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.

 

 

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. 

I'm happy to help test v5 🙂

 

Who is ready for an alpha site to play with?

How's your Thursday going?

 

 

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.

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