Plod

This is the first of a series of weekly development update announcements which will contain information on progress throughout the IPB 2.0.0 development cycle.

Last week saw the first release of IPB 2 which has been an overall success considering that it's the first release of a major version increment and although the feature set is incomplete it proved to be stable.

This week I've been putting my focus on completing the feature set before the next release. The global announcement feature has been added which allows super moderators and administrators to create announcements that appear at the top of the forum listing. This announcement can be timed to start at an entered date and end at an entered date and you can also choose which forums to show the announcement in.

The trash can feature has also been implemented. This allows the administrator to set up a 'trash can' forum which all deleted topics and posts are moved into instead of being simply removed from the database. You can hide viewing permissions from members and even staff to make it transparent. This is a very convenient way of reviewing deleted material and using the new inline moderation, restoring deleted material is a matter of a few clicks.

I've started work on the new "Post Office". This will be an area that allows the administrator to bulk email their members. The bulk mail feature has been hugely improved from previous versions and now sends out the mail via the mail queue system which means that you will no longer get failed mail messages due to large BCC headers. What's more - the post office saves all sent bulk mail and preserves the settings so you have a record of what you've sent and to whom. You can even start a new mail based on previous mailings which is a handy way of storing a template with settings to make regular bulk mailing less of a chore.

Post Office: New Bulk Mail Screen

What's left to do?

We've still got a bit of work to do before IPB 2 reaches release candidate quality. I aim to have the full feature set implemented for PDR 2 (Beta 2) and the full database abstraction layer implemented for PDR 3 (Beta 3). It's quite possible that the bulk of the bug fixing will be done after PDR 3 (Beta 3) as it might prove beneficial to wait until all the components are completed to reduce the possibility of fixing-by-changing.

Skins and Languages

As mentioned in other announcements, the skins and language sets are not complete and will receive an overhaul during the development cycle. As a rule of thumb, the skins and langauges will not be complete until PR 1 (RC 1).

Upgrading to PDR 2 from PDR 1

We might implement our upgrade system a little earlier and give it an airing for the next beta release. There have been some schematic changes and this will require a script to be written. We plan to introduce a more integrated method of upgrading between releases.

Upgrading from 1.3 to 2.0.0

There is currently no upgrade path from 1.3 to 2.0.0. We plan on writing the upgrade script for around PDR 3 (Beta 3). Until then please don't try and import a 1.3 database into 2.0 - it simply won't work.