Invision Community Insight: Deprecation Communication, March Release and more.

[Olivia Clark]

🌸 Welcome to this week's Invision Community Insight! 🌸

Thank you for checking out this weekly round up post. I hope you have had a wonderful week! In the comments below, feel free to say hello and let us know what you are working on. As for us, let’s dive into that below.

 

Current Happenings

We are beginning some spring cleaning in Our Community. I hope you enjoy this first round of changes and those that will appear in the coming weeks. 🧹 

 

Deprecation Communication

Deprecations are important to keeping our software clean and modern as needs change and the software evolves. We want you to know when deprecations are happening and how to prepare for those. When a new deprecation is announced or a removal is completed, we will communicate those in four ways:

1. Release notes: This is a simple description with a link to our new Deprecation Tracker.
2. Deprecation Tracker: This will give a bit more information and any actions or advice from us regarding the change.
3. Topic: To allow for a place to ask your questions, we will share in a topic.
4. AdminCP notification: This will appear as a banner in your AdminCP.

We recommend that you follow these areas in Our Community so you are notified of changes. There are new announcements and removals in the March release so check those out.

 

New Version

Our March release is out and ready for your community. As you know, we recommend that you keep your community up to date each month to keep it running smoothly and so you can enjoy the latest updates.

As a reminder, here is what is included in this March release, version 4.7.8. 🍀

https://invisioncommunity.com/release-notes/

 

On Deck

Live Topics is set for beta release in … April! 🤩 🎉 We are looking forward to hearing how you use live topics and how it evolves in its future versions.

If you want to see Live Topics in action and like to hear Charles and I talk about the release (or just talk in general 😉) follow and add the April Release Chat to your calendar. Hope to see you then.

 

Also in the upcoming April release, Commerce, Clubs, Gallery and Events will all get some attention. 

 

Peeking Ahead 

Progressing along nicely are our statistics and reporting improvements. A blog entry will be posted soon.

 

We are in the beginning stages of development for our Courses and Lessons application. If you want to help shape this feature, share your ideas and use cases with us. https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/472307-courses-and-lessons/#comment-2934996

 

Lastly, for those that like to see what we are up to line by line, here is the changelog for the week.

 

Changelog

Quote

Core

- Fixed an issue where incoming emails containing '-' or '.' may be discard.

- Fixed an issue where a fatal error is thrown during email processing if the email character set is not supported by current PHP configuration.

Pages

- Added the media URL to the ACP - Media Details sidebar.

- Fixed an issue where the Media Preview Image wouldn't be shown on the ACP - Media Details page.

Events

- Fixed an issue where the "All Calendars" dropdown link would load the overview page instead of monthly view.

- Fixed an issue where the 'Copy Event' link would be shown even if the member had no permission to create new events in the calendar.

 

 

Hope you enjoyed this week's Invision Insight round up. See you next week. 🙂

[Brian Garcia]

Thanks for the update, @Olivia Clark. We appreciate you handling Charles & crew, I mean doing what you do!

[Charles]

1 hour ago, Brian Garcia said:

Thanks for the update, @Olivia Clark. We appreciate you handling Charles & crew, I mean doing what you do!

Olivia always says I am so easy to work with. 

[Olivia Clark]

Looks like @Brian Garcia knows my role oh so well 😉

This team is the best, honestly. Never a dull moment trying to keep them all in line, especially @Charles.

[MMXII]

On 3/10/2023 at 4:04 PM, Olivia Clark said:

Deprecation Tracker: This will give a bit more information and any actions or advice from us regarding the change.

This is a good thing! I like that you list all old features that have been or will be removed. 👍

How was this tracker created? With the Pages app (obviously), but maybe you can add a little How-to to your documentation?

Quote

we made the decision to deprecate the support desk feature

This is sad news. 😞 I love the ticket system, it is well implemented in the software and the features it offers are more than enough for small to medium sized communities to organize all incoming tickets.

[Olivia Clark]

7 hours ago, MMXII said:

How was this tracker created? With the Pages app (obviously), but maybe you can add a little How-to to your documentation?

Glad you like the tracker and will find that helpful, @MMXII. I think @Ryan Ashbrook can help with this question. 

 

 

[Afrodude]

On 3/10/2023 at 9:04 AM, Olivia Clark said:

• Deprecation Tracker: This will give a bit more information and any actions or advice from us regarding the change.

@Matt it would be nice if you include this to the main menu.

[The Old Man]

Have the Blog comments gone for good? Used to be some useful info in there. 😬

[The Old Man]

On 3/10/2023 at 3:04 PM, Olivia Clark said:

We are in the beginning stages of development for our Courses and Lessons application. If you want to help shape this feature, share your ideas and use cases with us. https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/472307-courses-and-lessons/#comment-2934996

It seems like I can't reply to those Cloud forum topics. I was pleased to see a new IPS app mentioned as it's been years since the last, but apparently, it's only for the IPS Cloud platform.

Then I noticed that the Statistics improvements are, you guessed it, for IPS Cloud hosted only.

So disappointed. These cloud features appear to use Amazon cloud functionality which as far as I know, is available for all. Amazon Rekognition for example.

I hate negativity, but I can't help but wonder; has new innovation now ended for us loyal self-hosted customers?

[Charles]

We may bring Courses to Classic in the future. For the moment, Courses is a value addition to those on our cloud platform.

The statistics improvements are mostly available for both cloud and classic editions other than a few extras that are cloud only.

Feel free to PM me or we can do a Zoom call to discuss options about switching to cloud to take advantage of new technologies. 

[The Old Man]

Thanks for the reply and the invitation Charles. I know it's good for many but I prefer and need to stay with IPS Legacy for now! 😍

[Marc]

55 minutes ago, The Old Man said:

I know it's good for many but I prefer and need to stay with IPS Legacy for now! 😍

Assuming you mean classic there? 

[Charles]

1 hour ago, The Old Man said:

Thanks for the reply and the invitation Charles. I know it's good for many but I prefer and need to stay with IPS Legacy for now! 😍

Totally understand many do. It's why we will continue to offer the Classic edition in v5 🙂 

Always open to hear from people on what is holding them back though even if we cannot change your mind it's good to chat and learn. Always open for PMs 🙂 

[Makoto]

I look forward to seeing what updates you have to the reporting system. Making moderation easier is always a good thing for larger communities.

The gallery updates also seem very nice for the most part, though the navigation having a limited number of images it can display (or seeming to not display at all in the case of categories/non-albums with lots of images) is something I hope can be improved on.

[jesuralem]

Am I wrong or this the first official mention of Invision community 5 ? And with a timeframe!

[Randy Calvert]

32 minutes ago, jesuralem said:

Am I wrong or this the first official mention of Invision community 5 ? And with a timeframe!

The first mention that I saw of it was Feb 23rd.  

Though the deprication discussion is the first talk I've seen of actual timelines.  🙂 

[Grafidea]

I hope that v5 will bring a lot of changes in terms of design theme and optimization 🙂

Edited March 17, 2023 by Grafidea

[Schaken]

I would love to see some improvements of the API system. I don't think you all have expanded or touched it in years. it would be awesome to see it expanded on. I am a program developer working with mostly C# and I end up having to make a web crawler to get common information pretty often.

[Randy Calvert]

2 minutes ago, Schaken said:

I would love to see some improvements of the API system. I don't think you all have expanded or touched it in years. it would be awesome to see it expanded on. I am a program developer working with mostly C# and I end up having to make a web crawler to get common information pretty often.

Check out the following...  it looks to be IPS's direction for APIs.  This is something they've noted they'll be heavily investing in as we go forward as a way to reduce the amount of 3rd party apps breaking with new IPB releases and PHP version changes, etc.  

 

[Schaken]

Just now, Randy Calvert said:

Check out the following...  it looks to be IPS's direction for APIs.  This is something they've noted they'll be heavily investing in as we go forward as a way to reduce the amount of 3rd party apps breaking with new IPB releases and PHP version changes, etc.  

 

Thank you for this. its by the same guy who i usually deal with and offers me assistance. my guess is he is tired of dealing with me and making fixes and updates himself. lol. he is a great guy.

[SeNioR-]

Invision Power Board Usage Statistics

• The most popular in Poland in Forum Software category.
• 3rd most popular in the Top 10k sites in Forum Software category.
• 3rd most popular in the Top 100k sites in Forum Software category.
• 4th most popular in the Top 1 Million sites in Forum Software category.
• 5th most popular on the Entire Internet in Forum Software category.
• The most popular in Russia in Forum Software category.
• The most popular in Romania in Forum Software category.
• 2nd most popular in Brazil in Forum Software category.
• 3rd most popular in Australia in Forum Software category.
• 3rd most popular in Italy in Forum Software category.

[Schaken]

9 minutes ago, Randy Calvert said:

Check out the following...  it looks to be IPS's direction for APIs.  This is something they've noted they'll be heavily investing in as we go forward as a way to reduce the amount of 3rd party apps breaking with new IPB releases and PHP version changes, etc.  

 

This is great for some things, but it is not tied in to half of the apps yet. If this is still under development and they are still adding, then this has some really good potential.

[Daniel F]

17 minutes ago, Schaken said:

get common information pretty often.

What are you missing most?

[Schaken]

Just now, Daniel F said:

What are you missing most?

@Daniel F you are awesome. As you know, I try real hard to make things look pretty, it tends to sell better.
When im getting API's for forum categories, I would love to be able to grab the category image, and/or Icon.
Same with gallery. People usually dont read as often as they just look for pictures, and the Invision system has functionality for this, but not in the API.

For example, I would like to grab images from here. I can simply make them in my app, but if this ever changes on my site, I will have to update my app.

 

And of course, as our earlier conversation, maybe a different way to upload images to the gallery. most other API I can upload as objects, which I can do this fine. but in the gallery for some reason I am really struggling to make it an encoded base64 image.

 

and one that I almost forgot about... I would love for a way to upload images in topics. for example how I uploaded those images just now, I would love to do that with the API, granted I could upload to a 3rd party and just enter HTML to make it happen... but then I have to rely on 3rd party services and they delete images pretty fast and anyone reviewing topics will see tons of broken images.