Release notes & theme difference tool

[Nick Willson]

Hi Invision

Version 4.2.4 is slated as a maintenance release however it seems Invision continue to maintain the policy of keeping their customers in the dark with the changes. According to the theme comparison tool there are a number of under the hood theme change and have yet to install the release on my pre-production server to discover what these and any other changes in the release are.

It would also be really useful to know what is in each release, rather than having to trawl through blog posts to uncover new features and changes. The 4.x news blogs were excellent but now it is quite hard to see what features were introduced in 4.1 and 4.2 release which really needs from being consolidated somewhere. I understand the resistance to a bug tracker but how about a feature and changes tracker that is linked to the Release notes?  

I only came across the tool by chance and I am sure a large number of customers may not know about it and it is quite important. I wonder what your usage statistics for the tool tell you on the customer base that has used it? It is not mentioned in the installation and upgrade guide  and the only place I believe it is mentioned in an 4.1 upgrade prep article (an this post of course!) but you might like to add it to the relevant documents..

In the current arrangement could the release notes state 'Theme changes' with a link to the tool as this would alert customers to the fact the theme has changed as "4.2.4 is a maintenance release that fixes issues identified in 4.2.3."does not imply theme changes have been made.

Keep up the good work

Nick

[Matt]

Hi Nick,

Appreciate the feedback!

So typically X.X.n releases are bug fixes. Some of the bug fixes do require template edits. Sometimes if we need to change a lot of things, this can affect a lot of files. Unfortunately there often isn't a way to avoid theme edits in a bug fixing release.

In almost every minor release there are template edits so we don't really think to mention them.

I will take onboard your point regarding linking to the differences tool.

[Joy Rex]

Would using a service like Github that shows tracked changes on files be something IPS could leverage for this purpose?

[Matt]

We use git to develop Invision Community but it's not something we'd make public.

[Aiwa]

You can do this yourself with your own private repo. Key word, private. Otherwise you'd be in violation of TOS by distributing files.