.Board or IP.Gallery that is not listed above, we recommend that you upgrade to the latest version to obtain these security fixes, as well as several other security and bug fixes. We would like to thank Sahil Saif for bringing the flowplayer vulnerability to our attention. We would like to thank Masato Kinugawa for bringing the swfupload vulnerability to our attention. We would like to thank Jakub at Читать дальше

In 3.x, we support HTML emails being sent by the software. However, due to constraints we had at the time, HTML emails use pretty much the same content as plain text emails, but wrapped in a simple HTML wrapper. Additionally, users had to explicitly decide whether they wanted to receive HTML or plain text emails via a preference setting - quite an anachronism. All in all, not a very satisfactory user experience. Email handling in 4.0 In 4.0, users no longer choose which type of email to receive. Our email handler sends both types in a single email, and the email client chooses the most appropriate to show based on its capabilities. If it can display a fancy HTML version, that's what they'll see by default, but plain text is used if not. Email template system In 3.x, email content is defined by the language system, and each email has one language string which forms the content for both the plain text and HTML versions. Clearly, if we were going to improve the HTML templates we ship with, this would have to change. In 4.x, each type of email has two templates - one for HTML, one for plain text. This means a better display of content can be created for HTML emails, while keeping the plain text ones simple and to the point. Email templates make use of the skinning system foundation (which we'll reveal later), meaning they have full use of logic, template tags and more - so we can also customize the emails depending on the user they are being sent to (note though that email templates are not per-skin; they are global to the site). And, of course, email templates can be added and edited via an interface in the AdminCP. This isn't groundbreaking stuff, but a vast improvement on email handling in 3.x. Email template design We also wanted to improve our email templates, so that each type of email sent was designed specifically for the purpose. The data shown in a registration email will be different to a topic digest, for example, and the email should reflect that. Coding email templates is not a trivial thing, unfortunately. The latest version of Microsoft Outlook uses the Microsoft Word rendering engine(!!), while GMail strips out all CSS included in style tags - and that's just the start of the gotchas. This makes designing email templates a tricky business, and one that requires lots of testing to ensure compatibility. For our first 10 templates alone, I reviewed 900 screenshots to spot problems. As a result, we've taken the approach of creating email templates which are simple in appearance and would work well for most sites, with the goal of hopefully avoiding the need of most sites to edit them at all (though you can, if you wish). The colors we've used are fairly neutral, for this reason. For those mail agents that are a little more... advanced, our email templates in 4.0 will be responsive. They will look great on mobile devices as well as desktop clients. I have included some examples of email templates, along with their mobile counterparts. I should note at this point that this does not reveal the main skin design. As discussed above, emails are intentionally separate in design. Admin-completed registration Friend request New personal message New profile comment Attached Thumbnails " title="admin_registration.png - Size: 47.21KB, Downloads: 0"> " title="friend_request.png - Size: 61.78KB, Downloads: 0"> " title="new_pm.png - Size: 114.76KB, Downloads: 0"> " title="profile_comment.png - Size: 61.44KB, Downloads: 0"> View the full article Читать дальше

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 " title="admincp.png - Size: 595.05KB, Downloads: 0"> " title="admincp_form.png - Size: 600.95KB, Downloads: 0"> " title="admincp_tree_tabs.png - Size: 476.9KB, Downloads: 0"> View the full article Читать дальше

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. 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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 [email protected] for more information. Thank you for your interest! View the full article Читать дальше

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" class="bbc_url" title=""> View the full article Читать дальше

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 . Right now it's all that you had before but presented in a much easier to understand format. Check out our new information page: __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 time Initial training & consultation by phone or live chat Post-deployment best practices training Custom migration from other platforms* Custom skin design* Custom single sign on (SSO)* Support Same business day ticket response Scheduled upgrade times Custom skin upgrades between versions* Security updates applied before public release Monthly Maintenance Logs checked for signs of problems Advise and schedule if upgrades are available Database maintenance Settings reviewed for optimal performance Best 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 [email protected] 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 Читать дальше

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): 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 Alternatively, you may follow the instructions made available by the Minify developers in their 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. Читать дальше

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 __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 __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 View the full article Читать дальше

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 Читать дальше

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 " title="mentions.png - Size: 38.5KB, Downloads: 0"> " title="html.png - Size: 23.37KB, Downloads: 0"> View the full article Читать дальше

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 " title="toolbars.png - Size: 82.39KB, Downloads: 0"> " title="plugin example.png - Size: 48.35KB, Downloads: 0"> " title="permissions.png - Size: 44.79KB, Downloads: 0"> View the full article Читать дальше

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 Читать дальше

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: Content Uploads Customisation and BBCode Special features Here'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 Читать дальше

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. Читать дальше

Патч безопасности для IP.Board от: 3-е Мая 2013 Обнаружена угроза безопасности IP.Board, позволяющая получить несанкционированный доступ в админ-центр форума. Компания IPS опубликовала патч, позволяющий закрыть эту 'дыру', и рекомендует немедленно обновить форумы всем своим клиентам. Инструкции Ниже вы можете скачать патчи для IP.Board версий 3.4, 3.3 и 3.2. Если у вас установлен форум ниже версии 3.2, мы рекомендуем вам обновить свой форум до актуальной версии, чтобы получить этот патч и другие, найденные в более поздних версиях. Для применения патчи проделайте следующие действия: Определите версию вашего форума в админ-центре. Скачайте прикреплённый ниже файл и разархивируйте его (будьте внимательны: для официальной и нулл версии подходят разные патчи). Загрузите содержимое папки в корневую папку вашего форума. Если папка admin у вас переименована, вы так же должны переименовать её в скачанном архиве. Для оригинальных версий IP.Board от IPS: IP.Board 3.4.x 3.4.zip IP.Board 3.3.x 3.3.zip IP.Board 3.2.x 3.2.zip Для русифицированных версий от IBR (с транслитерацией и интеграцией с vkontakte): IP.Board 3.4.x 3.4_IPBMafia_Edition.zip IP.Board 3.3.x 3.3_IPBMafia_Edition.zip IP.Board 3.2.x 3.2_IPBMafia_Edition.zip Важные замечания: После применения данного патча, объявление в админ-центре по-прежнему будет отображаться. IPS транслирует его по крайней мере ещё неделю после релиза патча. Перед копированием файлов сделайте копии на рабочий стол для предотвращения непредвиденных ситуаций Компания IPS благодарит исследователя безопасности John JEAN, который раскрыл эту уязвимость и сообщил компании для её дальнейшего предотвращения, подробная информация от авторе: Автор: John JEAN Twitter аккаунт: @johnjean Деятельность: исследование безопасности Компания: Wargan Solutions Читать дальше