To my knowledge, you can still have physical products listed in your store with Commerce, you will just lose the whole shipping capability. This would have to be organized by yourself as opposed to the software having this functionality, otherwise you can try out alternatives such as Shopify as has been suggested on the Deprecation Tracker.

I suppose I can probably rig this to work. The idea is to have two premium accounts. One that its a modest monthly subscription and the other essentially being the same thing, but billed annually at once. Those that sign up for the annual version would then receive a custom community t-shirt. I suppose it's likely a matter of a custom field to gather shipping details or if that's not possible to add some language into the transactional email with instructions. Would be a lot easier if it was all integrated as it used to be, but I'll make do. 

Anyhow, I wanted to voice my opinion so you guys were aware of the interest. Shopify is a great solution to a quick, full featured shop, but it's also quite expensive. I already have a Shopify shop, but am currently researching / testing Woocommerce since have the features I want are paid plugins for Shopify that also seem to be developed for WC. I suppose at the end of the day, the $105 or so I pay monthly for Shopify is inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, but every little bit helps in this particular situation, a full website with content is almost as important to me as the transactional e-com side of it. Seems to me that, WC is a better solution to that end, but neither are tied into Invision or our community, so it's still a sort of hacked together solution that I can see being prone to mistakes as we copy / paste customer info back and forth.

At least there's some solid looking solutions for the help desk feature when it comes to WordPress, though they seem to cost almost as much as most of the dedicated platforms out there.

Well done for a great job.
Will V5 enable users to follow only the user's new topics? And not get a notification for every reply?
Why is there no precise ETA for the V5?

 

Well done for a great job.
Will V5 enable users to follow only the user's new topics? And not get a notification for every reply?
Why is there no precise ETA for the V5?

There has been no significant changes to the follow system in v5. In terms of ETA, there can be no precise time until we know it's finished. v5 itself is pretty straight forward, but to launch it, we will need updates to our website, documentation, etc which all take time.

Progress is good though, we're up to alpha 7 and hundreds of fixes have already gone in, lots of features changed based on feedback and even a few things added we've yet to blog about.

We're ready for the next step in alpha testing, and we expect to have more news on that next week.

I hope you will have side by side documentation as long as you continue support for v4, so there would be two help guides, v4 and v5.

Is it still possible to test that alpha v5?

I'd love to explore v5 and provide feedback, if there is room I'd like to join the testing volunteers.

Thanks for the interest! We're about to enter the next phase of alpha testing, likely next week where more can participate.

 

Thanks for the interest! We're about to enter the next phase of alpha testing, likely next week where more can participate.

You guys have hidden stuff for us alpha testers to 😇 interessting 🤩

 

Thanks for the interest! We're about to enter the next phase of alpha testing, likely next week where more can participate.

Hey Matt. So we can see first beta in September...?

Edited August 1, 2024Aug 1 by Feneroin

 

You guys have hidden stuff for us alpha testers to 😇 interessting 🤩

Almost makes me feel bad for annoying them with suggestions that they know (but we don't) they're already working on.

Almost 😙

 

Hey Matt. So we can see first beta in September...?

Maybe sooner.

I am going to guess the production version probably won't be available until december (maybe a christmas gift)?

Is it safe to assume it will either

1. install on top of our version 4 (probably disable all the 3rd party plugins until they get patched to support 5)
2. or is it a migration from 4 to a new fresh install of 5

Also can you confirm if you will still allow us to have self hosted?  I just can't afford the cloud version

Last question I have off the cuff is, is it planned that pricing will be the same as what we are paying now or is it planned to increase price.

Thank You..  looking forward to the makeover.

Also do you know if version 5 will add Dropbox and/or Google Drive support for files?  Amazon S3 bucket is just to darn expensive..   having a large HDD on a VPS is expensive so Dropbox and Google Drive are pretty inexpensive for alot of space so it would be ideal to store files off the server.

 

I am going to guess the production version probably won't be available until december (maybe a christmas gift)?

It depends on the betas 🙂 May well be before then.

 

Is it safe to assume it will either

1. install on top of our version 4 (probably disable all the 3rd party plugins until they get patched to support 5)
2. or is it a migration from 4 to a new fresh install of 5

You will be able to upgrade

 

Also can you confirm if you will still allow us to have self hosted?  I just can't afford the cloud version

Yes, version 5 will be available on our classic offering.

 

Last question I have off the cuff is, is it planned that pricing will be the same as what we are paying now or is it planned to increase price.

There arent any planned. Thats not to say prices will be the same forever, of course lol. But nothing planned at present

 

Also do you know if version 5 will add Dropbox and/or Google Drive support for files?  Amazon S3 bucket is just to darn expensive..   having a large HDD on a VPS is expensive so Dropbox and Google Drive are pretty inexpensive for alot of space so it would be ideal to store files off the server.

There are no plans for this at present. Feel free to post within our feedback area if you wish to see things like this added in the future. I would think however that dropbox and google drive probably wouldnt be suitable for the file storage side of a site

 

There has been no significant changes to the follow system in v5. In terms of ETA, there can be no precise time until we know it's finished. v5 itself is pretty straight forward, but to launch it, we will need updates to our website, documentation, etc which all take time.

Progress is good though, we're up to alpha 7 and hundreds of fixes have already gone in, lots of features changed based on feedback and even a few things added we've yet to blog about.

We're ready for the next step in alpha testing, and we expect to have more news on that next week.

This makes sense to me, appreciate you explaining that. That being said, I assume a public beta is essentially a final round that may or may night include documentation and likely has some undiscovered bugs that get revealed from a wider and more diverse testing environment. That being said, possible to share your opinion on when we might see a public beta? I understand that it'll likely be made available to Cloud customers first and that it'll be an individual choice as to whether those that opt in, chose to implement on a production install. Documentation is nice, as is being as stable as possible, but hoping to get my foot through that proverbial door as soon as possible.

Another nod of appreciation of the hard work that goes into all this.

 

Amazon S3 bucket is just to darn expensive..

Switch to Backblaze B2?

 

This makes sense to me, appreciate you explaining that. That being said, I assume a public beta is essentially a final round that may or may night include documentation and likely has some undiscovered bugs that get revealed from a wider and more diverse testing environment. That being said, possible to share your opinion on when we might see a public beta? I understand that it'll likely be made available to Cloud customers first and that it'll be an individual choice as to whether those that opt in, chose to implement on a production install. Documentation is nice, as is being as stable as possible, but hoping to get my foot through that proverbial door as soon as possible.

Another nod of appreciation of the hard work that goes into all this.

So broadly speaking, a beta will be a true beta whereas in the past with new major versions, it's more alpha-like in that we might add some more functionality, or refactor bits of code on whim which means you get a really lengthy beta testing phase.

With v5, we're being more careful to ensure the quality of the product, and even now it's incredibly stable and very polished and much more beta-like than alpha. That said, we are aware that we may need to revisit some features and tweak them, or potentially re-work bits of code so we're not quite ready for beta status.

We're really hoping for a public beta by September. We're aware that we're running out of year and before long Thanksgiving arrives and signals the start of the holiday season.

We haven't made any firm decisions about release schedules in terms of which Invision Community packages get beta first. My instinct right now is to release both the classic version and the Invision Community but we'll confirm closer to the time. We may stagger the final release, but that would be just to prevent support becoming overwhelmed with upgrades.

But more pressingly, the next steps are:

- [Coming next week] Public alpha: an install of Invision Community v5 for everyone to test, offer feedback and post bugs on.
- Developer alpha: we've gathered a very small group of contributors to test and give feedback on the development tools
- Finalise v4 to v5 upgrade tests
- Public beta

 

Pubic beta

is there any approx. time for when public beta will be released?

Edited August 3, 2024Aug 3 by szalik.dev

 

- Pubic beta

Not sure we need that level of service, but always appreciate you guys taking things to the next level! 😅

Well. That was an unfortunate typo. 

 

Well. That was an unfortunate typo. 

Indeed.

 

Also do you know if version 5 will add Dropbox and/or Google Drive support for files?  Amazon S3 bucket is just to darn expensive..   having a large HDD on a VPS is expensive so Dropbox and Google Drive are pretty inexpensive for alot of space so it would be ideal to store files off the server.

I recommend looking into Wasabi, they don't charge for data egress which is why Amazon ends up being so expensive to media rich websites. Starts off at 6.99/TB and the service is reliable. There is a guide here if you search for Wasabi that lets you set it up through the Amazon S3 option in the ACP. We switched over 4.5 years ago and have saved over $10,000 on the low end of my rough calculations.

 

Almost makes me feel bad for annoying them with suggestions that they know (but we don't) they're already working on.

Almost 😙

Same thought here, 90% of the things I found are "already know". 

Hello,
The Sidebar is fantastic.
What is the level of control admins have on this bar? (width, customized contact, links order)
Currently, the Sidebar lacks client-oriented features, such as direct links to the user's latest open topic, messages, and badges - for example. These features will help users access relevant information quickly.

Edited August 6, 2024Aug 6 by LiveG

 

Hello,
The Sidebar is fantastic.
What is the level of control admins have on this bar? (width, customized contact, links order)
Currently, the Sidebar lacks client-oriented features, such as direct links to the user's latest open topic, messages, and badges - for example. These features will help users access relevant information quickly.

All of those user-focused links/menu features are positioned in the top right corner of the page, when the Sidebar is enabled (to the right of the breadcrumb).