A few of you have been wondering what's changed with the site. There's an awful lot of behind the scenes stuff (it's effectively a re-write), but there are also some front-end improvements. I've copied and pasted the below, which is from the developers blogs:
Calendar Improvements
Ratings
With the next update of Calendar, you will now be able to rate events very much like you can rate topics now. Ratings are saved through AJAX, just like with topics, falling back to a normal page load and redirect if javascript is disabled on the user's browser. You can control on a per-calendar basis which permission masks have permission to rate events within the calendar. If the user has permission to change their rating via their user group configuration, they will be able to change their previously rating for any event in Calendar as well.
Reputation
As with posts within the forums, you will now be able to give the member who submits an event reputation when viewing the event in Calendar. The reputation box displays just like it would for a forum post, allowing your users to quickly and easily understand the interface and functionality. By allowing reputation to be issued for event submissions in Calendar, you provide incentive to your users to submit events in your Calendar, making it all the more useful for your entire community!
Attachments
In our continued effort to increase consistency and functionality in Calendar, we have also implemented attachments for Calendar in the next update. When submitting or editing an event, the standard attachment uploader will be shown on the event posting form. You will be able to submit attachments based on the ACP configuration, just like you would be able to for posts in the forum. You can embed the attachments anywhere within the event content, or let Calendar just append the attachments to the end of the event information, again just like a post within the forum. Attachments may be useful for Calendar to share an event poster or flyer, to share coupons for an event, or to attach documentation users may need to be informed of prior to the event, just to name a few uses.
Notifications
Users can now optionally elect to be notified of new or updated events in Calendar, allowing your site to notify users of changes to the Calendar that they may elect to be informed about. Previous versions of Calendar provided no way to push information to the user to notify them of changes in Calendar. Any user interested in an event saved to your Calendar would need to manually check on it periodically to verify any changes made to the event, which we can agree is certainly not an optimal experience or expectation. As of the next version of Calendar, users can follow both individual calendars and individual events, allowing them to be notified of additions to calendars they are following, and updates to events they follow. By letting Calendar notify your users of changes, the software becomes more functional and useful in it's prime goal, sharing event-based data with the community.
Comments
Your members will now be able to comment on events submitted to Calendar. You can control on a per-calendar basis which permission masks can comment on events in each calendar, and you can also specify whether comments must be moderated prior to becoming visible (again, on a per-calendar basis). Comments in Calendar use the central commenting class of IP.Board, meaning it works identically to all other applications (e.g., identical to the blog commenting system at the bottom of this page), allowing for a consistent interface users can understand and utilize without having to learn how to use yet another posting screen. If a user opts to follow an event to be notified of updates to the event, they will also be notified of comments made on the event, allowing your site to better communicate updates to users about content they are interested in, and driving more activity within the Calendar in the process.
"Like"
Alongside commenting, users can now "like" calendars and events (the aforementioned "follow" capability), giving them the opportunity to either show their support for the calendar/event, to be notified of updates to the calendar/event, or both. As with IP.Blog, IP.Downloads, etc., the like system is a central class within IP.Board that is reused within Calendar, again to provide a consistent interface to users that they can learn and understand once, and expect to use throughout your entire site.
Sharing
The general use share strip that you see below each topic (and elsewhere throughout our suite of applications) has been added to Calendar. This allows users to share events through social networking sites, through email, or even to print an event's details out with their printer. If Facebook support is enabled in your ACP, the Facebook "like" button will also show up for the user, allowing them to share the event on Facebook. This is likely to drive activity to your site as the user's friends see this content shared on Facebook and follow it through to your site, where they may be interested and join your site...a win-win!
RSVP
Often times you will find that when creating an event on your community you want to allow users the opportunity to let you know if they will be attending or not. This is useful for both real-world events (i.e. a club meetup at a coffee shop) and for online-only events (i.e. a developer seminar). As the event organizer you may need to know how many people will be attending, and/or if specific users will be attending. It is useful to have a way to allow users to signal that they will be attending the event.
In the "real world", this is usually done through what is known as "RSVP". Basically, an RSVP is a notification from a participant to the event organizer that the participant will be attending the event.
Event Submission
One area we wanted to simplify a little was the event submission process. To start with, we have removed the three separate confusing button options on the calendar page ("Add Single Event", "Add Ranged Event", "Add Recurring Event") and consolidated this into just one "Add Event" button. No longer will users have to actively think about what type of event they are adding before they are even presented with the form to do so.
The event form has been overhauled to handle the addition of all three event types at once in the process. Javascript has been leveraged to show and hide fields that are not applicable to the type of event the user wishes to add, until they need to see those fields. The date picker javascript tool has been added to the form to make it easier for users to choose the date they are attempting to add, and times have been changed to a 12 hour format with an "AM" and "PM" dropdown menu, a vast improvement over the previous 24-hour format field previously used.
Because the options are all interlinked, I've taken a quick video to show you how these work. When you submit the event, calendar will figure out what type of event (single, ranged or recurring) automatically and save the event data accordingly. By figuring these details out automatically, we make it easier for the user to submit their event without having to actively think about all of the details before hand.
Daily View
Receiving some of the biggest changes in it's general interface, the "daily view" as we call it has been completely changed in the next release of Calendar. "Daily view" is what I call the page that shows what is happening on a particular day.
As a reference point, you can view our current Calendar to see what the daily view looks like for a day that has both an event and some birthdays by looking at February 8th. In the current version of Calendar, you will see that birthdays are listed vertically at the top with a lot of wasted space to the right, while the more important events are listed at the bottom using the same exact template that is used when viewing the event itself. If you have a calendar where there is one event on the day, you ultimately end up with a "duplicate content" SEO scenario. The daily view looks (and indeed, has the same source code HTML) as the event view because both simply show the same event on the page. We wanted to make this view a little more useful than it is currently in the next release of Calendar.
Navigation Changes
Similarly, we have touched up the navigation bar on every page in Calendar to make it easier to navigate back up the hierarchy to where you want to go. Most pages in Calendar in the current release will show "Board > Calendar > Calendar Name > Page Name" in the navigation bar. While this generic approach does offer some flexibility to move back up the chain, you cannot easily get back to the page you were previously on when you view an event, or a day, or a week. With the next release of Calendar, the navigation bar will be much more dynamic and natural feeling, allowing you to more easily return to your previous page without having to use your back button.
When viewing a week, the month and year has been added as a navigational bar entry to let you return back to the month. When viewing a day, the same has been done here. The most useful changes have been made to the event view page, however. The event view page now will attempt to determine where you are visiting
from, so that it can better show you a navigational bar that is relevant to how you reached the page. For instance, if you are viewing the daily view and click on an event, you will now see the month and year as a navigational entry, as well as the day of the event. If you reach the event view page from the weekly view, you will have the month and year as a navigational entry, as well as the weekly view you just came from. This is particularly useful when you are viewing a ranged or recurring event, as it allows you to return to where you actually came
from, rather than simply returning you to the month and year the event started in (which is not where you came from, in many cases). The end result should be a more useful navigation bar for Calendar in 3.2.
Exporting Events
Two options will be available for your members to export events from your calendars. Your members will be able to download all events in the calendar as a .ics iCalendar file, which they can then import into their calendar application of choice, or your members can subscribe to your calendar to automatically import new events as they are posted through a webcal:// protocol link. Both options are presented on most pages of the calendar so that they are easily accessible. When clicking on a link beginning with the (unofficial) "webcal://" protocol, the user's calendar application of choice should automatically launch, importing the feed without any necessary intervention from the user. Users can also copy the link and use the link to import the calendar into an application or website (such as Google Calendar) manually.
All relevant data is included in an iCalendar export, including the event start, end and recurrence information, the event organizer information, attachments (when applicable), and RSVP attendees (when applicable).
Importing Events
It is important to note that for this release, we have opted to make event importing an
admin-only option. We may likely investigate front-end support for importing events into your calendar, however we have decided to implement the iCalendar importing in this release through the ACP so as to prevent resource issues on your board. I'm sure you can imagine how your server might react if 10,000 members all decided they wanted to import their Google Calendar events into your calendar on a recurring basis.
The ACP provides two ways to import events:
- You can upload an iCalendar file (which will usually have a .ics extension) through an upload form
- You can define feeds (using http://, https://, or webcal:// protocols) to import on a regular basis
When you upload a .ics file to import, you can specify which calendar you wish to import the events to, and the member you wish to save the events as (the field to specify the member uses the member look-ahead javascript to aid you in finding the correct user). The file you upload will be parsed and all data that can be extracted and honored will be imported as provided. If the event file has attendees specified, and any of those attendees are also members of your board, they will even be automatically RSVPed for the event!
Layout Enhancements
While we are not ready to go into detail about some of these other changes just yet (but we will in a future blog entry!), we are making other changes that closely relate to SEO in the general structure and layout of Calendar. For instance, we have consolidated all event posting pages into one, so there is just one "Add Event" button now, and we are changing the current daily view to less-closely resemble the event view. We feel these two views being essentially duplicates of each other is not only confusing to the user, but may be seen as duplicate pages by some search engines while crawling your site (if you view a day that has one event, and the event directly, the output is nearly identical, even though they are two separate views within Calendar). These changes, while we are not targetting SEO specifically with them, do impact your search engine optimization directly and indirectly. Expect future blog entries to be posted that detail these changes further.
New Text Editor
Nearly ten years ago, IP.Board shipped with a pretty advanced functional editor that allowed you to quickly format your text in a rough "WYSIWYG" format. This was an exciting technology. As the main browsers started adding better support for this functionality we updated our own code to keep up.
The internet is a constantly evolving space and web browsers and technology rise and fall and keeping up with these changes gets harder and harder. This is why we've added a new editor to 3.2.0 that is developed by a dedicated team outside of Invision Power Services.
IP.Board 3.2.0 will come with the excellent CKEditor as standard. It's a well developed and well tested editor that is very extensible. It's constantly updated which means that we simply have to update the version that comes with IP.Board to get all the latest fixes.
In general use, the new editor is much better at "WYSIWYG" (rich text editing) than our own current implementation and we've extended it further.
Please keep in mind that the screenshots and videos below are using a very early development copy of IP.Board 3.2.0 and the editor will likely be skinned in a little more to match IP.Board before we release.
Switching between modes
We love the new editor and as it supports nearly all major browsers, it's the first choice for replying and adding new topics. However, there are times when you want to edit the BBCode directly and with that in mind, you can switch between rich text editing mode and simple text mode without a page reload.
Auto Saving Text
A new and really handy feature we've added is auto save. As you type, the editor checks to see if there's any new content and if there is, it'll ping off via Ajax to save what you've written. If anything happens to your page, upon reloading you'll see it's stored your content and you can quickly restore it. You won't lose another post to a browser crash or server time out.
Live Topic Replies
Quite often you're on a busy board such as ours and you're using the fast reply to make a post and when submit the post you realise that others have posted in the mean time making your reply either redundant or out of context.
To solve this, IP.Board now checks at regular intervals to see if any new posts have come through and if so, you can add them to the page.
View New Content and Topic Marking
Of all the features we receive feedback on, view new content receives the most. To many this is their primary browsing page and it's vital that it works accurately. We've had database level topic tracking for many years. It was introduced in 2.0 and has gone through many refinements for efficiency and accuracy.
We rewrote the system in IP.Board 3.0.0 as a global framework that all applications can use via a small extensions file. This provided great flexibility and a centralized storage area for the marking data. However, there were some technical limitations which made 'View New Content' a little unreliable in certain situations due to the partial reliance on cookie data to provide a full picture of what is unread.
Another common complaint is that partially read topics 'vanish' from the view new content list as they are marked read even when some pages are left unread which leads to confusion about which topics have been fully read.
As always, we listen very carefully to feedback from our customers and this feature kept coming up time and time again so I'm very pleased to say that we've tackled these issues head on in IP.Board 3.2!
Improved View New Content Tracking
We have rewritten large sections of the view new content tracking and parsing to make it much more accurate. We now fetch the data in a large chunk and then post process it against the topic marking table to ensure complete accuracy. This means that you won't have 'read' topics showing up in your view new content list again.
Sphinx Usage
We have added a setting to enable Sphinx users to use plain SQL View New Content to avoid the 15 minute 'delay' in the results due to the delta indexes being cycled. The SQL view new content is incredibly efficient so you can still use Sphinx for the general search areas but give your members instant view new content results.
Improved Topic Marking
Purely based on the feedback we've received from our customers, we've implemented a change so that a topic with many pages isn't marked as read until the last page has been loaded. This means you can partially read a topic and come back to it later. We've made it even easier to locate your last read position with a handy link on the topic page.
Improved View New Content Overview
Another common source of confusion was our two areas "View New Content" and "View Active Content". Most people were confused by the difference and ended up loading the wrong view to locate their unread content. We have now merged these views into one single "View New Content" page. This will instantly resolve that confusion and make it much simpler to fetch the data you are looking for.
The view new content page remembers your last selection preferences and stores them in the database so next time you load the view new content page, it'll automatically use those preferences. There's no need to go into your User CP to set them anymore!
Filter by "Followed" items only
In a future blog entry, we'll discuss the change from "Watched Topics/Forums" to "Follow" but for the purpose of this entry, assume that they are synonymous.
In IP.Board 3.2.0 you can now elect to filter the view new content result set by items you follow. This will search forums and topics you are following (in other words, 'watching') and present topics inside forums that are new or topics that you're following that have new posts. This makes the view new content area much more useful as it is delivering just the content that you want to read.
Search In Titles
In IP.Board 3.1, there is a global "Search in titles" checkbox available for all content types when using the advanced search form, however there is then an additional option for the forums content type specifically to search in "titles and posts" or "just in titles". Naturally, this is somewhat confusing and contradictory. Additionally, it limits certain functionality to the forums application alone, functionality that may be useful in other applications. We have resolved this in IP.Board 3.2 by removing the forum-specific option (the second arrow in the previous screenshot) and enhancing the global option to allow you to specify "Search title and content", "Only search in titles", and "Only search in content". This level of customization for searches in any application should help you better find content when you know where the search terms may be contained.
Default VNC Method
A minor change, but one we have seen requested many times on these forums, we have added an ACP setting to allow the administrator to define the default "View New Content" method. You can now specify for your new users whether they should see "Content I have not read" by default, or "Content since my last visit". Users can still overide this when viewing the VNC results, but now you will be able to define the default that you feel is best for your community.
Content Filters for VNC
In the previous screenshot for "My Content", you will see that there are filters to drill down to "Topics I participated in", "Topics I started", and "Posts I made". This is a useful feature when viewing a user's content ... so we decided to expand it to the VNC search results as well.
The option "Posts I made" is not relevant to view new content (if you made the post, it will never be new of course), so this option is not present. However, you can now filter VNC results down to "Topics I participated in" and "Topics I started", allowing you an easy way to review new content on the community in topics that you are interested in. When combined with the new filter "Content I am following", you have a granular level of control over your content discovery process never before seen in forum software!
Forum Filtering in VNC
Another oft-requested feature, we have added the ability for user's to filter which forums they wish to see results from in the VNC search results screen.
Under the 'Other Filters' area in VNC, you will have an option "Filter by forum", which will launch a modal popup allowing you to specify which forums you wish to see content from.
These filters are remembered (between sessions and across separate computers), with an indicator to let the user know when the filter is being applied.
New Photo Editor
One of our main goals for IP.Board 3.2.0 is to streamline the interface and make it easier to work with. We're also taking full advantage of modern techniques to ensure that IP.Board has more of an application feel by eliminating page reloads and using rich web technologies.
We've revamped the photo editor to make it easier and simpler to use. The first thing you'll notice is that if you've connected your forum account to Twitter and/or Facebook, you can quickly select to synchronise your photo with the service on the same page.
We're also using square cropped images for the user's photo for a more uniform feel and you can adjust the crop viewport if the default center crop doesn't catch all the detail.
Shared Media
The ability to easily share content within your community is important to your members. If your members submit an image to Gallery, it's quite probable they'll want to include that image in a post at some point, and there needs to be an easy way to do this. Likewise, if your members submit a file to the Download Manager, they may want to link to that file when replying to a blog entry. There are many instances where it is crucial that members be able to quickly and easily share the content they have contributed to your site within the community, and the old-fashioned method of copying and pasting a link into their post just doesn't cut it anymore.
This is functionality that many of our members have requested, many times over, and that we have been eager to build into the software. It was important for us, however, to build this in an extensible manner that allows us to include support for all of our applications without having to reinvent the wheel each time, and without having to manage the functionality individually per-application. Users expect a combined and intuitive interface that allows them to share all of their content easily, without having to visit their content pages and copy links and other data manually.
IP.Board 3.2.0 will introduce a new shared media manager to fulfill this important need.
Sharing Media
With the new editor in IP.Board 3.2.0, we have built a plugin that allows your members to access and share their previously submitted content. Firstly, this new media sharing tool is available anywhere that the new editor is available. That means you can share download manager files in calendar events, gallery images in blog entries, and forum attachments in download manager submissions. There are obviously a lot of possibilities here, and we expect that as third party applications embrace this new feature you will be able to share even more of your community content anywhere across your community.
The shared media tool is a custom bbcode, like all of our other bbcodes. This means you can control its use just like any other bbcode, including limiting the feature to select user groups (or disabling it entirely). You are not required to use this new feature if you don't wish to, and you can restrict it any way that you wish.
The system is entirely based on a plugin callback approach allowing third party developers to hook into it easily. I can envision sharing "issues" from tracker in forum posts, or items from other popular modifications throughout your site. The plugins are relatively simple to create and we expect to provide documentation of the system to developers shortly following the 3.2 release. It is important to note that plugins can each utilize their own permission checking and display routines, however they can also utilize our basic layouts as shown in my previous screenshots. There is a lot of flexibility in this new system for developers.
And lastly, this is only the first version of our new shared media tool. We expect to enhance and bring further capabilities to this feature in future versions of our software.
Tagging and Prefixes
Tagging
An incredibly popular request has been the ability to 'tag' content with special keywords and then find other content tagged with the same keywords. This gives a secondary way to organise data beyond the administrator defined 'categories' and 'forums' set up.
We're very pleased to say that this functionality is now available in IP.Board 3.2.0 and we've spent some time to make sure we have a robust and thoughtful implementation.
A tale of two modes
Our tagging implementation is available in two modes:
- Open Mode: Where allowed, your members can create new tags on-the-fly and add them to content.
- Closed Mode: Where allowed, your members can select from pre-defined tags and add them to content.
We feel this gives you the best of both worlds. Some communities may not need a full tagging system, but you may wish to enforce secondary categorisation via pre-set tags that you as the administrator control. Alternatively, you may wish to throw the doors open and let your members tag their content as they see fit. The choice is yours!
As you'd expect, this feature comes with many controls. You can define the minimum and maximum number of tags per item, the minimum and maximum length of each tag and more. You can even override the pre-defined tags on a per app (and thus per-forum) basis giving full control over the tagging system.
Prefixes
Another very popular feature request is the ability to assign a custom or pre-defined prefix to a piece of content such as a topic or blog entry. In many ways this works very similarly to tagging so we've created a single system that allows the use of a tag as a prefix!
As you'd expect, you can disable prefixes and tagging on a per member or per group basis giving you complete control over your members' permissions.
You can even set the system to be used solely for prefixes by limiting the number of tags to one and enforcing the use of pre-defined tags. It really is a very flexible system.
Notification Enhancements
We added a notifications system in IP.Board 3.1.0 and it's been a very popular addition allowing your members to select the type of notification they receive for specific events like a new personal message, quoted post, etc.
However, we've received a lot of feedback since and we wanted to make some enhancements to address some common issues. I'm happy to say that we've completed a lot of interface work in this area and we feel we have a much better system.
The actual functionality hasn't changed. You can still elect to receive and/or a personal message, email or inline notification for certain events and you can still elect to receive an inline 'pop-up' (it's actually an inline javascript modal box but we've retained the familiar phrasing) when you receive a new inline notification. Many members set their notifications up so they receive an inline notification with pop-up when they get a new personal message, for example.
Interface
As IP.Board 3.2.0 has a completely revamped skin, the actual "PM count" and "Notification" boxes have been removed from the drop down icons and placed with a high visibility count.
Enhancements
The eagle eyed among you may notice that the new inline pop-up contains the proper personal message text and not simply a copy of an email that could be sent out. We've made it so each notification can have 'meta data' attached to link the notification to the piece of content. This means that the pop-up can correctly fetch the live data without any additional mark-up or text.
More excitingly, we now mark the notification as read when the personal message has been read. This was a long standing complaint about the system and I'm pleased to say that we've now addressed this.
We've also changed how the 'red alert' counts work. In the old system, when you viewed the notification drop down, the count and the menu contents were removed so that on the next click, it would tell you that there were no notifications to view. We've now changed that so the count will disappear when you click the link, but the actual contents will remain so you can go back after a page reload and view it again.
Likewise, previously the 'new' personal message counter didn't vanish when you viewed your inbox. Now, when you click the inbox link the alert count will disappear but the drop down will show you the recent messages still. They are highlighted with a blue background in the screenshots above.
We feel this makes the alert system much more useful as you truly only get alerted when there is new content you've not acknowledged without losing the read/unread status of each item.
Mobile Skin
We've had specific support for mobile touch devices in the IP.Board suite for a number of versions - these devices see a specially designed skin which is stripped down and touch friendly, rather than the usual skin. We've taken the opportunity to update this skin for IP.Board 3.2, refreshing some aspects of the style and adding support for new features.
Launcher
Gone is the linear menu of community links, replaced instead with a new launcher screen that shows the various areas that can be accessed.
As well as looking more pleasant, the increased space for each item should make tapping easier. In addition, you'll notice that we now display bubbles that show the message/notification counts, like on the default skin.
General interface improvements
We've restyled most elements in the skin, to lighten it and reduce the space necessary. You'll notice the navigation bar that used to be present is now displayed as a 'Back' link in the header bar - a convention mobile users are well used to. The individual page title is shown in the black bar, with the page content following.
In this particular screenshot, you might also notice that we're using the standard default skin read/unread topic markers, since they're perfectly suited. As well as the cleaner display, you might notice we also support the new Like feature for posts.
Notifications
Notifications aren't something we've supported in the mobile skin before, but with more focus being placed on them in IP.Board as a whole, we took the step of adding them to the mobile view too. They essentially work just like you're used to, with the option to go to the user, the content, of the individual post.
Tagging
Tagging is a new feature introduced in IP.Board 3.2, and since tags can be set as required when posted, it was essential that posting support was added to the mobile skin. To remove a tag, simply tap it, then tap the Remove Selected button that will appear. If you choose to use the closed tagging system (whereby users can only choose from tags you define), a select list is shown instead, allowing users to choose from the native phone interface.
View New Content/Searching
IP.Board 3.2 introduces a new way of filtering results when using View New Content or when searching. A bar is shown on the left, with the various filter choices able to toggled on and off to change the results. While this interface clearly wouldn't work on a mobile device, we did want to ensure the filtering options were still available. Clicking one of the buttons on the top bar presents the available filters, with the currently-used shown with a check.
Miscellaneous Changes- Linear+ and Outline modes removed for topic viewing (they're a hold-over from an older time on the web and it's time to retire them)
- Support for IPv6
- You can now use the member management tools to search for incomplete members
- Member photos and member avatars are being merged into one function: member photo. There was too much overlap between the two features.
- “Show X Last visitors in profile” now shows always the last 5 visitors if the setting is enabled rather than having a 3, 5, 10 dropdown choice.
- The note box in your My Settings (UserCP) area has been removed. It is a hold-over from years past.
- The unread topic marking system will now remember what page of a topic you left off reading rather than assume you read the entire topic on the first click.
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