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Rimi, how so?

You get the new version of the software for free, as long as you have an active subscription for support?

You are not forced to pay for support separate from paying for new software.

As far as 3.1.... well, sometimes change is necessary. I run a fairly clean install, with the base IP packages, Nexus, Content, Gallery, Chat (50 person), and only have 3 modifications.... by moving from 3.2 to 3.4.4 yes, I have to use a new modification... however I am not forced to keep using IPB much like I am not forced to do anything.

IPB does not owe anything to anyone, as a private company. we as consumers, decide where we deploy our capital.

yes, it may be a simple patch, or it may not... however after a certain point, people must move on.

Once again, you did not pay for a 3.1 license, you pay for a license, and as long as you have active renewal, you get all of the new software for free.

They even go out and provide security patches for 3.2.x even for non active customers.

 

Costs a lot of money for some forums to update their modifications and themes, so some forums go periods where they don't upgrade.

Some may even be waiting for 4.0 because of the terribad editor.

Upgrading is not free. You keep saying free.

 

I look at it from the perspective of... you are paying a renewal fee to get access to support and to keep your license active. As long as your license is active, you have FREE, as in no other fees, access to updates and new versions as they are released.

If your license is not active.... you can simply pay $25 to activate it, and get the newest version, on top of the support that you are paying for.

VB4, and XenForo, but we will see.... you not only pay for the support, you also pay for the NEW version.

IPB... you have access to the new versions, as long as you are paying to keep the support on your license going.

 

But you're still paying for new versions... Not having separate fees doesn't mean it's free. You can say no additional fees or in addition to support, but isn't free.

 

I guess the most accurate term is 'cheaper' then, since you can simply decide not to renew until a major new version comes out, then upgrade for about 50 dollars tops. Compared to vBulletin where you'd need to pay about 200 dollars for each major version.

 

It is $25 to renew your support and have access to all the upgrades.

 

Don't get access to any versions without renewal.

 

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.

Continue reading...

 

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!
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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.
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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.
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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

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I LOVE thei IPB 4 announcements

They'll have some IMO important features, where the new xf editor is really lacking

• html permissions
• drag and drop toolbar editor