Dreadknux

[removed]

The Record Image field in a Pages database provides the correct og image for external linking.

Just make sure the field is enabled in your Database (AdminCP > Pages > Your Database > Fields and then the ‘Record Image’ field under “Publish Fields”). Then, for each Page record, you just select Edit, find the image field, upload up it desired image to the field and then save. 🙂

On 7/25/2023 at 9:07 PM, Matt said:

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.

Well I’m glad not EVERY useful feature is being deprecated! Just “semi-dead” 😅.

Seriously though, I am excited about the thinking behind “smarter” solutions surrounding this - I’m definitely not  against change (I got over Status Updates already, honest!), as long as I can get behind the general vision.

For me, part of the appeal in migrating all of my separate silo sites into IPS was in exploring ways the different apps could communicate with each other by virtue of being on a single platform (being able to reference related forum topics in a wiki Page database record, or connecting an Event to a Gallery). I don’t necessarily feel like this is ‘old news’ or ‘end of journey’ / ‘looking back’ stuff - on the contrary, I think the inter-connection of apps is an exciting future-thinking concept for IPS with currently massively untapped potential. But I can definitely wait for something like this to be explored later throughout v5’s life.

So just to be clear, I am definitely excited about what new and future things v5 would bring… but at the same time I think it would be a step back to regress the apps to siloed experiences. What would then be the benefit for customers to add Pages, Gallery, Commerce etc to their community suites if they each just acted like separate websites? If it’s just about having a shared member base across the apps, you may as well just set up a SSO for a bunch of different apps hodge-podged together (and I don’t like that idea, it’s very inelegant).

The topics/pages thing, in particular, was all about tackling content redundancy and making sure that new Pages articles can leverage existing forum discussion to prevent the site looking inactive/dead. As long as the smart solutions-thinking down the road addresses this in some way, I’m on board.

Granted, this is more a conceptual feedback now than a developmental one, but I figured I’d mention it now rather than regret not mentioning it all later when v5 is about to launch and we all find out it’s just a Rick Astley video on loop 😄

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. 🙂 

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?

I wanted to revisit this topic as I've recently been using the 'Copy to Database' system on a live community situation and have been polling feedback on how it works. For context, I ended up using a plugin to sort of 'hack' my way around the suggestions made in the OP - so with the plugin installed, using 'Copy to Database' will 100% prevent the original topic content being overwritten by the resulting Pages record that is written from it. However, the link between Page and Topic is still established, meaning comments and replies are still synced.

What I am now interested in exploring/suggesting, is a means to allow the Topic OP to be overwritten by the Page Record content after all... but instead MIGRATE the Topic OP content into its own new Topic/Comment meta that is inserted into the top of the comment/reply list.

I've mocked up an example just to illustrate what I mean. First, this is the original Topic, before it is made into a Pages Record using Copy to Database:

Next, I Copy this to Database and rewrite the entire post copy, to suit my own site's needs as I see fit. Below is a mockup of that Page record being published.

And below is a mockup of how I imagine my new suggestion would look like on the original topic. Note that the OP has been changed to sync correctly with the Page Record, but the original topic content has been saved and inserted into the topic as a Meta so as not to lose any context from the following replies/discussion.

It could also be inserted at the top of the Page Record's Comments section too, so that it can be visible and highlighted. Perhaps there could be a way for that OP content to be edited within the Post editor page as well? But that's the general idea that I'm having with this thing now.

What do you mean by “spaces” in this context? The theme editor already uses tabs; each HTML template or CSS file you edit appears in its own tab so you can work between files at once.

On 7/12/2023 at 1:15 PM, Gabriel Torres said:

We have this disabled here.

I think what MMXII is saying is that, if you have it set so images don’t display and links don’t convert to embedded content, the URLs they post will contribute towards the character limit you want to set. Meaning that if a user wants to post a long link or something, they’ve potentially run out of half their character allotment.

Actually, that's a good point - @opentype and @Dean_ since you've done this before, is there anything I need to know / inform my users upon this change? If they no longer will be able to use FB/TW to sign into their account, does anything lock out for them? Any housekeeping they need to do that I need to warn them about (i.e. remember email address, change password, that sort of thing)?

Appreciate any help!

2 hours ago, Matt said:

We're keeping that as you can still use the 'internal' method but we'll be reviewing all our promotion tools to make sense of them as we have a few ways now (pinned, featured, promoted, etc).

Yeah I'm looking forward to seeing how you guys may re-organise these as there's a lot going on there now. Although I've gotten used to using them for different things (Pinned and Featured on a news database to feature in a home page highlights box, Featured on Forums to highlight user-contributed topics that we have turned into news stories, Promoted as a capture of all-site content - it would be good to be able to organise that/call results in IPS code by content type for this too).

Anyway, all this has made me wish death to all social media platform connectivity. Might just sunset the whole lot and ask users to straight-up register an account on my suite. No risk of anyone forgetting their credentials/emails then (he said... 🤣)

9 minutes ago, Matt said:

We've removed the promotion tools in v5. With Meta increasing the barrier to get approved and Twitter falling apart, it doesn't make sense to keep it. There are various low-cost promotion tools such as Buffer (free tier) to manually post to social media, or you can connect via Zapier to post to social media.

 

Thanks Matt, that's understandable. What would happen to the Our Picks feature, will that be going as a result of this as well in V5? Will there be some similar feature being introduced?

So with Twitter going a bit insane with all its API stuff lately, I have noticed that a lot of functionality on my IPS Suite no longer works (such as the ability for users to sign up/log in using their Twitter accounts). So I decided to deactivate the Twitter option from the 'Login and Registration' page on the Admin panel.

I don't know if it was the above action that caused the following to happen (or if the Twitter API stuff in general just caused this), but... I noticed that I now cannot de-couple Twitter from the 'Social Media Promotion' section of the Admin panel. And yet, Twitter fields and icons still appear in the Promote button/dialog which is functionally useless.

First, going to Social Media Promotion > Twitter shows that it's "not set up", which is odd because...

... the Twitter icon still appears on the Promote button...

... and an option for Twitter still exists. If it doesn't work (thanks Twitter), I don't want the option on here anymore, but obviously I can't remove it because IPSAdmin thinks the application is not set up. 

The problem is, as I suspected, I can't actually "re-set up" the Twitter application because going to 'Login & Registration' > 'Twitter' > 'Enable' and filling in the Settings results in constant errors. Obviously the problem with this is Twitter, not IPS, but that's the entire reason why I want to just get shot of the Twitter integration. But something's happened here where IPS thinks it's not connected to Promotions, even when it functionally is (despite it likely not working).

Not sure if it's just something on my setup because I pressed a button wrong somewhere and Twitter's API changes caused a lock on my Suite, but it'd be nice to have a hotfix for this issue in case it can be replicated on other communities.

Oh my, that sounds wonderful @Daniel F! One of the things stopping me from investing in Gallery is a (seemingly, I only have context via Trial versions of the Suite) inability to x-ref Gallery albums with Pages records (so I could, for example, have a "Wiki" Page that can connect to a "Related Gallery" that would output thumbnails from that gallery in-page), similar to how I can x-ref different Pages Database with one another.

Regarding Topic/Pages in particular, I'd love to be able to have Topics "know" if a Pages record is connected to it so I could try and do things like;

• Add a Meta block linking to the Record within the Topic (not like the "Read Full Article" link that currently exists, more like a block inserted between posts that could include a template/record image etc)
• Allow for automatically 'credit' the original Topic Author before new author/content sync (I have a custom field in Pages that allows me to search for members that allows me to do this manually but it's a bit unwieldy)
• Open up for automatic rewards via the Achievements system
• 'Lift' the original topic post and "place" it elsewhere so that the original post content can be saved even if the Pages content overwrites it in sync (I'm thinking like an inserted mini-post block between the OP and first reply in the topic, similar to the Topic Summary block)

I think a lot of people would appreciate (and thank) you sharing that app for V5, even if it was a paid extension or something, as I think it would go some way to integrating a lot of my content a lot more closely (a big part of my site feedback I heard earlier this year was they didn't know when certain Events were happening, likely because it feels like the different IPS apps are separate worlds in a way). 😀

I see. I thought as much, thanks @opentype and @Daniel F - I'm guessing this is a symptom of just how the Copy to Database feature has been coded/locked in for V4? Bit of a shame, but I can work with it for now.

Hopefully this is something that is re-built/re-imagined for IPS V5, I would like to be able to integrate the Topic/Pages thing a little better than I've been able to so far with V4.

Hi, I’m looking to see if there is some built-in IPS code that allows me to check if a topic in a row is synced/connected to a Pages record.

The use case I’m thinking of, is something like, on a Forum’s topic list:

IF topic row is of a topic that has a connection to a Pages record (comments/topic replies are sync’d), THEN display [HTML]

I’d also like to be able to pull a Topic’s original post content and display it somewhere else when using Copy to Database so that the original topic content isn’t lost when the Page Record and Topic is sync’d up… but I’m guessing that’s more of a Feature Request to make and that’s not something I can currently do in v4?

Thanks for the assistance as always!

Yes, it’s causing problems - when using typographical (curvy) quote marks in a Pages title, the quote marks are added to a record’s URL, for example:

domain.com/database/vinyl-4”-record

Because these typographical quote marks are not standard characters for URLs, it causes huge issues when sharing these links (on social media for example - Tumblr simply refuses to acknowledge the above as a valid link) and sometimes even when clicking through to them as either browsers or the IPS software has trouble parsing the correct destination due to the quote mark inclusion.

This doesn’t seem to be an issue when using regular “non-curvy” quote marks as these characters are ignored when IPS creates the URL slug. It would be great if IPS also ignored the typographical quotes too to avoid future issues and confusion.

Sorry to bring this topic up again - this issue has occurred again today, and I remembered this topic to check in and remind myself what the responses were. I checked and the headline did in fact have a typographic quotation mark and that was what was displayed in the URL. I changed the quote marks to a standard " and it fixed the URL.

My question is, why does IPS Suite include typographic/curvy quote marks in URLs? I cannot see a use case where this would be a desired result (I can see why people would want typographic quotes to be displayed on a page/in a headline, but never in a URL). Is it possible to close this rather odd 'loophole' and have IPS/Pages handle typographic quote marks the same way it does regular quote marks?

10 hours ago, Marc Stridgen said:

I would suggest informing the author of this. Did you install it as a custom modification or from the marketplace direct?

Shouldn't IPS investigate and pull the app pre-emptively and re-approve once the author has fixed the issue? If there really is an app on IPS' official marketplace that has malicious code in it, isn't there a risk of other customers being negatively impacted?

Since the most recent update, I've noticed that a user who is confronted with the cookie consent form will have their browser redirect to the community's set home page (in my site's case, the forum index) after clicking the 'Accept' or 'Reject' button, regardless of what page they encountered the consent form at.

For example, a user who may click a link to a Pages record (from say, a tweet we posted) will see the cookie consent form at the bottom of the Pages record they are viewing. They may instinctively click 'Accept' or 'Reject' to get rid of the consent bar before reading any of the text. The browser then takes them to the forum index instead of keeping them on the same page.

It's only a small bug, but it's not really desired behaviour and it could offer bad UX. It'd be great if this was fixed.

I noticed IPS has also uploaded a new patch fix as well relating to ‘cookie consent’ so I’ve installed that and cleared caches. Hopefully that fixes everything (unfortunately adding @adik’s code doesn’t quite resolve the logged in problem but it solved everything else).

I don't want to jump the gun, but I believe this has fixed the login issue (and actually a number of other issues, including restoring the Notifications popup list!). Thank you so much @adik, I've marked as solution for now but will follow up if there are any other problems!

Thanks for posting - seems like I am not the only one affected by this. I posted my own issues with my install following the last patch/update here:

https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/474315-pii-update-patch-appears-to-have-broken-my-suite-themes/#comment-2944849

I am not using a CDN.

2 hours ago, Stuart Silvester said:

It sounds like you may have a Javascript cache issue, go to AdminCP > Support > Clear Caches to see if that solves your problem.

Hi Stuart - I tried clearing caches again (I did try this before) and still no change I'm afraid.

I fear I may have to rewrite my custom skin in order to fix many of these issues (which I'm sort of resigned to, it's fine), but one thing that I don't think I'll be able to fix is the logging-in issue. Many users (including myself) are being asked to log in several times. Here's some feedback from my users:

Quote

Despite the settings being left on "remember me" - I seem to be forcibly logged out whenever I navigate away from this site. Unless I keep a tab open in the background, I've had to re-login every time I've come here in the last day or so.

Quote

Strange thing is, if I just reload the page while seemingly signed out, I'll suddenly be signed in again like it was nothing.

But then if I close the browser (on mobile at least, I haven't tested on PC yet) and re-enter, the same thing happens: I'm signed out until I reload the page, then suddenly signed in again.

Any chance someone can check my suite/setup and see if something is wrong there?

Hi guys

Installed the latest patch fix last night, and now I'm getting strange issues on mobile and desktop on my IPS suite.

• Notifications list won't appear when the bell icon is clicked
• Trying to post a status update on the Status Updates homepage returns the user to their profile page (not expected/desired behaviour)
• Embedded content such as tweets no longer show up
• Profile Banners no longer show up
• Users have had to re-log in a number of times

Some of these issues do not appear to be occurring when changing to default IPS theme, however when comparing my custom theme to the new default I can not see any changes that can allow me to fix the issue.

For example, Notifications list - this is what I'm experiencing on my custom theme:

However, checking the theme comparisons does not appear to result in any changes that I can revert that would fix the issue:

There's nothing missing in my custom skin. So I am confused as to why this has broken down. The same with a number of other issues I'm experiencing - no problems on Default, but when I go to investigate what part of the custom theme would need to change, I cannot find anything to fix.

Clearing Caches do not fix the problems.

If IPS can offer a changelist from its last patch regarding themes, that I can refer to, that would be great. If I still have issues, I may need some deeper technical support please.