Plod

This is the second IPB 2.0.0 development update. These updates are designed to keep you informed on the development progress of Invision Power Board v2.0.0.

Post Office: finished
邮局功能开发完成

This week saw the completion of the 'Post Office': IPB's centralized mail system. The post office allows you to create new bulk emailers, re-send old bulk email and edit old mail to use as the basis of new mail.

The most difficult aspect of sending bulk mail is actually sending the mail in bulk. Previous versions of Invision Power Board have failed when sending email to more than a few thousand people with no real way around it.

Enter the task manager and a nifty piece of footwork.
Now, when a bulk mail is 'sent', it activates an otherwise dormant task manager process which checks and sends mail every minute until all the email has been sent. When the mail has been sent, the task manager switches off the bulk mail task and stops checking. This allows the mail to be sent out in cycles without putting an undue load on the server. This has proved very successful and I will trial it here next week to see how it performs under a 'real' load. An added bonus is the ability to watch the mail being sent from within the post office.

群发邮件功能较以前的IPB版本有较大更新，目前来说任务管理器可以在群发邮件被发送之时，另外激活一个休眠的管理进程，它会每隔一分钟检查一次邮件是否发送完毕并发送邮件，发送结束后，该进程自动自杀，这样一来避免了群发时给服务器造成的超负荷。经测试非常成功，下周将模拟真实情况进行测试。此外还添加了可以在邮局中监测邮件的发送情况。

Email Errors: Not Fatal
邮件错误: 并非致命

In IPB 1, if you were sending email via SMTP and the mailer encountered a problem, it would exit the program with a 'fatal error'. However, a lot of the time, SMTP was simply complaining about a non-existent email address or a badly formatted email address. This would cause IPB to refuse to display a topic when replying and activated the topic notification procedure.
In IPB 2, the errors are silently logged to the database and IPB no longer exists with a fatal error. This means that the odd problem, such as a badly formatted address won't stop all the mail from being sent.

在IPB 1系列中，如果你通过SMTP发送邮件，如果邮件程序遇到问题它会退出程序并返回一个“致命错误”的提示。其实大多数时候SMTP只是遇到了一些不存在的或存在格式错误的邮件地址，所以当这种情况的发生时，一旦启用了主题回复邮件提示功能，会导致回复主题时IPB不能正确显示主题页面，取而代之的就是那个臭名昭著的“致命错误”。在IPB 2系列中，这类错误将被由后台悄悄地记录到数据库中，不再会出现致命错误的提示了，也就是说即便那些邮件格式等问题也不会影响到其他邮件的发送了。呵呵，福音啊！

Profile Fields: Revisited
自定义资料表单: 重造

I have rewritten the custom profile field handler (which is now in its own class for all those who love a good API or three). The new handler allows for much more flexibility (see screenshot) without the self-imposed limits that IPB 1 caused. You can now have a profile field on the registration form which must be completed but cannot be edited by the member - this was something that you couldn't achieve in IPB 1. There are many more 'new' configurations possible in IPB 2 which allows for much more scope.
I've also written a nifty little routine which allows you to specifiy (if and) how the custom field appears within the author's details section in a post when viewing a topic. In IPB 1, you had to manually edit the templates to achieve this. In IPB 2 it's a simple case of showing IPB how you want it to look and thanks to HTML logic, IPB does the rest for you.

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.