IPS Community Suite 4.0.0 Release Candidate Available

[Charles]

We are happy to release the Release Candidate of IPS Community Suite 4.0.0!

This means we have left the beta stage where things are unsupported and known to be broken and enter the period between that and final. The Release Candidate phase allows us to partially support the Suite without committing our full resources to it. This step also means that there will still be some bugs in the system but they should not be major issues any longer.

You can download IPS Community Suite 4.0.0 RC1 in your client area. IPS Community in the Cloud clients can request upgrades through support. If you are using our Chat product please note that it is not yet available for version 4.0.0 so please do not upgrade if Chat is required.

Release Candidate Schedule

This is the first Release Candidate and we plan on having several RCs that will be released every few days over the next couple weeks. By doing a rapid release schedule it will allow us to get fixes out to you very quickly and ensure things are as stable as possible for the final, fully supported release.

Beta Testers

Everyone at IPS greatly appreciates those of you who participated in the beta testing phase. If you did you use beta releases you can upgrade from Beta 8 to RC1 however you may wish to consider a fresh upgrade from 3.4.7 just to ensure you are not carrying over any beta quirks through to RC and final.

Important Support Note

Release Candidates will be partially supported only.

There will be bugs in the Release Candidates. Do not use Release Candidates if any sort of issues will impact your ability to enjoy your site.

We will assist you in support with any major problems in installing or upgrading from 3.4.7 to make sure your install is online. However, once the site is online and functional, other less critical bugs may be deferred until the next release to fix those issues. We do plan on a fast update schedule but it does mean you may not get fixes for several days.

To reiterate: we will assist with major problems that make your Suite not function (install issues, upgrade issues, major problems) but you may have to wait for update releases for other issues. Please keep these support limitations in mind when choosing to use a Release Candidate.

Our Thanks

IPS Community Suite 4.0 took at lot longer than we thought it would as we changed the focus of the Suite and were forced to extend our workload and therefore timeline. We are sorry for these delays and we do hope that you see it will be worth it in the end. IPS4 is a great platform and we are very excited to start adding lots of fun features throughout this year.

 

 

For right now we are only posting this announcement here on our forums so only people like you who closely follow IPS are aware. We will announce to a broader audience as it progresses.

[Matt]

Upgrading IP.Content to Pages

When upgrading from IP.Content to Pages, it is worth noting that because the underlying code has changed, custom templates and custom blocks are not upgradable. Custom templates are removed from the system after the upgrade, and any custom blocks are retained, but left disabled as a reference point for recreating manually.

This release of Pages does not have external blocks (this feature allows you use IP.Content blocks on another website or page) and neither does it have relational database field functionality. Both these features will be available in a near-future release.

 

[Matt]

Upgrading from a previous 4.0.0 beta to RC 1 with custom CSS
If you have created a custom theme that makes use of Font-Awesome, or you've created a theme with Designer's Mode, then please check your CSS to ensure that you now only use a single backslash whereas previously it would have used two.

For example, in previous betas you might have used this:
content: "\\f1022";

As of RC 1, you'll need to use:
content: "\f1022";

[Mark]

Theme Hooks

RC1 changes the structure of theme hooks slightly. If you created a theme hook on a plugin or application prior to RC1, open the hook file and change:

public static $hookData = array (
    ...
);

To:

public static function hookData() {
return array_merge_recursive( array (
    ...
), parent::hookData() );
}

[Charles]

Release Candidate 2 is now available.

[Charles]

Release Candidate 3 is now available.