Plod

As the development process for v2.0 continues, the focus has been put on the skins and templates manager. We've had a lot of feedback on Invision Power Board and the most common area of confusion is the template editor. With this in mind we've started work on the interface to try and make the process easier and more logical.

Screenshot of Skin Manager Home
This screen is the main hub for the skins and templates system. You'll notice radical changes and a lay-out clean up from previous versions. You'll notice a bank of three icons next to the "Export" and "Remove" buttons. In order from left to right these icons represent "Is this skin being used for a forum?" a tooltop lists the forum names if so. "Is this skin hidden from members" and "Is this the default skin?".

Screenshot of Skin Manager Home with menu
Clicking on a skin set names brings up a menu where you can choose to edit parts of that skin and edit the assignments; the components of the skin (such as which board wrapper to use, etc).

Screenshot of "Edit Skin Assignments"
A more logical layout allows you to share components with other skins, such as HTML templates, CSS, etc

Screenshot of "Edit Skin HTML Templates"
Again, a more logical view is presented when editing the HTML template bits. Each section is given its own "folder" and clicking in the section name brings up a menu where you can either click on the template bit name to edit that bit alone, or select many via the checkboxes and edit many at once. The boxed "IE" logo on the far right next to the "download" and "upload" buttons will open a new window with the relevant page loaded as a preview - for example if you clicked on the boxed IE on the Board Index row, it'll load "index.php?act=idx".

Screenshot of editing many template bits
The new template bit editor allows you to make changes to the textareas in real time. You can chose from the dropdown menus at the top to change the font face, colour, background color, textarea width and textarea height. This makes editing much easier and as you don't have to wait for a page reload when changing makes it very fast to find the best environment. The information is stored in a cookie so that it's saved for next time you edit any templates.

Screenshot of floated template bit editor
You'll notice a "float" button on each template bit editor. This will pop open a new window that can be resized for easier editing. I've set this one to "matrix style" with green text on a black background.

Please note that this is very much work in progress and layout and logic may change further down the development path.

That's it for now!

In response to the huge demand for our conversion service from other forum software products we have lowered the price for this service.

Please note that for some software conversions you can download the conversion software directly on our home page at no cost if you are able to perform the conversion yourself.

If you wish to have our staff perform a conversion from an existing forum software product to Invision Power Board the price for this service is now $60 which is down from the previous price of $85 per conversion.

Thank you for your continued business. If you have questions please email info@invisionpower.com or phone us at 1-800-901-5491 and we will be happy to assist you.