Jimi Wikman

I am always happy to test 🙂
Good stuff Matt, I am really looking forward to see what you have come up with for Pages 🙂

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.
 

Am I correct to assume that the blue arrows here have designated CSS classes or ID's?

If that is true, then it is possible to style them so then you can have the transparent block below and above if you want. Same functionality and both UI's are possible.
All through the magic of CSS 😉

Hmmm...that reminds me, will the new editor have a clear formatting function? I figure that will help with those pesky cut and paste from other tools that add garbage to the text?

Am I correct to assume that the blue arrows here have designated CSS classes or ID's?

If that is true, then it is possible to style them so then you can have the transparent block below and above if you want. Same functionality and both UI's are possible.
All through the magic of CSS 😉

Hmmm...that reminds me, will the new editor have a clear formatting function? I figure that will help with those pesky cut and paste from other tools that add garbage to the text?

Yes, there is a clear formatting button, but more importantly the content is stored according to a predefined schema - this means that there will never be random styles or lines that are unexpected, even after pasting. Though you cannot have "whatever wherever however in the source", this becomes a big advantage for everyday users since the entire content state is achievable through the UI.

When will we see a public alpha test?

I use STRG + SHIFT + V for this (Windows).

Tables, tables and more tables, couldn't agree more! Only type of 'button' that I've been asked for more regularly than anything else and a very logical, common sense fit to any website using this editor box.
Other than that, its great to see all the improvements and I'm sure it'll be well received across the board 😄👏

I think it's worth waiting until you can use it. Then get feedback from your members. I'm sure it actually works better than you imagine and that it's quite intuitive.
If you have a reason to use source code beyond fixing CKEditor issues, please let us know and please be as specific as you can which will really help, for example "Embed other sites" is less helpful than "I have a separate website, and I want to bring blog articles into my posts at around 600px high with a scrollbar".

I am out. I'll wait until I can test the editor integration on IPS5. Then I can say what I miss. Or I do not miss anything and am unlimited happy. Make me happy, IPS. This would be the best solution for both of us. 😉 

Conversation is going around in circles a bit now people. We're happy to hear the reasons people are using source mode in the first place, as it does give us opportunity to see things that may be easily solvable without people having to resort to such measures to achieve the same thing. However the back and forth debate between people on whether or not something is useful is a little futile. What is pointless to one, may not be pointless to another. There is a place for these discussions, and its probably not within a topic showing the new editor.
 

It's really not, to be honest. Seriously, this weird "unmarked white space that exists but doesn't really unless you click it" idea is a nonsense - both in usability terms and in WYSIWYG standards. If your community members can't discern what a 'Title' field is, they're definitely not going to figure out whatever esoteric suggestion this is. 🙂
And I dare say that, if you know that your community mostly consists of people who are unable to operate forums, a small change to the post editor is really not going to move the needle for you one way or the other. I also don't know why you would decline to offer email support to people asking for help, but that is probably doing more harm to your cause than a blue arrow button ever could.
Agreed. It's a pretty bizarre argument; "these contextual buttons that add lines above and below a quote box are simply too complicated for the common user! What they really need is a Source button to click on so they can dig into the HTML code, scroll to the line they need on their tiny mobile screen and add extra p tags and div containers!" 😂

This is a different problem completely though and not related to alpha testing a new version of an existing product where our customers who run forums know their users pretty well.
Those that are posting that our way is bad and they have a better idea should probably wait until they've tried it.
The alternative is no arrows or spaces or anything, just like v4 and most people have somehow managed to drag themselves from their primordial soup to figure out how to bash a keyboard in an astethitcally pleasing way enough to leave messages on Invision Community 4.

Most of this thread is about needing more buttons to do things...  edit source code, play with styles/headers, fix messed up code, etc.  
I can say with a very high level of confidence these sorts of things are not needed by "common users".  The things being talked about here are things power users want/need.  The vast majority of actual end users will never need more than the default styling options.  
A site admin or major site content producer might need more however...  and I think it's a fair ask for those users to make the request for needing more power in helping them publish.    Those actual end users are happy with the buttons there and don't need more!

I'd argue that a large number of community owners/administrators know their user base, and have a pretty good idea of how new features and changes would be received. Most owners would be looking at this from a perspective of "how well will this do on my site?" and not "how good is this for me personally?"

1) The embed system works as it does in v4.
2a) Mentions work as you'd expect
2b) Just paste the link in as you'd do with v4.
Well, you're wrong but I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts.

Whaaaaaat Matt F coming in with the clutch MVP post of the thread!? That's awesome news, thanks for sharing/teasing!
Respectfully, I do not think your suggestion would really solve anything and in fact would make UX worse. Having extra space above/below the box area that is clickable-to-enable-text-input but is otherwise redundant will be super confusing to users, and would make the post editor not WYSIWYG compliant. Users need to see that what they're typing in the editor (and especially how it is presented in the editor) will be 100% accurate to how the post will appear on publish.
I would recommend waiting for V5 to come out and trying out the icon. While every user's experience will of course be different and there will likely be room for improvement in the UI, in my view I really do not think any user (no matter their level of experience) will miss these two clear icons sitting in the box area:

If a user is so inexperienced that you think they will not know what those buttons do, I will imagine the first thing said user would do is experiment and click those buttons to see what function they served. And there, problem solved.
My only suggestion regarding this topic is that, perhaps the arrow buttons should be permanently visible on the box in the post editor (at present in the V5 alpha those blue icons only appear if you hover your mouse over the box - and that's a scenario where I do believe that inexperienced users may have difficulty, as they may not think to hover over the box in order to reveal a solution they're looking for).

With v5, you can probably save a lot of hassle and just use the backticks to generate inline code. Either way, applications have a framework to add new editor functionality, including buttons.
  CleanShot 2024-05-21 at 10.29.11.mp4  
 

The short answer is no, but the full answer is yes (in theory) but you'll have to manually build them and then roll into an IPS Application to make sure the content type is supported on the back end. We'll address extending the editor in depth in a future blog so stay tuned if that's your thing!

If you connect Pages with a forum for comments, the topics will always have a link back to the record. Please consider making the link optional.

There are several issues with this link:
It is not editable: you cannot edit topics created automatically from records. It does not respect the template change: you can edit the template, but the changes are not considered while rebuilding. It does not respect permissions: if a user does not have a view permission for the record, the link is broken. E.g., database only for staff, topics for all. It sometime has ambigious wording, like view full person, view full movie, view full book. I know that I can change the language. But it is difficult to find a global one for all databases. It is not translatable: once saved in the post, it always uses the default language. No control for individual forums with other languages. It is redundant: I can create a field in the database and use Topic format to get a full control over the link. This way I can decide, whether to show or not, wording in individual database, exact position in the topic, formatting. This is also respected while rebuilding. Just a small choice field, yes/not would be sufficient. Or at least add a CSS class in the template so that the link can be suppressed with display:none. 😉
Thank you!

This is what I do regularly. Example for recordRow in Listing Template:
<div id='elTable_{$table->uniqueId}1' data-role="ipsGrid"> {{$articles = $rows;}} {{foreach $articles as $id => $record}} <div class="ipsBox ipsSpacer_top{{if $record->hidden()}} ipsModerated{{endif}}" data-rowID="{$record->_id}"> {template="entry" app="cms" location="database" group="FXPages_Blog_List_Category_Articles" params="$record, $record::database(), $table"} </div> {{endforeach}} </div> I just replace everything belonging to the row with an entry from Featured template.

Sorting is only available with the listing templates, not with those frontpage/article views. One could however create listing templates that look like those frontpage/article views. 

@opentype @Sonya* as always you save the day 🙂 Thank you 🙂