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In 2024, a secure WYSIWYG Editor has become a complex intricate thing. Copy/paste bundle files have largely been phased out in favor of complicated NPM repos and build tools. What was more or less just "HTML Manipulation" has evolved to abstract content models with dynamic rules on how to actually render the content to HTML. Then, for kicks, throw in the requirement that this editor needs to work in non-standard cases like the drag and drop page builder and live topics. The solution for Inv

As part of our commitment to encourage 3rd party development and extension, we have given our Developer Center a much needed makeover. A picture is worth a thousand words, but how about a video?   Highlights The Developer Center now has its own dedicated tab in the ACP. What were previously tabs are now displayed on individual screens, making for a far less cluttered UI. You can easily switch from one application to another using the main menu or the but

One of the areas we have reviewed in Commerce is the way that we handle custom items. Previously, many of our features were limited to Commerce Products. Even items such as Subscriptions and Download Files were not fully integrated. In Invision Community 5, we have looked at ways to improve the overall experience.   Icons and Images A small, but important change: displaying the item icon when an image is not available. In previous versions, if no image was available, the checkout

As we get closer to our first release, we'll be discussing how to update your custom applications to be compatible with IPS v5. We know this can seem like a daunting task, especially since not all changes will be immediately obvious, so we'll be walking through this step by step.   Updating Source Classes Classnames should no longer start with an underscore. All our source classes are now strictly typed, so any of your classes that extend pretty much anything (Content It

Theming has been a core component of Invision Community since its inception, and this continues with Invision Community 5, but in a very different way. If you haven't already seen Ehren's blog on the new Theme Editor, please do take the time to watch it. The all-new theme editor reduces the complexity of theming by taking complex concepts like HSL CSS variables into a pretty slick UI that almost any Invision Community owner can use to personalise or brand match to any existing properties.

We've been dropping hints about various development features that haven't yet made their appearance in our previous blog entries. Now that hooks are no longer a possibility, we've expanded our Extensions system to allow developers to integrate with other areas within the framework. This blog entry will give an overview of our new Extensions. We are working on updating our developer documentation to include these changes.   AccountSettings Allows you to add tabs to the Account

By now you might be getting a little tired of hearing about our UI Extensions, but we still have a few more features to talk about. We showed you how to add CSS and data attributes to content. We discussed how to add form fields and menu items. In this final entry on this tool, we'll talk about working with Nodes.   ACP Tools Nodes are different than the Items and Comments, as they are typically managed in the ACP and not on the front-end. Therefore, we needed additional extension

In our  previous blog entry, we described the UI Extension and its overall capabilities. Today, we'll talk about how to use this new tool to extend content forms and menus. Form Fields A popular modification request is to add fields to a Content Item, such as a Topic. All UI extension classes contain the following methods: formElements Returns an array of form elements that will be added to the form. Note: Unlike other UI Extension methods, the first parameter of th

Only a little over a week into our development tools announcements, and there is already lots of buzz about our new UI Extensions. The UI Extensions handle a variety of functionality, and we will discuss them all in detail, over the course of multiple blog entries. For today, we'll start with an introduction and an overview of some of the basic usage.   Features and Functionality UI Extensions are extensions to a single content class - Nodes, Items, Comments, or Reviews. With a UI

Action and Moderation Menus can be one of the most tedious development tasks, while also being critical to user experience. For example, we may add support for pinning/unpinning content, then we need to remember to include the ability to pin/unpin that content in all the HTML templates. 3rd party developers add screens inside their applications, and then they need to add a link to the User Menu to make that accessible. With Invision Community 4, this would require a template hook targe

I'm very excited to be posting my first blog entry for IPS, and thrilled that this is what I get to post. When we started planning the new development tools for v5, we looked at existing resources - from the marketplace, from some contributors, and from our own managed clients - and asked, what is it that developers find themselves doing the most often? Matt’s previous blog entry gave a brief summary of some of those functions. Today’s blog entry is going to focus on one of our powerful new

When planning Invision Community 5, we knew we had a unique opportunity to hit the reset button. It's hard to believe, but how we work with the framework has been the same since 2013. The priorities we held a decade ago no longer align with our current vision. The landscape of modern frameworks has evolved, and we have adapted accordingly. When we initially designed the Invision Community 4 framework all those years ago, our goal was to create an open development platform. We aime

Welcome to our October developer's update! After a frantic few months of working on the PHP8 transition, we made it across the line with our November release (4.7.4), which requires PHP8 as the minimum version. Reminder: Invision Community 4.7.4 will disable plugins and applications that are not compatible with PHP8, and the only way to re-enable them is to upload a new version. Hopefully, you've had time to get your apps updated and through our review system. Thank you again for your

Welcome to our September developer's update! I can say with some confidence that both the Invision Community team and our marketplace developers have had a busy September as we prepare for PHP8. Thank you for your patience with this necessary step. As I've mentioned elsewhere, PHP8 is a pretty big jump and is much more strict about many things, and now throws fatal errors when before it would have been a harmless notice. PHP7 is now end of life, and security updates will no longer be a

Welcome to our August (and June and July) developer's Update! We've had a busy summer so far, with our team working on the final touches to 4.7 which introduced range of new Cloud specific features. In our August release we also added a way to schedule topics. @Jordan Miller announced the new solutions improvements here, this will be included in our September release (4.7.2) PHP8 Compatibility Scanner We are excited to announce that as a platform we (finally) are starting the

Welcome to our May developer's update! May has been a bit of a whirlwind as we worked through the cloud platform feature set along, the backlog of existing issues reported to us and a new feature coming to all platforms. Along with the usual bug fixes in the backlog, we also worked on a few popular requests, such as adding hCaptcha as a new CAPTCHA option. We've seen this battle spam bots much more effectively than the existing methods, so if you're being hit by a lot of spam, consider

Welcome to our April developer's update! This month has seen the developers work on a variety of features coming to our cloud platform, some of which we've been testing here, which include real-time updates on what members are viewing and when they are typing replies and an image scanner which not only identifies what is in the image, it also tags it for search results. Furthermore it can also hold images for moderation if they contain nudity, etc. We've got more to come and will announce t

Webhooks allow other services and applications to stay in sync with your community data or to perform an action after a specific event occurs in your community. Webhooks are a performant alternative to continuously polling for changes to the IPS REST API. For example, a webhook can notify your service when a new topic is created so that your app can perform then any further actions. Webhooks can also be used to connect your community with Zapier, IFTTT or Integromat, so that