Invision Community v5: An update, and next steps

Matt · May 31

As we find ourselves with our toes over the precipice of June; signalling the half way point of the year, I thought it's a good time for an update.

Apologies southern hemisphere.

Invision Community 5 has been in alpha testing for a while, and a small group have found a good number of bugs, and offered their thoughts and suggestions, some of which we've implemented. During this time we've wrapped up the new editor, a boat load of UI improvements and more.

We are now ready for the next stage, which is to give our alpha testers their own Cloud v5 to test with. This opens up testing for the Admin CP, and all areas without using developer mode. v5 has a lot of changes to how CSS, JS and resources are managed. They are now built when we build the apps, and should never need rebuilding. We also store compiled templates now, so lots of slow eval() calls are no longer needed. In brief testing locally, it has made the entire platform super-fast.

We are choosing to use a Cloud v5 to test with, rather than a traditional download for two reasons. The first is that using our hosting platform means we don't have to chase down issues with PHP, MySQL and unix versions which can be time consuming in the early stages. The second is that we're still writing the new build code, so we can't actually produce a versioned zip just yet. 😂

But fear not, downloadable versions will be coming at some point.

We're aiming to have this alpha demo system ready next week, so if you want to help alpha test, drop a comment below. I want to keep the first round (1-2 weeks) fairly small or it becomes overwhelming sifting through the feedback and bugs but please do register your interest.

In terms of functionality, we're wrapping up the tagging changes; I'd expect a blog on that next week. The final parts of the Pages app are coming together. We even tested an upgrade of this site to v5 to see how the Pages built pages looked, and much to all of our relief, it looks great with just a few CSS classes needing updating.

It's been a long journey - and a little longer than we'd first hoped but we're getting closer to betas when the fun really starts.

We're really proud of v5 and we hope you like what we've created.

Meddysong · May 31

23 minutes ago, Matt said:

so if you want to help alpha test, drop a comment below

Just proving that I've read the whole post!

Feel free to skip me if you get an unmanageably large number of volunteers.

dmaidon1 · May 31

Looking forward to v5 and am willing to help test.

David N. · May 31

1 hour ago, Matt said:

if you want to help alpha test, drop a comment below.

I would love the opportunity to be part of this alpha test phase.

teraßyte · May 31

Time to see the ACP then. 😋

rastafari · May 31

I hope i can help !!

DawPi · May 31

33 minutes ago, teraßyte said:

Time to see the ACP then. 😋

Count me in!

Marc · May 31

Chris027 · May 31

Thanks for the communication. Every bit helps as we inch closer to a large upgrade.

Troublesome · May 31

I am willing to help with testing

CheersnGears · May 31

I'm (still) in. I'm looking forward to trying Pages.

SoloInter · May 31

Please choose us, we have plenty of things to test

Edited May 31 by SoloInter

Dreadknux · May 31

3 hours ago, Matt said:

We're aiming to have this alpha demo system ready next week, so if you want to help alpha test, drop a comment below. I want to keep the first round (1-2 weeks) fairly small or it becomes overwhelming sifting through the feedback and bugs but please do register your interest.