The long wait for news on IP.Dynamic and IP.Nexus will be over soon…

Hot on the heels of the two previously finished features, here’s another completed feature for the “MyCP” area of IP.Dynamic.

Personal Topics, is – as the name implies, a feature that allows you to start a topic and invite specific members to participate. It’s a bit like a personal message but in a forum topic format.

The movie shows the main features such as the ability for the topic starter (and admins) to remove and ban members from a topic. Each participant can optionally remove themselves from the topic or block it completely.

Expect this feature to make it to IPB 3.0.

6.4mb Quicktime Movie

I’m just about done with the IP.Dynamic task manager. As the name suggests, it’s a little corner of the CMS to organize you and your staff.

It should be pretty self explanatory as-is. Just after I took the movie capture, I added in a check box to ‘Hide Completed Tasks’ and made it so the settings are stored in a cookie so they are remembered across pages and when you return.

4.6mb Quicktime Movie

I had previously blogged about IP.Dynamic’s calendar.

Thankfully, it’s nearing completion.

There’s not much to say that the movie clips won’t other than it has support for multiple calendars that can be viewed simultaneously a’la Google Calendar and it introduces ‘context sensitive’ menu options (the Calendar View Options above the left hand menu).

4.5mb Quicktime Movie

5.7mb Quicktime Movie

I hate writing calendars.

I suck at maths. For a programming nerd, that’s unsual – but it’s true. Even after a month of intense DS Lite Brain Training, I still can’t work out how much change I’m supposed to have at the till. Mainly because I use a visa card, but I digress.

Calendars suck because you have to take into account different timezones when storing the event and when showing the event. Stick on some daylight saving time variances and it’s enough to push me over the edge.

Not being satisfied by getting whipped by basic mathematics that my six year old nephew could do with both hands behind his back, I went and threw some javascript into the mix to ensure the last remaining clumps of hair I have were majestically pulled from my scalp.

Now I know there’s some fancy AJAX calendars out there. Google’s calendar app and 30boxes are both good examples of what can be done with enough time and enough programmers. I didn’t really want to compete with those programs because basically, I don’t have the time.

Here’s a quick look at the interface thus far. (Quicktime .mov, 1.1mb)

As alpha testing continues, I’ve been overhauling some areas which haven’t seen much attention for a while. One such area is the files and directories management screen.

I’ve re-done the entire section to make it not only much prettier but much easier to use and more functional. I’ve tried to keep it as “dynamic” as I could and utilized a fair bit of javascript (yes, with AJAX) and some fancy DHTML to produce a display that allows you to upload files and watch the file listing get updated in real time without the need to visit upload forms and have the page refresh.

Also included is drag and drop move and click and hold title editing. I had a small breakdown getting it to work in Safari (argh!) and IE (double argh!). I’m not brave enough to try Opera just yet.

Notice in the movie how, when we move into another folder by clicking on its name, the drop down boxes for the “upload into folder” and “create new folder” change automatically (that was the double argh! for IE).

(Sorry about the light yellow mouse pointer in the movie. Ambrosia Software are working on an intel version of Snapz Pro. The PowerPC version doesn’t work 100% on intel Macs)

IPD Files and Directories (Quicktime .mov 2.1mb)

Sorry for the lack of updates over the past few weeks.

It’s been a car-azy time at IPS towers as we’ve just kicked off the first round of alpha and beta testing for two new products: IP.Dynamic and IP.Converge.

Initial feedback is very positive and we’ve got some great ideas to work with. The ‘biggest’ stumbling block was MySQL 5 support. None of our products install and run with MySQL 5 when sql_mode is set to STRICT_TRANS_TABLES,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION because of sloppy SQL schematics.

I’ve spent the best part of the day cleaning up IP.Dynamic, IP.Converge and IP.Board so that they all install and run cleanly.

I had some trouble trying to get MySQL 5 installed. Regular readers will known that I’ve upgraded my main machine to an intel iMac. This causes a slight problem as the current PHP and MySQL installers don’t run so well under the intel chipset. I spent a few hours fiddling with MySQL 5 to no avail and came across MAMP which is a stand-alone webserver running Apache, MySQL 5 and PHP 5. It doesn’t interfere with the Mac’s own apache installation which is very handy. It’s enabled me to run MySQL 5 without messing up the rest of my mac. The old iMac is running as a webserver and uses MySQL 4 – and I don’t really want to upgrade that machine just yet.

I’ve also been amusing myself by writing perl scripts to export the latest release from SVN, clean it up and create an encoded (ioncube / zend) release for the alpha testers.

Invision Power Dynamic is a very modular system. At IP.Dynamic’s core is nothing more than a framework – the actual functionality comes from the ‘components’.

IP.Dynamic will ship with default components, such as the menu manager, articles manager, RSS import/export manager and a form manager.

The form manager has been designed as a flexible system that can handle pretty much every form requirement you might have; from a simple contact form to a more complex customer survey.

The form manager allows one to capture the input as well as email the results to multiple addresses or activate a custom module when the form has been completed so that you can use the form manager to power your own mini-applications.

The movie shows a form group’s options, a form field’s options as well as browsing the form results. The ‘public’ side looks very scrappy – this is because we’ve still to create the ‘default’ site HTML and CSS so we’re still using the alpha tester’s demo site for the output with IPB CSS. This will all be cleaned up prior to shipping.

IPD: Form Manager (Quicktime .mov 9.1mb)

We, at IPS towers, often eat our own dog food. We do this with development builds to discover new better ways of presenting our product and to high light any areas which can be improved.

Rob (IPS designer / web site lead) has been working with IPD at a top secret location for top secret reasons and he’s been busily offering suggestions which he’d find useful and it’s been a very productive experience.

One area highlighted was the initial confusion with the components and how one uses components in a page. It was felt that it was too cumbersome to have one click on the components tab, click on the component ‘Manage’ link and then proceed to add or edit a new instance of that component (such as a new articles group, etc) and then, click back on the ‘Content’ tab, click on the page one wishes to edit to use the ‘Insert IPD Tag’ from the text editor.

My solution was to tweak the components framework a little and allow the IPD user to choose which type of page they want to create. If they choose advaned, they are taken immediately to the normal IPD page form (complete with proxy options, etc). If they choose a component page, they get a slightly ‘dumbed’ down form with separate rich text editors for content above and below the component along with a link that creates a pop-up window with the component’s manage screen loaded.

The result is a much easier introduction to IPD. Advanced users will appreciate the flexibility of being able to use multiple components on a single page.

IPD: Adding a new page (Quick time .mov 7.2mb)

I’ve finally finished the IPD attachments system (which will likely come to IPB 3.0 along with the new RTE) and I’m pretty pleased with it.

I’ve spent a lot of time on the interface to allow one to make multiple uploads without leaving or refreshing the current page. I finally went with a scripted solution that manages an iFrame. It’s at this point that someone (yes, you Dean) says “Hey, why not use AJAX?”. Well, for one – there wasn’t the need to do so. An iFrame suits this job perfectly and degrades nicely when javascript is disabled. If I wrote an AJAX engine for the attachment system, I’d have either had to accept that non-AJAX equipped browsers (admittedly very few) couldn’t upload files or create an iFrame alternative. Secondly, lets only use AJAX when we need to, OK?

As you can see from the movie below, the result is pretty seamless and – paradoxically – you wouldn’t know that it was an iFrame unless you read this blog. The first one to comment “or read the HTML” gets a slap.

The attachments system in IPD is another little framework that accepts ‘plugin’ modules to the main attachment class to generate permissions / file size restrictions. This means that I can quickly add the attachments system to any area of IPD just by adding a bit of HTML mark-up (and the relevant JS loader) and a little plugin class. The rest is handled by the attachments framework.

There’s a bit of tidy up to do. I’m thinking of changing the colour of the status bar if an error is reported and adding the number of stored attachments to the drop down box title: “Manage Current Attachments (4)” to make it obvious that the page / article / whatever already has attachments.

IPD Attachments (3.1mb Quicktime .mov)