IPS4 Feature Plan

CheersnGears · March 4, 2015

I love this... I love every feature listed..... I am very happy you've announced these things and we now have clearer view of the roadmap. I'm looking forward to all of it.

Charles · March 4, 2015

Oh don't say roadmap. I avoided that word because it makes me nervous.

RevengeFNF · March 4, 2015

It's back, now with the ability to Like the features you like most

Can i like all of them?

CheersnGears · March 4, 2015

Oh don't say roadmap. I avoided that word because it makes me nervous.

Star Chart?

Warzone · March 4, 2015

I dear you not to look

Okay, so, added the xml: Fatal error: Call to undefined method IPS\Theme\class_cms_database_status_4::categoryHeader() in /.../applications/cms/modules/front/database/category.php on line 365

hmm

z1000-forum.de · March 4, 2015

nice one!

the pages app has much potential, but most of us are not able to use it without any useful documentation. the most other apps of ips are self describing, but pages is not as easy to understand as you might think. please add more support in this.

xert77 · March 5, 2015

nice one!

the pages app has much potential, but most of us are not able to use it without any useful documentation. the most other apps of ips are self describing, but pages is not as easy to understand as you might think. please add more support in this.

I agree, all I keep seeing is people saying how easy everything is. But for people who don't know much about coding it's foreign. I would love if someone could do a step by step guide on how to create awesome things like this.

z1000-forum.de · March 5, 2015

it's also for people with coding experience like me (i made a couple of hooks myself for ips3) not to easy to understand how pages is really working. and i don't want to spend days or weeks with trial and error to learn it on my own.

xert77 · March 5, 2015

it's also for people with coding experience like me (i made a couple of hooks myself for ips3) not to easy to understand how pages is really working. and i don't want to spend days or weeks with trial and error to learn it on my own.

I have seen some great websites make awesome frontpages & website articles pages with cool layouts and features. I would love if there was documentations or step by step guides on how to create nice Pages. I honestly bought Pages last year thinking it would be simple like Joomla, but then I realised I had been niave & had no idea how to actually make the post of pages. We now have the forums as the homepage instead of using it's full benefit - Which seems like a waste.

opentype · March 5, 2015

I have been testing Pages since the very first 4.0 beta is was part of. I can assure you, it has become much more easy for non-developers. In IP.Content you had to work in different places at once and you had to edit template files just to get create any display at all of database records. And to control the layout you had to do almost everything in HTML templates.

This is now much easier. You just go through the process of adding a database and you can easily create the necessary page during the setup. After that, the page layout can be defined through drag and drop — columns, widgets, everything! No coding whatsoever necessary. And it’s even responsive, since that is coming automatically from the suite and the template settings.

However, your page wont look like the Chelsea page automatically. When it comes to the customization of your page, there are limits and if you don’t know HTML/CSS/PHP you will hit those limits quickly. But that’s just the nature of these things. If you want to fully customize your car, you better be a mechanic or know one. If you rebuilt your house, you might hire an architect, electrician, plumber and so on. A “tutorial” won’t be enough. ;-)

I agree that tutorials and documentation for Pages are useful or even necessary, but this has been said before for IP.Content: Since that app is so flexible and powerful and therefore can do so many things, no tutorial will cover exactly what you want to do with it. And that’s the problem. It can’t be all described step by step. If you want an amazing custom site with an amazing custom look and custom features, you need to learn how to do it or hire professionals. There is just no way around it. IPS can just provide the best possible framework.

Rici · March 5, 2015

I can assure you, it has become much more easy for non-developers.

What would you say to developers? Is Pages as powerful as it was as IP.C? Or did you notice any significant limitations now?

Rikki · March 5, 2015

We'll certainly be adding tutorials on how we built things like the feature plan, and the new provider/projects sections which are coming soon. That said, like opentype mentioned, these kinds of things do involve digging into at least the templates, and occasionally a little custom PHP; it isn't possible to click a few buttons and end up with a completely customized result, unfortunately. Hopefully some alternative templates will end up in the Marketplace, but while I'm sure they'll look good they still can't know what kind of data it is you're displaying. There's still going to be a certain amount of 'generic' to it, but they might serve as a good starting point for more customization.

But Pages is much better at getting the basics down for non-developers - being able to drag and drop sections of a page, set up databases and so forth is all done without any coding now. You can easily build functional dynamic pages within your community even if you aren't able to style them and add customization features.

A good example is our bug tracker. Charles has built our bug tracker entirely on his own using the built in tools in the AdminCP. He created the database and fields, used the visual page editor to put the database and filter areas in, made custom WYSIWYG blocks to show informational text around the page, and permissions and a simple custom field formatter to make some status/priority badges. None of our development team have worked on that with him. Sure, it could be made pretty with a custom template, or we could add some fancy custom features by writing code - but the point is this is what he's built without any of that custom stuff.

Rikki · March 5, 2015

What would you say to developers? Is Pages as powerful as it was as IP.C? Or did you notice any significant limitations now?

I have been using Pages 'for real' recently to build out our community areas, and I haven't come up against any limitations to what I want to do. I would actually say a whole lot of it is easier for developers now, because iPS4 is so modular. Whereas in IP.Content I would write a few dozen lines of custom PHP to fetch records from somewhere else and show them within a different database, it's now (literally) one line of PHP using our models. It's a lot more straightforward to do those kinds of things now.

SJ77 · March 5, 2015

I have been using Pages 'for real' recently to build out our community areas, and I haven't come up against any limitations to what I want to do. I would actually say a whole lot of it is easier for developers now, because iPS4 is so modular. Whereas in IP.Content I would write a few dozen lines of custom PHP to fetch records from somewhere else and show them within a different database, it's now (literally) one line of PHP using our models. It's a lot more straightforward to do those kinds of things now.

How about for noobs? Are there a lot of canned settings and the rest of it so I can easily setup beautiful custom pages without knowing a boat load of code?

I found that IPC wasn't intuitive at all and I would struggle to figure how to set anything up.

EDIT -- // nevermind, I see you answered this up above.

SJ77 · March 5, 2015

Also, is there a way to do the following in IP Pages??

if (member) {
    'do this stuff or present this html/data
    }
elseif  (guest)  {
    'do this other stuff or present this other html/data
    }

Rikki · March 5, 2015

Also, is there a way to do the following in IP Pages??

if (member) {
    'do this stuff or present this html/data
    }
elseif  (guest)  {
    'do this other stuff or present this other html/data
    }

Yes, you can use the template logic for that:

{{if member.member_id}}
    // member stuff
{{else}}
    // guest stuff
{{endif}}

SJ77 · March 5, 2015

There is template logic now?

Has that been there all along? I used to use template logic like crazy in PHPBB. I found it to be one of the best parts of PHPBB.

Rikki · March 5, 2015

There is template logic now?

Has that been there all along? I used to use template logic like crazy in PHPBB. I found it to be one of the best parts of PHPBB.

Yes, all of our template system is built on that logic (take a look at some of the templates under Customization -> Themes for example). You can use template logic anywhere in Pages - in pages, blocks, database templates, custom field formatters, and so on.

xert77 · March 5, 2015

We'll certainly be adding tutorials on how we built things like the feature plan, and the new provider/projects sections which are coming soon. That said, like opentype mentioned, these kinds of things do involve digging into at least the templates, and occasionally a little custom PHP; it isn't possible to click a few buttons and end up with a completely customized result, unfortunately. Hopefully some alternative templates will end up in the Marketplace, but while I'm sure they'll look good they still can't know what kind of data it is you're displaying. There's still going to be a certain amount of 'generic' to it, but they might serve as a good starting point for more customization.
But Pages is much better at getting the basics down for non-developers - being able to drag and drop sections of a page, set up databases and so forth is all done without any coding now. You can easily build functional dynamic pages within your community even if you aren't able to style them and add customization features.
A good example is our bug tracker. Charles has built our bug tracker entirely on his own using the built in tools in the AdminCP. He created the database and fields, used the visual page editor to put the database and filter areas in, made custom WYSIWYG blocks to show informational text around the page, and permissions and a simple custom field formatter to make some status/priority badges. None of our development team have worked on that with him. Sure, it could be made pretty with a custom template, or we could add some fancy custom features by writing code - but the point is this is what he's built without any of that custom stuff.

What I don't understand is what Databases are. They seem like Categories? But there is also a categories section in the backend as well. So what is the difference between the two?

(sorry to ask questions which are probably stupid)

I was just used to Joomla. You would create a category 'News'. Set a page to display a preview list of the category 'news' and that would be it. You could then add modules down the sides to display extra blocks. There was never anything called Databases.

opentype · March 5, 2015

What I don't understand is what Databases are. They seem like Categories? But there is also a categories section in the backend as well. So what is the difference between the two?

A “Pages Database” is, well a database, where you store content entries (called records), which share a certain structure. That sounds abstract, but that is what makes it so great. In its simplest form, the database holds for example news articles, which have a title, an image and the actual news text. But you can extend that however you like. You can design your database around any topic. You can have for example a book database which has a field for ISBN, author, publisher and publishing date. Or whatever you like.

Categories are a way to structure the records of your database. In that book database you might want to have categories for “science fiction”, “travel” and so on.

Databases just hold the content. When you want to show them, you put the database on a page. Then you can link to it from the menu. But you can also put other stuff (like widgets) on those pages, like you know it from Joomla. You can also create pages which don’t use any databases, but just show content directly. For example, if you create an “About us” page. That is just text you put on a page. You don’t need a Pages database for that.

Rikki · March 5, 2015

What I don't understand is what Databases are. They seem like Categories? But there is also a categories section in the backend as well. So what is the difference between the two?
(sorry to ask questions which are probably stupid)
I was just used to Joomla. You would create a category 'News'. Set a page to display a preview list of the category 'news' and that would be it. You could then add modules down the sides to display extra blocks. There was never anything called Databases.

Think of a database like an application - it's a collection of data for a particular thing. A database can contain categories, which contain records. In Pages (and IP.Content), we provide a built-in database called "Articles", so you might create your "News" category inside that database. That's probably similar to what you did in Joomla.

But if your site was about fishing (for example) and you wanted to create an area of your site that has loads of information about all different kinds of fish, you could do that by creating a new database. Your categories might be "Freshwater" and "Sea", and then you add a record for each fish in one of those categories. Our database feature lets you set up your own fields too, so you might have fields like "Color", "Average Size", "Taste Rating", and then you can automatically filter records based on some/all of those attributes and so on. Our bug tracker is a good example of a simple database.

xert77 · March 5, 2015

A “Pages Database” is, well a database, where you store content entries (called records), which share a certain structure. That sounds abstract, but that is what makes it so great. In its simplest form, the database holds for example news articles, which have a title, an image and the actual news text. But you can extend that however you like. You can design your database around any topic. You can have for example a book database which has a field for ISBN, author, publisher and publishing date. Or whatever you like.
Categories are a way to structure the records of your database. In that book database you might want to have categories for “science fiction”, “travel” and so on.
Databases just hold the content. When you want to show them, you put the database on a page. Then you can link to it from the menu. But you can also put other stuff (like widgets) on those pages, like you know it from Joomla. You can also create pages which don’t use any databases, but just show content directly. For example, if you create an “About us” page. That is just text you put on a page. You don’t need a Pages database for that.

Ah ok. Thanks for explaining this, it makes more sence now. I will have to play around with it a bit more on our website.

Currently on our Mods page: http://xeraingaming.com/articles.html/mod-videos/

We have it displaying a database:

<div class='ipsLayout ipsLayout_withright ipsLayout_largeright'>
    <div class='ipsLayout_content'>
        {database="1"}
    </div>
</div>

And it is displaying a list of all mod articles. I am guessing if I want to make each preview also display a preview photo, I would have to edit the Database?

SJ77 · March 5, 2015

Think of a database like an application - it's a collection of data for a particular thing. A database can contain categories, which contain records. In Pages (and IP.Content), we provide a built-in database called "Articles", so you might create your "News" category inside that database. That's probably similar to what you did in Joomla.
But if your site was about fishing (for example) and you wanted to create an area of your site that has loads of information about all different kinds of fish, you could do that by creating a new database. Your categories might be "Freshwater" and "Sea", and then you add a record for each fish in one of those categories. Our database feature lets you set up your own fields too, so you might have fields like "Color", "Average Size", "Taste Rating", and then you can automatically filter records based on some/all of those attributes and so on. Our bug tracker is a good example of a simple database.

Cool flexible design structure, but.. Where would all of the data come from to populate the records in each field? from posts? Manually? What is the input mechanism?

opentype · March 5, 2015

And it is displaying a list of all mod articles. I am guessing if I want to make each preview also display a preview photo, I would have to edit the Database?

You define for each field IF and HOW the content should appear in both the list view and in the record view.

Where would all of the data come from to populate the records in each field? from posts? Manually? What is the input mechanism?

There is an automatic front-end form created which shows all fields you have set up and are editable by the member. If you start a bug report, you are filling out such a Pages form.

SJ77 · March 5, 2015

If you start a
bug report
, you are filling out such a Pages form.

Really? It looks just like a regular forum. I thought this was a new forum category called "bug report"

So with a pages.database you could set up inputs and have members fill it out then publish to the front page? (just thinking of a use case)

Could I have special/ custom input's ? What if I wanted to create a DMCA take down notice that users could fill out to report copyright stuff on my site?

Invision Community 4: SEO, prepare for v5 and dormant account notifications

Invision Community 5: Beta testing and latest updates

Invision Community 4: A more professional report center

Invision Community 5: A video walkthrough creating a custom theme and homepage

IPS4 Feature Plan

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