Ideal Science is pleased to announce Ideal BB.Net Version 3.1.6 Beta 1 is now available to download at the online store today, December 1, 2006! At Ideal Science, we pride ourselves in providing our customers with the highest performance forum software available on the market while continuing to meet customer needs. In constantly improving Ideal BB.NET, I feel these new features and fixes will contribute to the success of your business.

New Features:

• Upgraded to .Net 2.0 Framework. Incremented the major version number to 3.x.x.x. series and since we were on 2.1.5.0 before the upgrade we are now on 3.1.6.0 for the next version.
• Added the ability to upload your own avatars via the edit profile page. Custom avatars are store for each user so that users do not see other user’s avatars. You can pick custom avatars already uploaded via the avatar selector. Only images with .jpg, .jpeg, or .gif are supported.
• Added a sample project for grabbing the last 5 most recent posts by consuming the RSS feed on the new posts page.
• Added list uploaded avatars view to the admin section so that admin’s and moderators can easily remove uploaded avatars that don’t meet the board’s terms of service. Resetting an avatar replaces and deletes the uploaded avatars with the default avatar. (Which can be set in the admin section.)
• Registration link is now hidden on login page when using active directory.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a bug in topic_getTopicsPaged that caused a syntax error when paging topics.
• Fixed a bug that caused AD to not work correctly for new users when anonymous access was disabled.
• Fixed bug with RTE (Rich Text Editor) where firefox browsers would lose formatting after clicking submit.
• Fixed small CSS issue with login box error messages in firefox.
• Fixed bug that caused links to get messed up after editing a post with a link in it.
• Fixed bug that would cause the quick reply to create multiple posts.

I hope you find these upgrades valuable as we have eagerly anticipated this launch to better serve a company’s individual needs.  Upgrades are a feature of the yearly maintenance package which also allows for continued technical support.  When a company purchases Ideal BB.Net forum software, a year of support and maintenance is included.  Each subsequent year, maintenance will be 20% of the original license fee.  These maintenance renewals can be made over the phone at 512-401-9811×200.  We look forward to continuing all efforts to make your business better.

As we near the weekend, testing of the upgrade to .Net 2.0 is coming to a close.  Soon, you will be also be able to make this fairly simple upgrade on your Ideal BB.Net forum.  Ideal Science will be providing documentation and support to ease the process of this upgrade. The benefits of .Net 2.0 will be covered in later in upcoming posts.  Have a great weekend! 

Welcome to the new Ideal Science blog based in the beautiful city of Austin, Texas!  I will be posting information on the latest developments of Ideal Science forums but would also like to speak on a range of other topics.  Please feel free to leave replies listing any topics that may interest you. 

In the next few weeks, Ideal Science will be releasing Ideal BB.Net Version 1.6 that will be .Net 2.0 compatible.  This important release includes a new avatar feature that allows registered users to upload a personal avatar.  Also, in response to numerous customer requests, there will now be a ‘how to guide’ for users of the forums.  This document includes everything from creating a post to using the advanced search option.  As always, Ideal Science welcomes any suggestions for future features.  Keep these recommendations coming!  
 

In an effort to reach out to our customers, we present the Ideal Science Blog conveniently located at www.idealscienceblog.com.   This blog will serve as an informal discussion about our products and services.  We’ll post entires that we believe are relevant to the work that we are doing and solicit feedback in the comments left on our blog.  Eventually we’ll move our discussion to our discussion forum.  (We aren’t quite there yet with integration.)

We wrote blog software a little while back that was very basic and allowed us to do a quick integration for a customer.  That software was so basic compared to the products on the market that we abandoned it to focus on the forums instead.  The Ideal Science blog is powered by WordPress and modified to fit the look and feel of our web site.  This might come as a surprise to many of you considering that WordPress isn’t even a .NET product.  We chose WordPress because as far as blog products go, this one is way superior.  (At least in our opinion.)

Going forward, we’ll build official support for WordPress blogs so that our product can easily integrate into a WordPress blog.  I imagine that support will come as a WordPress plug in.

Enjoy the new blog and good luck.