Products
Dynamic AJAX & JSON based interface
One of the improvements we are excited about most with the 2010 update is the move towards a dynamic client side user interface. Many of the controls within InstantForum.NET 2010 are now built up dynamically on the client side (via JavaScript) with the server simply responsible for returning data needed to populate the control.
This greatly reduces the load on your web server as it's no longer responsible for rendering your pages. Page load times on the client-side will also be much more responsive as we can start displaying controls before we've even queried the data.
The amount of mark-up being sent to the client's browser is greatly reduced as we now simply need to render a container (typically a div) to determine where to render the data. The UI is then built on the client.
This is great to provide a responsive user experience however relaying on JavaScript to render the user interface does pose a number of problems. Mainly SRO & users who choose to brose the web with JavaScript disabled. Thankfully we've got this covered. If you browse the forums with JavaScript disabled we downgrade and display a basic UI allowing users to still browse your forums & search engine bots to still index your forums & topics.
We will be working in future updates to further improve the experience you get browsing the forums with JavaScript disabled. This is functional currently for browsing & SEO however it's not he same rich experience you'll receive with JavaScript enabled.
OpenID Login & Authentication
Everyone hates filling in registration forms. Also managing multiple usernames and passwords is a pain. We've tried to address these problems with 2010 by now offering support for OpenID authentication.
Complete Cross Browser Support
One of our key goals & area of investment with 2010 was to ensure complete cross browser support. InstantForum.NET 2010 will work perfectly in IE7 & 8, FireFox 3+, Chrome, Safari, AOL & Flock.
Strict W3C valid XHTML mark-up
InstantForum.NET 2010 moves away from nasty nested tables to provide a more designer friendly, CSS based approach for layout & styling. All mark-up provided by InstantForum.NET 2010 has been optimized and minified to ensure small light-weight pages & responsive load times. All mark-up is now strict W3C valid XHTML which also offers a performance increase as your browser is not attempting to compensate for any poor HTML during the rendering process.
InstantForum.NET 2010 now provides a web services API to return data in both XML & JSON format. Methods are provided to return data for all common objects within the forum (forums, topics, private messages, users etc) . You can query the web services to return different data based on search parameters. For example you may wish to return the last 10 topics posted to a specific set of forums or for example return topics matching specific tags within your forums. These and many other options are available with the web services API.
Whilst providing the ability to return data matching several dozen different search options we've written the web services API to be as simple as possible to use. Typically there are no more than 4 parameters you need to pass to any web service call to return the data you require.
The 2010 update uses the very same web services API to build many of the controls you see within the software. If your paging topics within a forum now within 2010 your calling the web services API behind the scenes to return the data in JSON format & update the results.
You can consume the web services either by simply adding a web reference within Visual Studio.NET or we also provide client side proxy objects you can use that will accept the JSON data, perform the parsing & provide a nice client side object model to work with. We intend to document how to take advantage of the various web services & provide working examples very soon.
JSON Results for Topics
XML Results for Topics
We've rewritten the editor used when posting within InstantForum.NET from the ground-up for 2010 to provide consistent cross browser experience. The editor will work the same in Ie 7 & 8, FireFox, Opera, Chrome & Safari (Mac & PC).
All editor menus(IFCode, Attachments, Images, YouTube) are embedded directly into to the editor. No more modal dialog boxes. Whilst all the menus are now embedded directly into the editor we only render what is required at run0time on the client. We don't load any of the menu options until you need to use them within the editor. At which point they are added to the DOM. This ensures the quickest possible load time for the editor as we only load menus & images within those menus as and when you need them. Once you've activated the menu and it's added to the browsers DOM there is no need to initialize the menu again.
The editor will also downgrade to a standard text field if JavaScript is disabled in the browser.
YouTube Support
We've added a YouTube button to our WYSIWYG editor to make it child's play to share YouTube videos within forum posts. Simply copy the URL from your address bar for the YouTube video you wish to share and paste the URL into the YouTube menu within our editor. The video will then be embedded within your post.New Tagging System
To help improve post discoverability you can now add tags to all posts within InstantForum.NET 2010. Users can navigate tags either as a list of most popular or as a tag cloud in alphabetical order.
We provide auto-suggestion for tags that already exist within your database as you start typing tags. This ensures consistent tags and avoids identical tags with different casing. As an administrator you can easily delete any tag from the tag cloud.
New Quick Post & Quick Reply
One of the most requested features for 2010. You'll now find a "Quick Post" or "Quick Reply" button allowing you to post without leaving the page.
When viewing topics within the forum we take the tags associated with every post within that topic to display a list of similar topics. If no tags are provided we'll use the keywords within the topic title to determine similar topics. This is great for finding similar discussions within the forum.
Improved Moderation ControlModerators now have the ability to ban or delete members with a single click. If you allow anonuymous posting you can also choose to ban IP addresses of anonymous posters to reduce SPAM.
We've worked to make this process very easy for moderators within 2010. The various existing moderation tools have been updated to now use AJAX to allow your moderators to quickly & easily manage your forums.
Improved User Profiles
We've improved your profile pages to provide a quick overview of your recent forum activity This allows you & others to much more easily track posts you've recently participated in. We've also added several new profiles fields to capture contact information. These include LinkedIn,Twitter, Facebook, Skype etc.
Share posts via Twitter & Facebook
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You can now easily share any post within the forum on either Facebook or Twitter with just a single click. You'll find two small buttons below each post whih allow you to tweet or add the post to Facebook.
We automatically shrink the post link before publishing to your preferred social network. |
You can now follow individual members within your community. This will notify you via email if your friends post within the forum. We display the number of followers you have on your profile page & the most followed members on your members page. Hopefully this will encourage members within your community to fight for the top spot.
Member Cards
You can now hover over any member photo within InstantForum.NET 2010 to reveal a member card for that member.
Improved Member List Page
The members page now displays your most active members today, this month and overall. You'll also find a list of most followed members. These panels have been designed to allow developers to easily customize the information displayed here. We'll be publishing documentation very soon.
New Skins
InstantForum.NET 2010 is provided with a new Classic skin. This skin now offers greater contrast & larger font sizes to assist those with poor eyesight. The updated skin also now support rounded corners for the various expandable panels.
Standard ASP.NET Master Page SupportInstantForum.NET 2010 now uses standard ASP.NET master pages. We've moved away from our custom implementation of masterpages in an effort to provide a more familar experience for designers or developers customizing InstantForum.NET.
Improved Performance
We now leverage the new web services API available with 2010 to return compact, highly optimized JSON results for many common operations. For example if you were to page through posts within previous versions this would involve a complete page refresh to query the server & render the new results. With 2010 we now utilize our web services API and dynamic JavaScript UI to refresh the results your looking at in seconds with no page refresh.
We've also rewritten the paging algorithm used to page all data within InstantForum.NET to offer improved performance when paging extremely large record sets. For customers familar with how we did paging in previous versions we've now removed the generic "iasp_sp_PagingProcedure" & "iasp_sp_RecordCount" procedure. Whilst these performed well our "iasp_sp_PagingProcedure" procedure has to much SQL string concatenation.
With 2010 these generic procedures have been removed and replaced with dedicated paging procedures for all data types (topics, users, roles, attachments etc). These dedicated stored procedures don't use any string concatenation ensuring SQL server can now take advantage of the indexes on the columns specified within the paging procedure. This offers improved performance whilst at the same time making the actual code that calls the paging procedures much cleaner.
We've also managed to further reduce the number of database queries required on key pages. In some cases we've saved up to 4 separate database calls on a single page.
Improved RSS SupportAlongside the existing RSS feeds there are several new feeds available with 2010. These include...
- Global Latest Topics
- Forthcoming Events
- Dedicated RSS feeds for each forum member
Visual Studio.NET 2008 & 2010 Support
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For developers currently InstantForum.NET 2010 is provided as a Visual Studio.NET 2008 solution. We've tested with the RC of Visual Studio.NET 2010 and you won't have any issues. We will likely move to Visual Studio.NET 2010 shortly after the RTM. |
We've improved many areas of our API to make it more intuitive for developers to take advantage of our API. We've greatly improved the search API allowing you to use our API to return a strongly typed collection of topics matching any particular search criteria. Similar to our web services API we've now simplified our search API so that no method requires more than 4 parameters. This was a major pain point for many developers in 4.1.4 with our previous search API requiring 30+ parameters. We've also simplied the API to add & update user profiles within the forum. This is now all encapsulated within a single method now. Previoously you had to call two seperate methods one for the InstantASP_Users tables and one for the InstantForum_Users table.
We've also updated many methods to move to simple object types for arguments (int, string, boolean etc). We've worked to remove complex object types as arguments for methods as the .NET garbage collector is more effect cent at cleaning up simple types. This results in code being promoted through the heaps and disposed of more promptly.
Active Directory Support
We'll be offering optional Active Directory support for InstantForum.NET. This is great for enterprises looking for centralized community management. We are working to have our Active Directory support ready for final release.
General Updates
We've removed the need for a temporary table when using the forum search. This allows you to now link directly to search results. This is great if you wish to share search results via email.
We've removed the dependency on the "InstantASP_Sessions" table when posting new topics or replies. This ensures the post page will never time out regardless of how long you stay on the page as the information needed to make the post is now hele within the URLs query-string. This resolves the annoying Session Timeout problem if you took more than 20-60 minutes to submit your post.
User Profile Pages have been improved to make it easier for members to provide profile information. We've also simplied the member photo / avatar system. This was to confusing with two seperate pictures. You can now provide a single picture which appears both alongside your posts and within your profile.
We've now made it much easier to reuse our controls on your own ASP.NET pages. We've standardized the properties within our controls and removed the need to pass in objects as properties making it much easier to set-up the control in your own pages. The majority of the controls can now be included declaratively via mark-up with no need for programmatic set-up within your pages code behind.
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Purchased InstantForum.NET after 1st March 2009?
Our InstantForum.NET 2010 update will be a free upgrade to all existing InstantForum.NET customers who purchase InstantForum.NET after 1st March 2009. If you purchased after this date and would like to get started with the release candidate you can use the download link below to goto your My.InstantASP account and download the RC1 release.
Purchased InstantForum.NET before 1st March 2009?
If you purchased InstantForum.NET 4.x before March 1st 2009 you'll need to purchase an upgrade to InstantForum.NET 2010. Upgrades start from $79 USd for our single web site end user license & $199 for the full source developer license.
