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.

 

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. 

I am willing to test version V5. 😁

I'm happy to help test v5 🙂

 

Who is ready for an alpha site to play with?

Well, it appears that after 4 minutes, it's entirely flawless so we may as well just release final?

1 hour ago, Matt said:

How's your Thursday going?

• Breakfast, kids, etc ...
• Go to work
• Check what is your local time 
• Saw 5h16 ... 😑
• Waiting
• Saw 8h16 ...😶

• Waiting
• Saw : 😮
  
• Check email
• Check notifications
• Check forums categrories
• Nothing 🙄
• Still waiting for something 😂

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

On 8/2/2024 at 4:01 PM, superaven said:

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