InstantASP Blog

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 :)

InstantForum.NET 2010 Final Released :)

Ryan Healey — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 16:07:00 GMT

Hope your all very well. First let me apologise for not posting much here over the last couple of months. My attention had been on our InstantForum.NET 2010 release which I'm delighted to announce is officially available today.

We've made lots of great improvements in our 2010 update. You can learn what's new for 2010 at...

http://www.instantasp.co.uk/Products/InstantForum/WhatsNew.aspx

To learn how to download the 2010 update please read my recent forum post at...

http://community.instantasp.co.uk/Topic15245.aspx

A big thank you to Jason Grovert, Chris Couture, Lenka Michálská, Marcello , Craig Greenway, Scptt Rupp, Jay Aldar, Jason Tuttle, Robert Weaver, Sophie, Steve Sinchak, Vaibhav, Sean Smith, Kristoffer Sheather, David Tesar, Al & everyone else who assisted during the BETA & release candidate releases. Apologies to anyone I've not mentioned.

We'll be working to post interesting blog posts here around the InstantForum.NET 2010 update ASAP.

If you have any questions regarding the InstantForum.NET 2010 update please don't hesitate to email me directly on ryan@instantasp.co.uk or pop your comments below.

We look forward assisting with any questions and working with all our existing customers to help you upgrade :)

Active Directory Module v2.00 coming soon!

James Trott — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:18:31 GMT

Hi All,

So, whilst we've been busying ourselves pushing hard to get the release candidate for InstantForum 2010 into shape ready for full commercial release, we've also been working hard on version 2 of our active directory module, which I know a lot of our customers are very excited about.

To remind you all, version 2 of the AD module, introduces the same AD authentication functionality the module already affords our existing Knowledgebase customers, we've made quite a lot of refinements to the way the module operates, and improved debugging and support for users having trouble with the slightly tricky 'Seamless' windows login functionality. Although I'm pleased to say that to date, as far as I'm aware everyone who has attempted this has managed to get it up and running.

The new version of the module will release very shortly on the back of the commercial release of InstantForum 2010, so once you've had your full upgrade to 2010, keep an eye on the forums, blog and our twitter feed to keep up to date on when you can purchase and download the AD module for your forum!

There may be a period of pre-purchase with a free instance of a BETA/Release candidate for the module, however I have no more specifics about that at the present time as we focus our efforts on the imminent release of 2010.

Hope everyone's as excited as we are about the release of these new product versions, and I look forward to sharing some of the more exciting developments coming up for InstantASP customers in 2010!

InstantForum.NET 2010 closed BETA now available

Ryan Healey — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 18:08:55 GMT

Just a quick post to let you know today we officially started the InstantForum.NET 2010 BETA. We've had over 60 customers apply to take part in this beta and we sincerely appreciate you all for offering to assist & take some time to ensure InstantForum.NET 2010 is a great release.

if you opted to assist with the BETA you should have already received your download link & information via email.

If your an existing customer and would like to assist with hte closed BETA please email sales@instantasp.co.uk and provide the email address you used to place your original order.

You can expect further news ASAP :)

Merry Christmas Everyone

Ryan Healey — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 12:18:19 GMT

Just a quick post to wish everyone a very happy Christmas. Also a sincere thank you to all the great customers we've had the opportunity to work with in 2009. We are super excited about 2010 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.

P.S. We'll be here during the holidays. We are working to ensure our InstantForum.ET 2010 update is ready for release at some point in Jan. If your an existing customer and have not already put your name forward to take part in the closed BETA and would like to take part please don't hesitate to email sales@instantasp.co.uk

Happy holidays & best wishes from InstantASP

iPhone / Mobile skin for InstantKB.NET 2.0.6

Ryan Healey — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:56:11 GMT

Hi All,

Hope your all very well. I just wanted to share some screen grabs of the forthcoming InstantKB.NET 2.0.6 iPhone skin.

This skin will be available for download to all existing InstantKB.NET 2.0.6 on Monday 16th November from within your My.InstantASP client are at http://my.instantasp.co.uk/MyLicenses.aspx

We'll be posting an additional blog post once the skin is available for download.

If you can't wait you can check out the skin in action now by pointing your iPhone or iPod Touch to http://kb.instantasp.co.uk/ If your using a blackberry storm device you should also get similar results.

This skin will be provided out-the-box with the InstantKB.NET 2010 release early next year.

We look forward to posting further information. If you have any questions or comments please don't hesitate to email me directly on ryan@instantasp.co.uk, use or contact form or leave a comment below.

InstantForum.NET 2010 Dev Preview Updated

Ryan Healey — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:55:50 GMT

Wow 3 blog posts in one day - just typical - you don't see one for ages then three come at once :)

Errm seriously...

I'm delighted to announce the latest version of the forthcoming InstantForum.NET 2010 update has been added to our demo area. Whilst still not perfect this update is a significant improvement over our earlier development preview and is much more feature complete & reliable.

As this is a development preview you will likely encounter bugs (we are aware of many) however we'll be working fanatically over the coming weeks to ensure the product is as robust as possible for the first public closed BETA expected mid November.

You can access the updated development preview at...

http://demos.instantasp.co.uk/InstantForum2010

As always you can login as an administrator using the login details below...

Email: admin@admin.com
Password: admin

We did hope to have a BETA with customers in October however we've experienced a couple of delays. Thank you to all the customers who have offered to assist with the BETA we'll be contacting you the moment we have a download available. This should not effect things to much and we are expecting to have the beta ready around mid November. We will be doing our very best to bring you the 2010 update early-mid December. This may vary based on BETA feedback.

I didn't want to wait any longer (I'm excited) and have updated the development preview to show how things are progressing.

Some of the changes you'll notice in this update...

OpenID, Google, Yahoo & AOL login options
New recently online users panel with AJAX member card
You'll notice the latest polls can be displayed on the homepage & within forums
Updated user control panel pages with tab navigation & following / followers pages
Update profile pages showing latest posts, followers & users your following
WYSIWYG editor is nearly complete bar a few issues around inserting links & images
You should notice general reliability improvements
Pinned topics within forums are now displayed correctly
You should notice general performance improvements

Whilst we are pleased with how things are progressing we do still have issues to resolve and as such this development preview does not indicate the final quality. We'll be resolving all current known issues & any new issues over the coming weeks and once we are confident with the reliability we'll be offering a closed BETA.

Thank you to Jason , Chris, Lenka, Robert, Steve, Vaibhav, Sean & Mark (I'm sure you know who you are) we'll be keeping you updated via email on the status of the first BETA.

Please feel free to explore and try the latest development preview. We would ask you don't report any problems at this stage as it's very likely we are already aware of the problem and it will be resolved ASAP.

We would of course welcome any general comments or questions around this update. You can email me directly on ryan@instantasp.co.uk, use our contact form or simply post your comment below. We'll do our best to respond ASAP.

InstantForum.NET 2010 Active Directory Module

Ryan Healey — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:55:03 GMT

Hi All,

Hope your all very well. We often receive requests from customers looking to use InstantForum.NET with there existing Active Directory infrastructure. Unfortunately up to now we've not really been able to provide an out-the-box solution for InstantForum.NET 4.x.

To address this problem we've quietly been working away on an Active Directory module similar to the one offered for our InstantKB.NET product to ensure with the release of InstantForum.NET 2010 we'll be able to offer an reliable, easy to install module to provide Active Directory support for InstantForum.NET.

Part of this work also includes core improvements to our Active Directory libraries to provide support for multiple active directory domains one of the most requested features since our InstantKB.NET Active Directory module was released.

We are working to ensure the Active Directory module is available with the final release of InstantForum.NET 2010.

As always we'll be keeping this blog updated with developments.

We would welcome any comments or questions. You can email us on sales@instantasp.co.uk, use our feedback form or post a comment below. We'll do our best to respond as quickly as possible.

InstantForum.NET 4.2 Gets a New Name

Ryan Healey — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 01:43:43 GMT

Hi All,

Hope your all very well. First let me apologize for not posting for a little while. We've been heads down working non-stop on the next forum update.

We've recently been posting updates here within the blog & via twitter and referring to the next InstantForum.NET update as version 4.2.

I'm excited to announce today that we'll be changing the way we name future updates and moving towards a Visual Studio.NET / MS Office style naming convention using the current year to indicate major updates. You can expect a new product logo, graphics & text on our web site to indicate this very soon.

The forthcoming InstantForum.NET update will be InstantForum.NET 2010.

The next major InstantKB.NET update will be InstantKB.NET 2010 - early 2010.

We are making these changes for a number of reasons.

We want to move towards at least 1 major release each year with Service Packs throughout the year to resolve any minor issues.
We wanted to signify the amount of development investigated in this next InstantForum.NET update and don't feel 4.2 did it justice
We feel it's a little less geeky and a little more consumer friendly

What can i expect to find in InstantForum.NET 2010

AJAX / JSON based UI (reducing server load, minimizing page size & response times)
Improved search & search API (making it possible to subscribe, consume or link to results matching specific criteria)
Web Services layer for all key objects (JSON & XML supported with examples of how to consume this from your existing web site)
Post Tags (Similar to InstantKB.NET users can tag posts & navigate via a tag cloud)
Completely re-written cross-browser WYSIWYG editor with a focus on performance & ease of use for the end user
Support for multiple authentication providers (InstantASP, OpenID, Google, AOL, Yahoo, Active Directory)
Improved AJAX based User Control panel making it much easier for users to build a InstantForum.NET profile
Improved profile pages allowing you & others to quickly see your posts & followers
Twitter style following system (you can now follow friends within your community and get notified when they post)
Improved RSS support (several new feeds will be available and it will be possible to create your own feeds from search results)
Now uses standard ASP.NET master page
Shared login & roles with InstantKB.NET (if installed)
Quick Reply option when replying to posts
Improvements to how settings & permission data is stored. This will allow us to add new setting groups or permission set options without having to touch the database.
Single Sign On with InstantKB.NET 2010 (further integration to come in future updates)
Lots of mark-up & CSS optimizations
Lots of code refactoring & performance improvements

We are excited about these changes and the direction it will help us take the products in the future.

As always if you have any questions please don't hesitate to contact us on sales@instantasp.co.uk, use our contact form or post a comment below.

Why choose InstantASP hosted services?

Ryan Healey — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:59:58 GMT

I've just finished up another batch of support tickets, and one of the clients happened to mention that they were impressed at the speed of turnaround on their issues, and how helpful we've been since their service was set up (I'm not trying to blow our own trumpet here, so bare with me.) A certain part of me really wanted to just say "All in a days work ma'am" because, that's exactly what we're offering in our hosted services provision.

A lot of people mistake hosted services for "Hosting", but that's not it at all, compare our hosted services prices to any ASP.net/Windows based hosting company, and pound for pound, dollar for dollar, they'll blow us out of the water on price. Don't get me wrong, we have the equipment, the set up, and the skills to offer hosting. But when we looked at offering hosting for our customers, what we found is that hosting wasn't really what they needed.

Hosted services are designed and priced to take the technical completely out of the hands of the customer, so that business minds who identify a need for our products, can have them expertly installed, secured, maintained and looked after by us. No installation headaches, no IS department delays, no back and forth with our support team to identify the problem, then time to establish a fix.

When you place an order for hosted services, we take that order, process it, configure your account and application(s) on one of our high spec, secured servers within our redundant network, in our secure, high availabillity Datacentre, then install and test your application. Within 48 hours of receiving your order confirmation, the next thing you receive is an email, containing all the details and logon information for your new up and running Knowledgebase and Forum.

But it doesn't stop there. Having a problem with FTP? Emails not sending from your knowledgebase? Application responding sluggishly? Open a ticket in our ticketing system, and one of our hosting team will pick it up, and go straight to the source of the problem at the server level, investigate and repair the issue. No back and forth neccessary. Is the data you store in the KB business critical? Let us know, and we can arrange a more stringent backup scheme for your data, so that in case of failure, corruption or accident, we can restore that for you*

We do our very best to ensure that when a customer opts to have us host their application instances for them, that they only need worry about how to best leverage our solutions for their business, and this is no sales pitch or marketing exercise, I'm a product developer, and the member of staff tasked with designing, deploying and maintaining the hosted services system, and I'm passionate about delivering on the needs of our customers. Through designing and developing great products, and providing a first class hosted application solution.

Hosted services has been in design and development for over a year now, and we've had nothing but positive feedback on how our customers are finding it. So if you're less technically inclined or your IS department are too busy to configure and maintain one of our products for you, get in touch, we'd be happy to help.

* Additional charges may apply.

InstantForum.NET 4.2 BETA soon (looking for testers)

Ryan Healey — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:00:29 GMT

Hope everyone is very well.

I just wanted to keep you all posted on the status of the next InstantForum.NET update v4.2. We are still hard at work and aiming to have a closed BETA early Q4.

As we are getting close i'd like to invite any existing InstantForum.NET customers to participate in our closed BETA. If you would like to get your hands on the update early and also provide us with valuable feedback to ensure a great update please don't hesitate to email me directly on ryan@instantasp.co.uk, contact us or of course you can leave a comment below with your contact information.

If you've not been following us on Twitter (why not :\) you may have missed some of the more recent screen grabs we've uploaded...

http://twitpic.com/ixpzj/full
http://twitpic.com/ixpyx/full
http://twitpic.com/h6vvd/full
http://twitpic.com/gfefg/full
http://twitpic.com/gfeb7/full

You can find more at http://twitpic.com/photos/InstantASP

I hope to hear from some of you soon and look forward to working with you to ensure 4.2 is the best release so far :)

Updates to My.InstantASP Client Area

Ryan Healey — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 17:04:48 GMT

Hey All,

I mentioned in my last blog entry that we were making more updates to My.InstantASP in order to better streamline our support ticket system and turnaround, and better facilitate service for our hosted services customers. I'm pleased to inform you all that this work is now completed.

Hosted services customers can now access their account details via the new 'My Hosting' Link within the My.InstantASP menu, although passwords must still be requested via support. We have also improved the searching and filtration of tickets, to automatically tag and highlight hosted services tickets, so that our hosting management personnel can identify and address hosting issues ASAP. It is for this reason that it is vital that hosted services customers raise new issues via the ticketing system unless for some reason My.InstantASP is unavailable.

For our regular customers, several optimisations, improvements and fixes have been added to My.InstantASP to improve the speed of the interface when lodging tickets, and streamline our process to enable us to turn support tickets around faster, improving our support provision to you the customer.

We're constantly making changes and alterations to our services and provision and are always pleased to hear customer feedback to allow us to make such improvements to better serve our customer base, as such we'd always be glad to hear from you, please feel free to comment on this blog entry with any additions you'd like to see in My.InstantASP in the future.