BN_IT_Support

Hi,

I have spent a number of days reading your IC5 development blogs and reviewing our plugins and applications to see what problems may arise and how we might solve them. Some changes are easy under your new system but others appear to have no obvious solution - and that will be a major problem for us.

adminCP reports that we have 62 hooks in our applications and plugins - that is "hook files" and as some of our hook files actually contain a number of hooks (e.g. one of our Theme hook files actually hooks into 13 different places) we could have around 150 actual functional hooks.

Many of the problems that we will face with IC5 appear to be because we cannot use hooks to remove functionality from the system. The following is a summary of some of the issues:

1. Need to remove author (and any other personal information) from content displayed to certain groups. Our website is for a member organisation but also part of the website is visible to Guests (and a few other non-member groups) - and for security reasons we must conceal all personal information from Guests and non-member groups but allow it to be seen by members. We have 11 code hook files and 2 theme hook files to hide author information (replacing it with Guest information) as well as hiding the jsonLD information. Besides generic 'hide the author' it also took application specific hooks to hide download data, CMS data and calendar data - which also included RSVP sections of the calendar (no point in showing the RSVP if all the details are hidden).
    
2. Hide "follow" buttons for Guests and all non-member groups.
    
3. Hide comments and reviews from Guests and non-member groups. It is a member organisation so members can read content and post comments and reviews that can be seen by other members. Although we have content that can be viewed by Guests and other non-members we do not want the non-members to be able to see comments or reviews posted by members - there are two obvious reasons: (1) that some members post derogatory comments that are tolerated for viewing by other members but are not appropriate to show to non-members (2) part of the added value of being a member is that comments and reviews are visible as well as being able to post one's own comments and reviews.
    
4. Disallow upload of attachments in various places - in particular, cannot add images to album descriptions, image descriptions, image comments, blog comments etc... Disallowing attachments is selective, so for example attachments can be added to forum topics and posts.
    
5. Enforcement of "gallery rules". Simplistically, the gallery rule is that all uploaded images must have a meaningful and unique title and a similarly unique and meaningful description. Currently, this is enforced when uploaded images are submitted - the hook checks that suitable titles and descriptions have been entered and reports an error if the checks fail.
    
6. Resizing (shrinking) images on upload. The standard IPS image size limits don't really work the way we need. File size (kB or MB) does not really relate to resolution (H and W in pixels) and in any case setting a limit gives a bad user experience as they don't know how to reduce image size to meet whatever limit we set. Our solution is to accept pretty much any image size and then reduce it to the size (HxW) that we want. This is selective according to where the image is to be stored so different resolutions are set for gallery, blogs, forum, profile, status updates, etc.
    
7. Displaying maps - two actions: (1) filtering who can see maps (only member groups can) and (2) caching maps. The issue is that Google Maps started charging for use of the maps API - there is a free allowance every month but if we didn't take the above actions then we would massively exceed the monthly allowances and it would cost us a lot. Firstly, it is a member organisation so allowing non-members to run up costs (by viewing calendar maps) would not be acceptable so non-members cannot view maps - instead they are presented with a standard outline and a message stating that members can view the maps. Secondly, each event tends to be viewed multiple times by different members and if we did not take action then every view would generate a Google Maps API call which would cost us. We cache map lookups using the coordinates as the key and this reduces our costs. (This applies to other maps such as images and CMS/database maps as well.)
    
8. Remove all references to the IPS newsletters and bulk mailing as we have an alternative system. (Our newsletters are managed through our membership system in conjunction with Mailchimp.) We have hooks to remove the standard newsletter widget and replace it with our own and another hook to remove notifications relating to newsletters/bulkmail.
    
9. Add additional information to members displayed  in the staff directory. Specifically, the hook adds the member's organisation email address (rather than their personal email address).
    
10. Selectively hide poll results from SOME members for SOME polls. Specifically, forum polls are used for voting on AGM motions and it is believed that showing the current voting levels could influence voters so the results are hidden from all members (except the people collating the votes). Other polls (i.e. not AGM voting) behave normally.

There are some that I have missed out that also don't have obvious solutions. Obviously, I've missed out all the hooks for which I believe there may be a solution (based on your blogs).

How can I solve the above?

Thanks.

John

Hi,

Thanks for that...

What is the actual sequence for converting a V4 application to V5? Take the following as an outline...

1. Starting with my V4 development system with IN_DEV
2. Disable IN_DEV (as I cannot upgrade with it set)
3. Install V5 (IPS database is converted, etc...)
4. Presumably my application is disabled by the upgrade as it is not compatible?
5. Enable IN_DEV
6. What do I have to do so that I can re-enable the application and start testing file by file? I don't believe that updating all files before I can test anything is practical. In many cases I'll have to play around and test various alternatives before I find something that might work under V5.
7. What happens to all the hooks? Do they just get deleted by the upgrade to V5? (Obviously, I could retrieve them from my other V4 development system and use them as the basis for working out what to do under V5.)
8. What happens to the MemberSync extension(s)? Do they just get deleted by the upgrade - so I just retrieve the code from my other V4 development system and insert it into a Listener?
9. Are all me database tables preserved by the upgrade?

Similarly, what happens to a customer/live system that runs my application and upgrades from V4 to V5?

1. Starting with live system running my application on V4
2. IPS is upgraded from V4 to V5.
3. Presumably my application is disabled by the upgrade as it is not compatible?
4. 'Customer' installs the V5 compatible version of my application -- is all now OK with no loss of data?

Thanks very much.

John