InstantASP Blog

InstantForum.NET 2012-1 Download

Ryan Healey — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:12:18 GMT

Ihope everyone is well. We've been helping lots of our customers upgradetheir existing InstantForum.NET installations to the latest 2012 updatesince it's release late December. So far your feedback has been verypositive.

However as with all software we have discovered someminor bugs since the 2012 release. To resolve these I'm delighted toannounce our InstantForum.NET 2012-1 update is now available fordownload. This is a maintenance update to resolve the bugs we'vediscovered since the initial 2012 release.

To learn more about the updates and how to upgrade please see the following article…

http://docs.instantasp.co.uk/Docs/InstantForum.NET-2012-to-2012-1

Our2012-1 update is available free of charge to all existingInstantForum.NET 2012 customers and will automatically be available fromyour Licenses page within your My.InstantASP account.

We havenot introduced any major new functionality with this release as wewanted to focus on reducing the bug count. Once we are confident our2012 release is as robust as possible we'll have a more substantialfeature update. We have a number of exciting improvements & ideas onour road-map but want to first ensure 2012 is a high quality release.

Wehope you enjoy the 2012-1 update and would suggest upgrading if you'vecountered any of the problems below. We've also introduced improvedright to left layout support in this update for Arabic customers.

2012-1 Improvements

- Added improved right to left skin, only one change required to the CSS now
- Added sample skin that tailors InstantForum.NET to work in smaller width constraints, 850pixels.
- Added .NET 4.0 support / specific web.config file
- Added ability to quickly link a URL within the editor in Chrome (similar to the Gmail editor)
- Improved CurrentCulture call on all pages for improved performance

2012-1 Fixes

- Fixed issue that prevent topics from being printed if anonymous access we denied to the forum containing the topic
- Fixed issue sending PMs if Max Number of Recipients was set to 0 in permission set
- Fixed issue with [code] and [quote] blocks when posted in Chrome not ending correctly
- Fixed an object reference error in mobile skin if you hidden certain controls via a permission set
- Fixed issue with private messages if you entered ", ," in the username field
-Fixed issue which prevented live preview from showing all your messageif the message contained "&" in the underlying HTML
- Fixed issue that didn't allow you to align text within the editor in Chrome
- Fixed issue which cased link text to disappear when editing links in Chrome
- Fixed a number of incorrect color issues in dark skin on calendar page
- Fixed "promte" spelling error in Like Pop-Up
- Fixed issue with event last edited by label not showing text correctly

We hope you enjoy the update. Thank you as always to everyone for your support. I look forward to posting further updates soon,

InstantForum.NET 2012 Preview Online

Ryan Healey — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 13:40:56 GMT

Hi All, Hope every one is well. We've been hard at work over the last few months on our next major InstantForum.NET update, InstantForum.NET 2012.

I'll be posting individual blog posts here over the coming days / weeks detailing the new features & improvements you'll find in our 2012 update however I'm a little excited and just can't wait any longer.

You can explore an online "early" demo of our next forum update at the link below…

http://demos.instantasp.co.uk/InstantForum2012/

You can login as an administrator using the usual combination…

Email: admin@admin.com

Password: admin

Alternatively login using the new Facebook login - yay.

I know I've not posted since March (I can't believe that) but please do check back here often over the next few weeks as I'll be posting much more information on 2012 now we are only a week or two from our first public beta.

P.S. Don't forget to visit the link above on a mobile device. You'll get a whole new experience :)

12 tips to improve your customer support & save you time

Ryan Healey — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 12:26:20 GMT

We recently published a white paper containing 12 practical tips you can put to use right away to help provide a more responsive, well managed customer support experience. A few practical changes and improvements can help turn your customer support into relatively easy, painless process and can quickly result in happier customers and support staff.

You can read this paper below...

As always if we can assist with any questions please don't hesitate to pop a comment below or contact us.

We hope you find some if the tipcs helpful.

InstantForum.NET 2011 - Going Mobile

Ryan Healey — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 02:39:22 GMT

I'm excited to announce our forthcoming InstantForum.NET 2011 update will introduce mobile support.

Our primary focus will be to provide iPhone & iPad, support however we are designing the mobile skin in such as way that it will work just as well on Android, Windows Phone 7 & Blackberry devices.

Whilst this is still a web application we are developing the new skin to look & feel (as much as possible) like a native iPhone/iPad application. The skins will be more touch friendly and will focus on simplicity allowing you to quickly catch up and post quick messages on the go.

You can test drive this skin now. Simply visit our community forums on any mobile device.

It's still early days but I wanted to share with you some screen grabs of how this looks so far...

Yes. Visit our community forums on any mobile device to give the mobile skin a test drive. We would welcome any feedback as a response here within this topic.

Year. We will be providing options within the Admin CP to allow you as an administrator to select a specific skin to target a mobile or tablet device.

Yes. A mobile skin is just another skin within InstantForum.NET. As with all skins they can be customized through CSS, master page changes, editing the mark-up etc.

Using the WURFL device database via 51Degrees.mobi foundation.
http://51degrees.mobi/

While ASP.NET’s built-in browser detection support will be sufficient for many applications it will not recognize many of the latest devices unless you manually update e the browser definition files.

For example even the .NET 4 browser definition files are not recent enough to recognize Windows Phone 7, Android phones, Opera Mobile browsers, or Apple iPads.

We choose 51Degrees.mobi foundation as the foundation is being continually updated to support new mobile devices and features requested by developers.

Once a mobile device has been detected InstantForum.NET will automatically load the correct skin. .

We look forward to posting further news as this moves to release :)

InstantForum.NET 2010-5 Update

Ryan Healey — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 16:24:53 GMT

Just a quick post to let you know we've just released InstantForum.NET 2010-5. This update is available now for download from within your My.InstantASP account. This update resolves a number of minor issues and addresses problems with both IE9 RC1 and FireFox 4 beta.

We'll be posting further information on this update and instructions on how to upgrade in our documentation area later today. We wanted to provide the 2010-5 update to address issues reported by customers and to prepare InstantForum.NET for the forthcoming IE9 and FF4 updates.

We've also made a number of performance / refactoring improvements throughout the and managed to defer (call when required) a couple of database queries to further speed page load times.

I'm afraid there are no new major features within this release. We simply wanted to ensure the current InstantForum.NET relapse is as stable as possible to allow us time to focus on InstantForum.NET 2011.

I would suggest waiting for our upgrade documentation before attempting to upgrade your installation to 2010-5. We will be posting a ZIP file containing only the updated files and a single SQL file to update your database.

I'll post official announcements within our community forums once everything is live :)

If you would like to try InstantForum.NET please register to download a fully functional evaluation here or if you ahve any questions please don't hesitate to contact us.

Happy Holidays from InstantASP

Ryan Healey — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 13:15:52 GMT

Just a quick post to wish everyone a very happy Christmas. Also a sincere thank you to all customers we've had the opportunity to work with in 2010.

We are super excited about 2011 and our users can expect major updates for both InstantForum.NET & InstantKB.NET.

Anyhow I'm sure your all very busy with last minute Christmas shopping so I'll keep this short. We hope you have a wonderful Christmas and get to spend time to with friends & family.

Happy holidays & best wishes to all from InstantASP. We hope Santa leaves you something nice :)

Using InstantForum.NET 2010 Under .NET 4.0

Ryan Healey — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 15:18:16 GMT

Out the box InstantForum.NET 2010 currently targets the .NET 2.0 run-time and will work fine on .NET 2.0, .NET 3.5 & 3.5 SP1. We will be moving to .NET 4.0 out the box with future InstantForum.NET updates as more of our customers also move to .NET 4.0.

To help customers looking to use the InstantForum.NET 2010 releases under .NET 4.0 you can find below two web.config files you can use which will ensure InstantForum.NET works correctly under the .NET 4.0 run-time

If your running InstantForum.NET under a IIS 7 Integrated ASP.NET 4.0 application pool please download the "IFNET2010_Integrated_DotNet4.0_WebConfig.zip" file attached below. This contains a web.config which will work fine for .NET 4.0 Integrated Application Pools.

If your running InstantForum.NET within IIS6 or under a IIS 7 Classic ASP.NET 4.0 application pool please download the "IFNET2010_Classic_DotNet4.0_WebConfig.zip" file attached below. This contains a web.config which will work fine for .NET 4.0 Classic Application Pools.

Each download contains a single web.config file which you should use if your running under .NET 4.0. Don't forget you'll need to update the database connection string within the web.config to point to your InstantForum.NET database.

If you have any questions with regard to running our products under .NET 4.0 please don't hesitate to open a support ticket or contact us.

Auto Subscribing New Users to Forums By Email

Ryan Healey — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 18:34:26 GMT

Recently we've received the same question from several customers with regard to automatically subscribing new users to all forums via email within InstantForum.NET. This would ensure all members are sent an email each time a post is made within any forum they have access to.

We don't do this by default as it's generally best practice to allow your users to opt-in to email notifications however we understand some customers may be running InstantForum.Net within a controlled internal intranet We will be adding options in a future InstantForum.NET release to allow you to automatically subscribe your users to specific forums however whilst we work on getting this right I wanted to share some simple code which may help in the meantime.

I would only suggest using this code if you know your users won't mind being automatically subscribed to all forums by email. Generally for public facing web sites this is not a good idea as you may quickly annoy community members with unsolicited emails. Please use your judgement before deciding to apply this code.

To automatically subscribe new members you'll need to modify the registration code to call an additional method that will loop through forums and add a subscription automatically. To get started open your InstantForum.NET installation within Visual Studio.NET and locate the register page as shown below…

Open this class. You should see…

Adding Imports Statement

You'll need to add the an imports / using statement to InstantASP.InstantForum as shown below…

Add our New Method

One you've added the imports / using statement copy the code below and paste this above the QueueConfirmationEmails nethod as shown below….

Private Sub AutoForumSubscription(ByVal intUserID As Int32)  ' create forum object, pass current user id to ensure role based security is applied  Dim Forums As New Business.Forums(MyBase.CurrentContext.CurrentUser.UserID)  ' populate local forum collection  Dim fc As Collections.ForumCollection = Forums.SelectForums  ' check we have a forum collection  If Not fc Is Nothing Then      ' loop through forums      For index As Int32 = 0 To fc.Count - 1          ' get forum          Dim f As Components.Forum = fc.Item(index)          ' add forum Subscription          Business.Subscriptions.Forums.InsertSubscription( _          intUserID, f.ForumID, Common.Enumerations.EnumSubscriptionType.Instant)       Next  End IfEnd Sub

Calling the New Method

You will now need to call the new "AutoForumSubscription" method we have added when adding the user. Todo this locate the code below iwthin Register.vb.

User = New InstantASP.InstantForum.Components.User(intUserID)User.Authenticate(e.RememberMe)' quque confirmation emailQueueConfirmationEmails(User)

Add a call to the new "AutoForumSubscription" method we created as shown below…

User = New InstantASP.InstantForum.Components.User(intUserID)User.Authenticate(e.RememberMe)' quque confirmation emailQueueConfirmationEmails(User)' auto subscribe to all forumsAutoForumSubscription(User.UserID)

That's It

When new members register on your site now they will automatically be subscribed to all forums and will receive an email notification anytime a new post is made within any forum the user has access to.

Any questions as always please don't hesitate to contact us.

InstantKB.NET 2011 Video Overview

Ryan Healey — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 14:01:05 GMT

We recently released our InstantKB.NET 2011 update. This is a major update and offers a number of new features we are confident will help your company more effetely manage your customer support.

We've put together a short 2 minute video highlighting some of the key features & improvements you can find within our latest InstantKB.NET 2011 update. To learn more please click the play button below :)

Thank you to everyone who assisted in providing feedback during our recent InstantKB.NET BETA. We are hard at work on the next updates for both InstantForum.NET & InstantKB.NET and I hope to be posting further news soon.

InstantKB.NET 2011 BETA 1 - Online Demo

Ryan Healey — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 02:46:00 GMT

Hi All,

Hope your all very well. I'm delighted to announce you can now test drive the forthcoming InstantKB.NET 2011 release via our online demo at…

http://demos.instantasp.co.uk/InstantKB2011

To login as and administrator please use…

Email: admin@admin.com
Password: admin

This demo shows the forthcoming ticketing support. You'll notice you can also submit bugs within the online demo via the "Submit Bug" tab. This tab demonstrates how you can extend ticket tabs & create your own tabs to capture unique important to your business. As with other data entry forms you can custmoize the fields displayed to users under any tab & add custom fields to capture unique data.

If you visit the Staff CP (accessible via the top-right once logged in as an administrator) you'll notice a new set of features to help you manage user submitted content.

Within the Admin CP you can define service level agreements to help manage customter expectation or define automated rules & escalation rules which can execute based on specific conditions or workflow stages to help automate & streamline the support process.

We are very excited about the possibilities with this new release and I could ramble on for hours. For now I'll let you play with the demo and discover the new features in your own time,

Please remember of course this is a BETA release so if you encounter any problems or indeed have any questions please don't hesitate to email me directly on ryan@instantasp.co.uk or use our contact form.

Stay tuned for some further news regarding a revamp of our web site here at InstantASP. We expect this will be around the same time as the 2011 BETA 2 release.

I look forward to any feedback and keeping you all posted during the BETA :)

InstantKB.NET - Looking for BETA testers

Ryan Healey — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 13:52:05 GMT

We've been hard at work recently getting the next major InstantKB.NET update ready .

This update contains a number of improvements. For a complete list please see http://instantasp.co.uk/Products/InstantKB/InstantKB2010.aspx

I'm excited to announce today we'll be offering a BETA download to existing InstantKB.NET 2.x customers this coming Monday 11th October.

If your interested in receiving a copy of the latest InstantKB.NET BETA please email sales@instantasp.co.uk and we'll confirm via email if eligible. For those who provide feedback during the BETA a free update will be provided once the next InstantKB.NET update reaches RTM.

Thank you to everyone who has already registered for the BETA. We look forward to sending further information & download instructions this coming Monday.

I look forward to posting further news on the next InstantKB.NET update very soon :)

Common keywords & SQL Server full-text search

Ryan Healey — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 13:41:26 GMT

We spent some time recently helping a InstantKB.NET customer. The customer was seeing unexpected search results within InstantKB.NET when using SQL Server full text search & a Boolean "ALL / AND" keyword search..

Unexpected Search Results

The client had an article titled "Bill me later" however when searching for the keywords "Bill me later" there was no results shown. Using a "ANY / OR" Boolean search seems to work fine.

After some investigation it appears the problem occurs due to the list of common keywords SQL Server maintains internally.

SQL Server Noise / Stop Words

SQL Server 2005 calls them noise words, SQL Server 2008 calls them stop words. SQL Server has a list of around 150 common words, which are ignored by the Full Text Search engine. e.g. about, this, all, me, was, and, must etc. You can view the English stop words in SQL Server 2008 by executing the following query:

select * from sys.fulltext_system_stopwords where language_id = 1033
Because “me” is a stop word and we are performing a Boolean “AND” search we won’t get any results as the query is terminated when we hit the keyword “me”. This does not seem to effect “ANY / OR” type Boolean searches so I can only guess these are executed in a different fashion.

Solution?

There is a workaround – to wipe the list of stop words! The problem with doing this is that the list of stop words is setup server-wide on the SQL Server itself.

If this is not an option I’ve attached below a script to add all common stop words to the your InstantKB.NET Ignored search terms table ensuring the stop words never get passed to the full-text query engine. This ensures the query won’t get halted half way through the boolean search returning no results.

For InstantForum.NET users you can simply change the ApplicationID within the script attached below to 1.

To demonstrate this take the following full-text query…

SELECT (a.ArticleID)
FROM
InstantKB_Articles AS a
LEFT OUTER JOIN
ContainsTable(InstantKB_Articles, *, '"*later*" AND "*bill*"', 500) AS ftArticleTitle
ON a.ArticleID = ftArticleTitle.[Key]
WHERE
a.ArticleID IN (IsNull(ftArticleTitle.[Key],0))
This will return the article titled “Bill Me Later”. However if we add the common keyword “me” the exact same query will fail…

SELECT (a.ArticleID)
FROM
InstantKB_Articles AS a
LEFT OUTER JOIN
ContainsTable(InstantKB_Articles, *, '"*later*" AND “me*” AND "*bill*"', 500) AS ftArticleTitle
ON a.ArticleID = ftArticleTitle.[Key]
WHERE
a.ArticleID IN (IsNull(ftArticleTitle.[Key],0))
You’ll notice the second query returns no results as it’s being terminated once it hits the "me" stop word.

To resolve this please run the attached SQL script against your InstantKB.NET database.

Once you’ve ran the attached script against your InstantKB.NET database please recycle the web application within IIS to clear the local ASP.NET cache and ensure the new ignored search terms are being used by InstantKB.NET.

If you do run into any other scenarios where you would expect to see search results it may be due to these common keywords. You can add your own terms to the list of ignored search terms used by InstantKB.NET from within the Admin CP > Settings > Ignored Search Terms page.

I hope this blog entry helps someone :)

InstantForum.NET 2010-4 Released

Ryan Healey — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 16:39:33 GMT

After several weeks of discussion within our community forums & a number of revisions I'm delighted to announce our InstantForum.NET 2010-4 update is now available for download to existing customers. Thank you to everyone who submitted feedback for the 2010-4 releaqse. Special thanks to Al, Ramsay, Eddy & Craig.

You can find a list of improvements, updates & fixes included within the 2010-4 release below.

Search Engine Optimized URLs

You can now easily enable search engine friendly URLs within InstantForum.NET.

This will transform the URLs to use forum names, topics titles & usernames within URLs whenever possible for SEO purposes.

Forum URLs

Topic URLs

Member / Vanity URLs

Back Button & Bookmark Support for AJAX Requests

With InstantForum.NET 2010-4 you can now use your bowsers back button support as you would in a traditional full post back web application. For more information please see my blog postAJAX is great but what about the back button?

Delete Attachments

When editing posts you can now delete attachments without the need to post back.

Abusive Post Reports

We've added a "Report" button to allow your community members to report abusive or spam posts to forum moderators.

New Admin Settings

Random Member Photos

You can now specify if a random member photo should be applied to new members.

Copy PMs to Sent Items

You can now always copy private messages to sent items. We felt from feedback we received this option was confusing for users. Now as an administrator you can simply choose to always copy private messages to members sent items folder.

Enable / Disable Tags

You can now disable tags if you don't require this feature from within the Forum settings page.

Show Quick Reply By Default

You now have the option to show the quick reply panel by default to ensure this is always visible for users who have permission to post within a forum.

Allow Hidden Roles

If you have lots of posts and don't have any hidden roles / member groups within InstantForum.NET you can now explictly disable hidden roles to improve query performance throughout InstantForum.NET.

Allow Similar Topics

Again for large scale communities you can optionally disable the Similar Topics displayed below a topic withyin InstantForum.NET. If your site is heavily indexed by search engines this can help reduce the load on your SQL Server.

General Improvements

We've reorganized a number of admin settings to make it easier for users to find application settings. For exapmple we've moved the CAPTCHA settings from the "Forum" settings page to the "Login & Registration" settings page. This makes more sense as the CAPTCHA verification code is only shown during registration.

2010-4 Fixes

Fixed issue with capctha code validation still taking effect even if capctha is disabled
Fixed issue with wrong signature appearing in post previews when editing
Fixed issue with quotes in topic titles & usernames being rendered with a preceding "\" character
Fixed issue with instant massager links within user profiles not working
Fixed issue with biography field not being updatable by admins
Fixed issue with private messages page if message usernames contained a quote character
Fixed issue with admin notes not updating if you cleared the richtext editor

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

You can find upgrade instructions within our online documentation at…

http://docs.instantasp.co.uk/Docs/InstantForum.NET-20103-to-20104

Should you have any questions with regard to upgrading please don't hesitate to open a support ticket, contact us or post within our community forums. We'll do our best to assist with any upgrade questions ASAP.

InstantForum.NET 2010-4 - You Asked, We've Delivered

Ryan Healey — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 15:25:51 GMT

SEO URLS

It's been clear from feedback within our own community forums since 2010 that you want to see search engine friendly URLs within InstantForum.NET. Whilst the basic URL rewriting works well and avoids the need for query stings within the forum URLs the URLS do not contain keywords relevant to the page to help improve your SEO efforts.

I'm pleased to announce today InstantForum.NET 2010-4 will offer very friendly URLs optimized to help improve the ranking of your topics & forums within search engines. Your forum & topic titles can now be used within your URLs by enabling a single option within the InstantForum.NET Admin CP.

Here you can see an example of how URLs like when viewing a forum…

Or when viewing a topic…

Other Improvements

We've also made a number of other improvements within 2010-4. A brief list of additions & improvements you can expect to find within 2010-4 follows…

Your browsers back button will now work for all AJAX requests
We've added a number of new general settings allowing you to further customize how your forum works.
We've added some optimization settings to help improve search performance for very large communities
We've improved several key database queries to move away from sp_executesql calls & local SQL string variables
We've removed COPPA registration to simplify registration for both users & administrators

We are expecting the 2010-4 release in the next week or two. I will of course keep our blog updated with developments. If you have any questions please don't hesitate to email me directly on ryan@instantasp.co.uk

InstantKB.NET 2010 - Coming Soon

Ryan Healey — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:16:13 GMT

Hi All, I'm very excited to share with you today the improvements you can expect to find within the forthcoming InstantKB.NET 2010 update. Whilst we are still a few weeks from the first public beta you can find a detailed list of all the improvements we in 2010 below…

http://instantasp.co.uk/Products/InstantKB/InstantKB2010.aspx

As always if you have any questions or comments please don't hesitate to respond below or email m directly on ryan@instantasp.co.uk

I look forward to posting further news ASAP :)

AJAX is great but what about the back button?

Ryan Healey — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 03:46:46 GMT

With the release of InstantForum.NET 2010 many of you will know we moved to a JavaScript & JSON (no-post backs) based approach for the InstantForum.NET user interface.

Whilst this move provides a very responsive interface & avoids a full page post back using compact JSON based web services to perform partial page updates there are obvious concerns with replying so heavily on JavaScript & partial page updates.

It's been obvious recently due to the volume of feedback I've received that you would like to be able use your browsers back button within InstantForum.NET as you would expect within a traditional non-AJAX web application as well as bookmark pages that are generated as a result of AJAX callbacks.

It's more challenging to enable the back button for AJAX based web applications as you need to manually manage the state of the page between callbacks & manually update the browsers address bar to reflect the current state of the page and allow users to bookmark pages.

With the recent 2010-3 update on Monday we've greatly reduced the bug count and currently are only aware of a handful of issues we still need to investigate.

We wanted to address the most common problem we see first. I'm delighted to say we've made great process with the bookmarking & back button issues we've seen reported

With the next update of InstantForum.NET you'll be able to bookmark pages even after an AJAX callback. For example you may wish to bookmark an advanced search page or a specific page within a forum or on the member list.

Even though these features use AJAX to call JSON based web services and a full post back is never performed of the page you'll be able to bookmark AJAX post backs with all controls maintaining stage when you come to the forum from your bookmark.

For example click here.

Whilst this URL looks nasty the value after the # within the URL is all generated by JavaScript and never seen by search engines. It's based on the jQuery Back Button Query plig-in.

Back Button (We've not forgot about you)

Your back button will work as expected in the next InstantForum.NET update.

To test the back button works as expected click the link below…

http://community.instantasp.co.uk/Recent.aspx

Click a few pages within the list of results or change the sort order of results.

When you navigate to a new page use your browser back button to return to the page. You'll notice that even though the page is only partially updated via our JSON web services the state is maintained and your browsers back button works as you would expect in a traditional full post-back web application.

What about SEO with JavaScript UI?

We tackled the SEO issues early in the 2010 development cycle and always provide SEO friendly links for any clients / bots that can't interpret JavaScript. We use widely considered best practices for doing this.

We are always keen to improve things and will be looking at further ways we can offer better support for clients who don't have JavaScript enabled.

I look forward to posting further information soon. I should probably go it's 3.45 in the morning - oh boy :)

Further improvements to online documentation

Ryan Healey — Mon, 31 May 2010 18:31:14 GMT

Hi All, Hope everyone is very well. We've been hard at work recently improving our online documentation for both InstantForum.NET & InstantKB.NET.

Some of the new areas include…

I also wanted to share with you the new search within our online documentation. Our documentation search will also now pull in results from our knowledgebase & community forums via the RSS feeds they expose.

To make it even easier to find the information your looking for we've added a search box to our main support page allowing you to quickly search all our online documentation, knowledgebase articles & community discussions…

Searching for "Installing InstantForum" we get the following results…

We hope these improvements will help our users quickly locate the information relevant to any problem or feature within either InstantForum.NET or InstantKB.NET. You can try the search for yourself at the link below...

http://www.instantasp.co.uk/Support/

Whilst we've made great progress we do still want to add additional content to the online documentation in the form of user guides for end users, administrators & staff / moderators providing more of high level overview of features and options within the software. You can expect to see these over the coming weeks.

We'll be publishing an example of how we implemented this search & consumed the InstantForum.NET & InstantKB.NET RSS feeds to display results in a forthcoming article within our documentation.

We look forward to improving the documentation & completing the additional areas. I will of course keep the blog updated with developments.

New Online Documentation Area Coming Soon

Ryan Healey — Tue, 18 May 2010 17:40:14 GMT

Hi All, Hope your all very well.

I just wanted to share with you the new documentation area we are developing to help our customers get the most from InstantForum.NET and InstantKB.NET.

Alongside traditional installation & configuration information we are developing a number of user guides for both InstantForum.NET & InstantKB.NET to help end users, administrators, moderators & content authors quickly get started with either InstantForum.NET or InstantKB.NET. Other topics will cover areas such as localization, customization, extensibility & integration. We'll also be creating more in-depth developer focused content to cover common questions.

The new documentation area is built upon the forthcoming InstantKB.NET 2010 release (still early alpha). We've designed the new documentation area to provide a simple, easy to navigate way to browse the product documentation. This view (table of contents on the left & content on the right) will be available on a per tab basis with the InstantKB.NET 2010 release.

You can take an peek at our new documentation area below. Click the image to view a larger version.

You can also take a look at the early content at http://docs.instantasp.co.uk/

We'll be announcing here in the blog once the new documentation area is fully live.

Your feedback would be sincerely appreciated. If you would like to see us cover any specific areas within the new documentation please don't hesitate to leave your suggestions below or email me directly on ryan@instantasp.co.uk

Google Maps Plug-in for InstantForum.NET 2010

Ryan Healey — Sun, 09 May 2010 15:46:59 GMT

Hi All, As part of the forthcoming InstantForum.NET plug-in documentation & samples we've been developing a number of cool little plug-ins for InstantForum.NET. As well as being functional these plug-in samples will also serve as a learning tool demonstrating key concepts of plug-in development as well as offering sample code showing how your plug-in can directly manipulate the host page & as well as injecting a plug-in onto any specific page or location.

One of these plugs-in directly modifying the InstantForum.NET "Who's Online" page to add a Google map with markers representing all your visitor locations. This plug-in works by taking the IP address from the InstantForum_WhosOn database table, we then use the GeoCityLite API to get latitude and longitude coordinates for the IP address. Finally we use the Google Maps API to add Markers & Info Windows to the map showing all visitor locations....

Test Drive Online

Whilst not 100% accurate this plug-in offers a neat alternative view to your communities "Who's Online" page. You can see this plug-in in action at http://community.instantasp.co.uk/WhosOn.aspx

This plug-in along with a number of other samples will be available for download very soon. Please keep an eye on our blog for further information. If you have any suggestions for plug-ins you'd like to see for either InstantForum.NET or InstantKB.NET please don't hesitate to send your suggestions to me directly on ryan@instantasp.co.uk

I look forward to posting further information very soon :)

Twitter Login with InstantForum.NET 2010-2

Ryan Healey — Tue, 04 May 2010 12:13:53 GMT

We've been hard at work on our latest InstantForum.NET 2010-2 update. Whilst the primary focus of this release has been to resolve issues reported since the last update we have taken time to add Twitter login support a highly requested feature. We'll be adding the option to logon via Facebook in future updates.

Our goal is to make it easier for your users to get started within your community. If they already have an existing Twitter account users can now use this to login to InstantForum.NET. With 2010-2 you'll find a new Twitter button on the login page...

Simply click the Twitter button to login at Twitter.com...

Once logged in via Twitter you'll be taken back to the forum. If this is the first time you've used twitter to login you'll be prompted to create a forum account as shown below...

By default we'll use your Twitter username also as your forum username. If this username is already taken within the forum by another member you'll be prompted to provide a new username...

If the username is not already taken you'll automatically skip this step and will be returned to the forum homepage authenticated...

On future visits you can now simply click the "Twitter" button on the login page, enter your username & password on Twitter.com and you'll be redirected back to your forum logged in. We use standard Twitter OAuth token based authentication to achieve the shared login.

Stay tuned for further information on InstantForum.NET 2010-2 this week. We've also resolved over a dozen minor issues reported since the last release. We'll be publishing a complete list of fixes & improvements included in the 2010-2 release very soon. .

As always please don't hesitate to leave any comments below or join our community and leave your comments or email me directly on ryan@instantasp.co.uk. I'll do my very best to respond ASAP.

I look forward to keeping you all udpated :)

Sexy InstantForum.NET 2010 Skin :)

Ryan Healey — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 14:34:14 GMT

Just wanted to share this InstantForum.NET implementation with you. I'm always excited to see how our users customize our products. When i saw this i nearly fell off my chair. The site is still in development and it already looks awesome. Great work to Sunil & Marcello who run this site...

Hope you all have a great weekend. I look forward to posting information on 2010-1 next week :)

Visual Studio.NET 2010 + .NET 4.0 Support

Ryan Healey — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 15:35:28 GMT

With the recent release of Visual Studio.NET 2010 & the .NET 4.0 Framework I'm sure many of you will be wanting to use InstantForum.NET or InstantKB.NET within Visual Studio.NET 2010.

The great news is InstantForum.NET 2010 & InstantKB.NET 2.0 will both already work great in Visual Studio.NET 2010.

Currently the Visual Studio.NET solution files provided with our products target VS.NET 2008. We want to allow some time for our customers to upgrade to VS.NET 2010.

To work with InstantForum.NET or InstantKB.NET in VS.NET 2010 simply open the solution file within VS.NET 2010 and you'll receive the migration wizard as shown below...

Click Next...

You can choose to create a back-up at this step. Again click Next...

That's it. Once you click finish the solution will be migrated to Visual Sudio.NET 2010 and should be displayed as shown below....

In this example we use InstantForum.NET 2010 however this will work just as well with InstantKb.NET 2.0.

For now we will be holding off on updating the solution file provided with our products. This will remain for now at least a Visual Studio.NET 2008 solution. You can follow the steps above if you wish to update. Once everyone has had a chance to update we'll be updating the main product downloads to target VS.NET 2010 out the box.

As always any comments or questions please don't hesitate to post below :)

The power of InstantForum.NET Plug-ins

Ryan Healey — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 16:16:06 GMT

If you read my previous blog post you'll know the next InstantForum.NET 2010 update will contain a plug-in framework allowing developers to add additional functionality to InstantForum.NET without having to modify our source code.

This makes it much easier for customers to add custom functionality to InstantForum.NET whilst ensuring a smooth upgrqade process as we release new features & updates.

The Join Prompt Plug-in

To ensure our plug-in framework offers everything developers need to extend the software we are developing our own set of plug-ins against our framework. One of these plug-ins is a simple modal pop=up that prompts anonymous users to register within your community. You can see this below...

Whilst quite a simple idea this plug-in demonstrates some of the possibilities with plug0ins.

You'll notice the plug-in has custom CSS, JavaScript (jQuery), it's own images and contains a ASP.NET web form for users to register within your community. This plug-in interacts with the InstantForum.NET API to get a live user count for the "Join 10,005 others within our community" label.

The plug-in also uses the InstantForum.NET API to add users & generate the required confirmation email.

The web form is actually included within a AJAX update panel and requires no page refresh.

For JavaScript the plug-in uses jQuery to provides a JavaScript API many developers are already familiar with which will hopefully speed up plug-in development.

The InstantForum.NET 2010-1 update which will include the new plug-in framework will be available for download next week. After this we intend to publish our current plug-ins & develop documentation to assist others.

As always i'll be keeping the blog updated :)

InstantForum.NET 2010-1 Introducing Plug-Ins

Ryan Healey — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 01:16:46 GMT

The next InstantForum.NET 2010 update will be available soon. Alongside resolving a number of issues reporting since the final 2010 release this update will introduce a new light-weight plug-in framework allowing developers to extend InstantForum.NET without having to modify the core code.

We intend to develop a number a sample plug-ins & tutorials to help plug-in developers get started. We'll also be encouraging others to develop & share plug-ins by developing a dedicated area of our web site to publish & share plug-ins as well as recognizing & rewarding the plug-in authors.

The plug-in framework has been baked directly into our InstantASP.Common framework ensuring the next update of InstantKB.NET will also support custom 3rd party plug-ins.

It's still early days however our basic goals are...

1. Provide a number of out the box sample plug-ins
2. Provide documentation & tutorials to help plug-in developers get started
3. Provide an area on our site developers can promote, publish & share plug-ins for free with others

Obviously we need to release InstantForum.NET 2010-1 before any of this can happen and you'll see an update very soon. Stay tuned to the blog.

How do plug-ins work within InstantForum.NET 2010

A plug-in within InstantForum.NET 2010 is essentially a single DLL file (containing your plug-in code) and any number of user controls (or .ascx) files containing your plug-ins mark-up.

As plugins are standard ASP.NET user controls you can use server controls within plug-ins (labels, links, 3rd party components etc). You can programmatically set-up controls from your plug-ins code-behind.

Tp create a InstantForum.NET plug-in from a user control you'll need to ensure the code for the user control inherits from our InstantASP.Common.UI.Base.Plugin class and implements our InstantASP.Common.Plugins.IPagePlugin interface.

The InstantASP.Common.UI.Base.Plugin base class derives from System.Web.UI.UserControl however it provides additional functionality to load your plug-ins control at run-time and inject your plug-in into the containing pages control collection.

To allow your plug-in to modify the containing page (for example add css or custom JavaScript or modify the containing pages control collection) you'll need to implement the InstantASP.Common.Plugins.IPagePlugin interface.

This interface provide four key events (OnPluginInit, OnPluginLoad, OnPluginPreRender, OnPluginRender) which allow you manipulate the page containing your plug-in at each of these four events.

Our plug-in framework within InstantForum.NET will always add your plug-ins user control to the end of the pages control collection. Just before the very end form tag. You can inject plug-ins into specific locations within mark-up by using a Response.Filter within your plug-in. This is demonstrated within our Google AdSense plug-in (example below).

Ok, Enough already show me some code

In this example we'll create a very basic plug-in to display the text "Hello World" within InstantForum.NET.

First we'll need a user control to hold the mark-up / controls for our plug-in...

HelloWorld.ascx

<%@ Control Inherits="InstantForum.Plugins.HelloWorld" %><asp:Label ID="lblHelloWorld" runat="server" />

In our code-behind we'll set-up our label control and populate this with the hello world text...

HelloWorld.vb

This code will be compiled into an assembly called "InstantForum.Plugins.HelloWorld.dll"...

Namespace InstantForum.Plugins    Public Class HelloWorld        Inherits InstantASP.Common.UI.Base.Plugin        Implements InstantASP.Common.Plugins.IPagePlugin        Public Sub New()            ' setup plugin details            Me.Name = "Hello World Plugin"            Me.Author = "InstantASP Ltd"            Me.SkinfileName = "Plugins/HelloWorld.ascx"        End Sub        ' method to setup controls within plugins ascx file        Protected Overrides Sub InitializePlugin( _        ByVal ctlSkin As System.Web.UI.Control)            ' find the label control within our plugins .ascx file            Dim lblHelloWorld As System.Web.UI.WebControls.Label = _            CType(ctlSkin.FindControl("lblHelloWorld"), _            System.Web.UI.WebControls.Label)            ' update the text if we found the control            If Not lblHelloWorld Is Nothing Then                lblHelloWorld.Text = "Hello World!"            End If        End Sub        ' page events you can use to modify the current page from the plugin        Public Overloads Sub OnPluginInit( _        ByVal context As InstantASP.Common.Plugins.IPagePluginContext) +        Implements InstantASP.Common.Plugins.IPagePlugin.OnPluginInit            MyBase.OnPluginInit(context)        End Sub        Public Overloads Sub OnPluginLoad( _        ByVal context As InstantASP.Common.Plugins.IPagePluginContext) _        Implements InstantASP.Common.Plugins.IPagePlugin.OnPluginLoad            MyBase.OnPluginLoad(context)        End Sub        Public Overloads Sub OnPluginPreRender( _        ByVal context As InstantASP.Common.Plugins.IPagePluginContext) _        Implements InstantASP.Common.Plugins.IPagePlugin.OnPluginPreRender            MyBase.OnPluginPreRender(context)        End Sub        Public Overloads Sub OnPluginRender( _        ByVal writer As System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter, +        ByVal context As InstantASP.Common.Plugins.IPagePluginContext) _        Implements InstantASP.Common.Plugins.IPagePlugin.OnPluginRender            MyBase.OnPluginRender(writer, context)        End Sub    End ClassEnd Namespace

Installing plug-ins with InstantForum.NET

For this Hello World example we'll need to simply copy the user control into a "Plugins" folder within the forum. You'll also need to pop your compiled DLL for the plug-in into the forum "Bin Directory.

Copy your plug-ins markup into the forums Plugiins folder. You can set the location to look for your .ascx file from within your plug-ins code-behind. It does not have to reside within the Plugins folder however we'll be suggesting this to keep things organized.

Copy your plug-ins DLL into the forum \bin directory...

Make InstantForum.NET aware of your plug-in.

Once you've copied your plug-in user control & DLL you'll need to let InstantForum.NET know to use your plug-in. This is very simple and will require a couple of lines of code within your InstantForum.NET web.config file.

let the .NET framework know which class to us to process our custom configuration section within the web.config...

<sectionGroup name="InstantASP.Common">
<section name="Plugins" type="InstantASP.Common.Plugins.PluginSectionHandler" />
</sectionGroup>
Then add your plug-ins within the web.config as shown below...

<InstantASP.Common>
<Plugins>
<Plugin type="InstantForum.Plugins.HelloWorld, InstantForum.Plugins.HelloWorld" />
</Plugins>
</InstantASP.Common >

The "type" attribute within the Plugin element conains the full path to your plug-ins class and the plug-ins assembly name.

For example...

<Plugin type="YourNameSpace.YourClassName, YourAssemblyName" />

In our example our Hello World Class is located within the nstantForum.Plugins namespace and this is compiled into an assembly with an identical name. So our HelloWorld Plugin element reads..

<Plugin type="InstantForum.Plugins.HelloWorld, InstantForum.Plugins.HelloWorld" />

You can of course add as many plug-ins as you wish here.

Running InstantForum.NET with the Hello World plug-in...

Now we've registered the hellow world plug-in with InstantForum.NET lets take a look at the forum within a browser...

Obviously this particular plug-in is not very useful however it demonstrates the basic idea of how to develop & add plugs to the forthcoming InstantForum.NET 2010-1 update.

This hello world example simply adds our hello world plug-in to the end of the pages control collection. We'll The Google AdSense plug-in demonstrated below shows how to add controls to specific locations within a InstantForum.NET skin.

What else is possible with plug-ins?

The short answer is virtually anything. As plug-ins are aware of the current page you can basically create a plug-in to perform any task within InstantForum.NET. For example you may wish to prompt users who have not yet registered to join your community. You may want to develop a plug-in that modifies post signatures or automatically add links to share content within the forum with multiple social bookmarking sites. The possibilities are fairly limitless.

Currently as a plug-in developer you can hook into the key four page level events (init, load, prerender, render). We do intend to extend the plug-in framework once we have matured a little to provide support for extending specific controls within both InstantForum.NET & InstantKB.NET.

The Google AdSense Plugin

One of the samples we've been developing allows you to very quickly & easily add Google AdSense banners to your InstantForum.NET pages...

This plug-in works by providing a user control (AdSense.ascx shown below) to contain our Google AdSense JavaScript template. Tiis allows you to easily change the look & feel of your AdSense ads from a single user control.

The plug-in when installed then searches your pages for unique mark-up in this case . If the plug-in finds this string within your pages it will take the contents of the AdSense.ascx file and inject this into your page at the location of the .string.

It will then take the {adsettings} section from the string it's found within your page to determine your the client ID, height, width & format of the AdSense banner.

For example to display a 468x60 text banner you would use...


The plug-in will replace this mark-up on your forum page at run-time to display a AdSense banner based on the template within your AdSense.ascx plig-in file.

You can display different banner types by simply modifying the parameters within the string the plug-in searches for...


AdSense.ascx

<%@ Control Inherits="InstantForum.Plugins.AdSense" %><div style="float: left; width: 100%; text-align: center; background-color: #ECEFF2; border: solid 1px #8AB4D1; padding: 20px 0px; margin: 0px 0px 12px 0px;">   <script type="text/javascript">  <!--      google_ad_client = "{0}";      google_ad_width = {1};      google_ad_height = {2};      google_ad_format = "{3}";      google_ad_type = "text";      google_ad_channel = "2621593367";      google_color_border = "FFFFFF";      google_color_bg = "FFFFFF";      google_color_link = "0000CC";      google_color_url = "FFCC00";      google_color_text = "000000";    //-->   </script>    <script type="text/javascript"     src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> 
   </script> </div>

AdSense.vb

You can download the code for the AdSense plug-in to learn how this works here.

Whilst a little rough this plugin demonstrates how to inject a plug-ins mark-up within a specific location within a InstantForum.NET skin. We will be providing a complete working solution with a number of other plug-ins to help get you started once released.

Is InstantForum.NET aware of the installed plug-ins?

Yes. You can get a collection of installed plug-ins via the HttpContext.CurrentPlugins method. This is new for InstantForum.NET 2010-1 and will returna strongly typed collection of plug-ins.

Finally...

We have lots of ideas for plug-ins and will be developing a number of out-the-box plug-ins you can download & use within InstantForum.NET 2010-1 or above.

As always we would welcome your comments & feedback below or contact us :)

I look forward to posting further information for you all ASAP :)

P.S. You can also expect to see much more documentation for InstantForum.NET 2010 very soon.

Our first InstantForum.NET 2010 Multi-Lingual Install :)

Ryan Healey — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 16:33:38 GMT

I'm always excited to see how our customers use our software. Today I discovered our first Hebrew installation for 2010 . Actually as part of a support incident. Great job to Liron who created this tech forum.

I look forward to posting more news on forthcoming InstantForum.NET & InstantKB.NET updates soon :)