v5 news coming soon...

[Matt]

Probably not. Things like read only classes are nice to haves, but we'd need to rework some stuff to use them. We tend to just start using new PHP for newer features and any major re-working of existing code.

[marklcfc]

On 7/21/2023 at 5:12 PM, Matt said:

I was curious as to what changes you'd like to see

More than anything else, I want to be able to set a share image for a topic should I want to. I don't want to just use the same default share photo for every single topic. If I share a topic on social media, I want a photo related to that specific topic to be the image in the card.

Have tried to get a hook/app for this for many years and nothing has worked

Edited July 25, 2023 by marklcfc

[nodle]

I almost forgot, hopefully we can get an update to Font Awesome license that would be nice so we can use the newer fonts.

[Grafidea]

CKEditor 5 and Fonts Awesome will be 99% in V5

[Daniel F]

1 minute ago, Grafidea said:

CKEditor 5 and Fonts Awesome will be 99% in V5

 

[Matt]

9 minutes ago, Grafidea said:

CKEditor 5 and Fonts Awesome will be 99% in V5

99+1%

[Dean_]

1 hour ago, marklcfc said:

More than anything else, I want to be able to set a share image for a topic should I want to. I don't want to just use the same default share photo for every single topic. If I share a topic on social media, I want a photo related to that specific topic to be the image in the card.

Have tried to get a hook/app for this for many years and nothing has worked

Would this help?

**Edit

Just seen; Update: Not needed anymore with Invision Community 4.7.11 or higher

[Fosters]

IPS uses the first images, with the following app you can pick literally any posted image from the topic as OG Image

 

[marklcfc]

4 minutes ago, Dean_ said:

Would this help?

**Edit

Just seen; Update: Not needed anymore with Invision Community 4.7.11 or higher

Looked at that originally but it needs the photo to be uploaded into a post on the topic itself which isn't what I'm after, since alot of topics don't have an attachment, and sometimes they do which are not relevant.

Edited July 25, 2023 by marklcfc

[Dreadknux]

Design

I echo the comments regarding general end-user design and navigation/travel. I like the idea that V5 will be 'mobile first' as V4 is a little bit unwieldy. In particular, browsing a member's profile page is an absolute nightmare on mobile and I think design cues from social media platforms (or sites like Deviantart's user profiles) would be a good source of inspiration in terms of a do-over so everything flows better.

Tabs also need to be designed better for mobile - no more dropdown menus, make it sleek and more like a scrolling mobile navbar instead. 🙂 

App Integration

Broadly speaking, and at risk of sounding like a broken record, a better integration and cohesion of apps (on the end-user side, not necessarily the dev side) would be most welcome. I've already raised a few ideas, at the (much higher) risk of being annoying about it! 😄 

Theme Development

As someone who isn't necessarily a coder but likes to play around with theme templates, it would be fantastic if V5 had a fully-fleshed out documentation this time around. I'm talking about a complete encyclopedia/wiki of every kind of IPS code that can be used/referenced in templates, what they do, and all of the possible variables that can be used.

For example, I had to spend an unreasonable amount of time to trial and error myself, without much in the way of online documentation, the below code to tell IPS to simply display a record image in an Activity Stream entry if one existed and the entry happened to be a Pages Database entry. I was lucky I figured that out, but in other areas, trying to do things myself has not been so successful.

{{if $indexData['index_class']::$title == 'content_record_comments_title_1' || $indexData['index_class']::$title == 'content_record_comments_title_4'}}
	{{if $itemData['record_image']}}
		<img src="{file="$itemData['record_image']" extension="cms_Records"}">
	{{endif}}
{{endif}}

I know documenting all the possible little things is really long and laborious work, but it could help unlock the potential of so many more amazing communities if theme designers knew of absolutely all of the tools they have at their disposal.

That's all I have in my head right now, but generally speaking I'm excited for what you guys have planned and can't wait to learn more.

1 hour ago, marklcfc said:

Looked at that originally but it needs the photo to be uploaded into a post on the topic itself which isn't what I'm after, since alot of topics don't have an attachment, and sometimes they do which are not relevant.

Yeah agreed, an option where you can just upload an image directly to a topic (rather than having to rely on anything already existing in a topic post) would be ideal. Something that works a bit like a 'Record Image' does in Pages, only for Forum Topics. You could even template it and have it set as a 'header image/background' for a topic?

Edited July 25, 2023 by Dreadknux

[Martin A.]

20 hours ago, Matt said:

What do those hooks do?

This is an app whose only purpose is to get the suite to function how we'd like it to. It's those 50 code hooks, and then an additional 25 template hooks. The most recent one is to the promote class in order to get the text you enter in the promotion popup over to Zapier. Another one is to allow a member to sign in once using their display name, which on successful login will reveal their email address. Some are bug fixes that have been reported but you can't reproduce it.

Also have one that adds analyzers and filters to the Elastic index which we need to get a proper autocomplete in a different app. 

One that I really like is one that posts log entries of interest to our Slack channel.

Can send it to you if you're curious.

[Grafidea]

@Matt

Will the email template also be renewed?

[Esther E.]

3 hours ago, Dreadknux said:

Theme Development

As someone who isn't necessarily a coder but likes to play around with theme templates, it would be fantastic if V5 had a fully-fleshed out documentation this time around. I'm talking about a complete encyclopedia/wiki of every kind of IPS code that can be used/referenced in templates, what they do, and all of the possible variables that can be used.

For example, I had to spend an unreasonable amount of time to trial and error myself, without much in the way of online documentation, the below code to tell IPS to simply display a record image in an Activity Stream entry if one existed and the entry happened to be a Pages Database entry.

What you're asking for is not just "laborious", as you described, but pretty much near impossible. We'd have to list literally every single element of every array (in the example you gave there are probably close to 50 possibilities alone) in every template. Anyone even slightly familiar with the code base would have no issue figuring that out, so this would be a very big effort targeting a very small number of people... and maintaining it would be a nightmare. 

[Matt]

2 hours ago, Martin A. said:

This is an app whose only purpose is to get the suite to function how we'd like it to. It's those 50 code hooks, and then an additional 25 template hooks. The most recent one is to the promote class in order to get the text you enter in the promotion popup over to Zapier. Another one is to allow a member to sign in once using their display name, which on successful login will reveal their email address. Some are bug fixes that have been reported but you can't reproduce it.

Also have one that adds analyzers and filters to the Elastic index which we need to get a proper autocomplete in a different app. 

One that I really like is one that posts log entries of interest to our Slack channel.

Can send it to you if you're curious.

Yeah, happy to take a look. There's fewer opportunities for hooking and overloading in v5 so a lot of that likely won't work but I'm curious as to what you need and why.

35 minutes ago, Grafidea said:

@Matt

Will the email template also be renewed?

What would you like to see? Email templates are like coding in Dreamweaver in 1998.

3 hours ago, Dreadknux said:

Design

I echo the comments regarding general end-user design and navigation/travel. I like the idea that V5 will be 'mobile first' as V4 is a little bit unwieldy. In particular, browsing a member's profile page is an absolute nightmare on mobile and I think design cues from social media platforms (or sites like Deviantart's user profiles) would be a good source of inspiration in terms of a do-over so everything flows better.

Tabs also need to be designed better for mobile - no more dropdown menus, make it sleek and more like a scrolling mobile navbar instead. 🙂 

App Integration

Broadly speaking, and at risk of sounding like a broken record, a better integration and cohesion of apps (on the end-user side, not necessarily the dev side) would be most welcome. I've already raised a few ideas, at the (much higher) risk of being annoying about it! 😄 

Theme Development

As someone who isn't necessarily a coder but likes to play around with theme templates, it would be fantastic if V5 had a fully-fleshed out documentation this time around. I'm talking about a complete encyclopedia/wiki of every kind of IPS code that can be used/referenced in templates, what they do, and all of the possible variables that can be used.

For example, I had to spend an unreasonable amount of time to trial and error myself, without much in the way of online documentation, the below code to tell IPS to simply display a record image in an Activity Stream entry if one existed and the entry happened to be a Pages Database entry. I was lucky I figured that out, but in other areas, trying to do things myself has not been so successful.

{{if $indexData['index_class']::$title == 'content_record_comments_title_1' || $indexData['index_class']::$title == 'content_record_comments_title_4'}}
	{{if $itemData['record_image']}}
		<img src="{file="$itemData['record_image']" extension="cms_Records"}">
	{{endif}}
{{endif}}

I know documenting all the possible little things is really long and laborious work, but it could help unlock the potential of so many more amazing communities if theme designers knew of absolutely all of the tools they have at their disposal.

That's all I have in my head right now, but generally speaking I'm excited for what you guys have planned and can't wait to learn more.

Yeah agreed, an option where you can just upload an image directly to a topic (rather than having to rely on anything already existing in a topic post) would be ideal. Something that works a bit like a 'Record Image' does in Pages, only for Forum Topics. You could even template it and have it set as a 'header image/background' for a topic?

Design is definitely mobile first and @Ehren has already implemented scrolling tabs over drop downs.

App integration, specifically pages records and topics - I see this as a semi-dead feature in that I don't want to invest a lot of time into it (but it remains in v5 and no deprecation plans). I'd rather find a smarter solution to the problem it solved 10 years ago. Other stuff is fine but we want 5.0.0 to be the start of a new journey and not just the end of one, so expect a lot of change over the 5.0 lifetime. We want to do the major things and then ship so customers aren't waiting 2-3 years between versions.

A blog on theme stuff is coming but we've got a few things to finish first.

[Grafidea]

a more modern look that encourages interaction.

[Adriano Faria]

9 minutes ago, Matt said:

There's fewer opportunities for hooking and overloading in v5

Awaiting eagerly any info about this in the related blog entry. No more template hook and now “fewer opportunities” to hook. I hope v5 is more than add links to menu content.

[Matt]

2 minutes ago, Grafidea said:

a more modern look that encourages interaction.

What would that look like to you? Any examples you have in mind?

Just now, Adriano Faria said:

Awaiting eagerly any info about this in the related blog entry. No more template hook and now “fewer opportunities” to hook. I hope v5 is more than add links to menu content.

I think what was announced in the blog already is more than that. 😅

Next blog will be tomorrow.

[marklcfc]

11 minutes ago, Matt said:

What would that look like to you? Any examples you have in mind?

Less sluggish on mobile, if you compare swiping back and forth to a XF forum, then Invision is slow. I think it maybe because Invision activates a reload when you swipe and XF doesn't. 

[Ocean West]

Can you speak yet of any database changes?

I know some settings are stored in a bitwise fashion (forum features) and enabling features in mass across all forums is impossible.

What changes do you anticipate for the ACP, or is the first push focusing on public-facing changes?

[Grafidea]

The database also needs a major overhaul.

[Matt]

No major database updates so far. We don’t want to completely destabilise the entire platform. We have a fairly agressive timeline. We did consider foreign keys, etc but honestly the impact to end users is none and the risk of chasing issues for months is high. 

[Dreadknux]

2 hours ago, Esther E. said:

What you're asking for is not just "laborious", as you described, but pretty much near impossible. We'd have to list literally every single element of every array (in the example you gave there are probably close to 50 possibilities alone) in every template. Anyone even slightly familiar with the code base would have no issue figuring that out, so this would be a very big effort targeting a very small number of people... and maintaining it would be a nightmare. 

Yeah that’s fair enough, I shared a really bad example there. But I think it’s fair to say the documentation currently existing for v4 is severely lacking; even a basic glossary of theme terms would have been useful. But the few scraps the IPS ‘theme guide’ does have are unhelpfully scattered across a number of esoteric ‘help guide’ pages that individually are more patronising than they are genuinely helpful. I feel like I’m having to hunt pieces of a treasure map by hopping across different areas of the site 😅 We can agree that a v5 version of this could definitely be designed better at the very least.

Anyway, Matt mentioned some level of information in a blog post so I can wait for that no problem. 🙂 

[Grafidea]

@Matt As you know, a lot of people use mobile devices, and I hope that V5 will bring many conveniences and improvements in terms of forum usability. It seems to me that the majority of users visit the forum from their smartphones rather than from a computer.

[Matt]

Events/Listeners blog out now: 

 

[rfcontreras]

Self hosted installations will have the upgrade for free or being a major release it's paid?

Regards

Ricardo