IPCommerceFan

Thanks for the heads up!

Hi all,
This is just a quick post to let you know that while stand-alone plug-ins are deprecated in version 5, there is no need to convert your plugins to applications right now.
There are significant changes coming to how third party templates and code interacts with the v5 framework changes which means any plug-in or application will need a lot of work for Invision Community 5. Simply converting a plug-in into an app won't future proof it, so it is a waste of your time at this point.
We're in the very early stages of making these framework changes but will get information to you as soon as we have everything figured out.
Also a reminder that v4 will have a multi-year deprecation, and we expect to work on both v4 and v5 for quite a while with a fairly slow migration over to v5 for the first chapter of its life, so I would think the majority of sales would still come from v4 for at least another year or so.
Thanks!

Courses is a new, lightweight learning platform designed to help you provide a new learning experience for your members. 
Courses are perfect for requiring your community to read and understand documentation and to deliver training and lessons to your community.

Let's take a look at how it works!
Instructor led courses are comprised of separate modules, each containing lessons. New courses are created and managed through the AdminCP under Community. Each course has the option to be assigned one or more instructors. Instructors play a crucial role in developing the course content via the frontend, and they are available to assist members throughout their learning journey in the course.
Courses can be set to be optional, or required meaning members must complete this course before progressing to others. Furthermore, courses tie into Achievement Rules, so you have the ability to grant points and/or badges to a member once they finish a course.
Courses can be free or paid, and comprise of one or more modules, each of which contain multiple sessions and an optional quiz.
Modules and Lessons
Courses wouldn't be much without some lessons! Lessons are grouped into modules, that can have an optional quiz. Quizzes are a great way to verify members' learning progression and understanding.
You have the option to configure modules to be completed sequentially. This pairs nicely with quizzes as you would need to complete the current module before moving on to the next one, ensuring a structured and progressive learning experience!

The lessons themselves are the main content of Courses. Lessons are comprised of the material that students will engage with during their learning journey. Lessons can be designated as optional, so they can be skipped. This is handy when you want to provide organised supplemental information that is not essential.

Managing Enrollments
As an administrator or instructor, you may need to manage course enrolments from time to time. This can involve enrolling a member on their behalf, withdrawing a member from a course, or deleting an enrollment altogether. There are two ways for managing those enrolled in courses, either through the administrative control panel or the course roster on the frontend.
To access the course roster via the frontend - just click on 'View All Members' when on the course homepage.

Course Manager
Managing a course is handled via the frontend. Individuals such as instructors, admins, and other authorized members can create and edit modules, lessons and quizzes for a course. You manage quizzes and lessons from within the module view.

I hope that you have enjoyed this overview of Courses. This is just the beginning, we're already considering various possibilities such as integrating with Live Topics, incorporating discussion sections within a lesson, and enhancing the required courses feature so stay tuned!
The features discussed in this announcement are not available for Invision Community Classic. Click here to learn more about switching to our platform to get this and other benefits.

View full blog entry

Note: There is a character limit for the short name field, but I'm finding inconsistent information on exactly what that number is because it can be different for Chrome or iOS, but err on the side of shorter.
That said, Cheers & Gears does just barely fit... so for iOS, that limit might be ~14

🌸 Welcome to this week's Invision Community Insight! 🌸
Thank you for checking out this weekly round up post. I hope you have had a wonderful week! In the comments below, feel free to say hello and let us know how this week is treating you. 
From the Invision Community team...
 
Current Happenings
Bounce Management is coming in May. For Cloud customers, we are adding the ability for you to view reports on bounced/complaint emails, take action on member accounts (purge them or mark them as no notifications), and unblock emails that our platform may be refusing to email. Check out our latest blog post: 
 
On Deck
Our new Courses and Lessons application and Statistics and Reporting improvements will be released in the coming months.  
 
Join us in a few weeks for our live topic event where we will cover Statistics and Reporting, including the new additions coming soon!
 
Invision Community 5
Thank you for sharing your excitement and eagerness to hear what version 5 is all about. For now, we have begun work in some areas and are still planning and scoping in others. We are not quite ready to share specific updates at this time but promise to once the time is right.
 
Finally, for those that like to see what we are up to line by line, here is the changelog for the week for version 4.
Changelog
 

Looking at my sites, it seems like spammers are already using it. I get more and more replies to old topics which somehow are on topic but still somehow make so little sense that I can’t believe a human registered to post it. 
I’m not afraid of AI and use it myself, but only like a brainstorming partner, where I judge which replies are actually useful and correct. I can’t imagine having AI (auto) reply/publish anything on my sites at the moment. And I think it would only dilute the value of a community. Because the AI answers will soon be available directly within search engines and other apps and services. I rather run the place where answers can be different and better than that. 

🌼  🐣 Welcome to this week's Invision Community Insight! 🐣  🌼
Thank you for checking out this weekly round up post. I hope you have had a great week. To those who celebrate, I wish you a Happy Easter this weekend! In the comments below, feel free to say hello and let us know how this week is treating you. 
From the Invision Community team...
 
Current Happenings
New Version
Our April release is out and ready for you to upgrade your community. As you know, we recommend that you keep your community up to date each month to keep it running smoothly and so you can enjoy the latest updates.
Review the release notes to see what is included in the April release, version 4.7.9.
Key changes:
Gallery, Events & Clubs: Improvements From Your Feedback Live Topics iPhone notifications, web app and more now available with Apple's latest IOS update. PayPal & Maxmind API updates in Commerce  
@Charles and I talked about the release in our April Release Chat this past Tuesday.
You can watch the video and participate in that discussion in the converted live topic. 
  
On Deck
Our new Courses and Lessons application is coming along great. We hope to have a sneak peak ready next week. 🤞
 
Statistics and reporting improvements are nearing completion and we will talk about what is included in our upcoming Statistics and Reporting live topic event. 
 
Bounce Management is coming in May. For Cloud customers, we are adding the ability for you to view reports on bounced/complaint emails, take action on member accounts (purge them or mark them as no notifications), and unblock emails that our platform may be refusing to email. 
 
Finally, for those that like to see what we are up to line by line, here is the changelog for the week.
Changelog

 

data-ipsLightbox-group='g{$indexData['index_id']}' Elasticsearch never returns that in the $indexItem array.
IN_DEV this will Whoops with missing array element when using Streams or Search.
Live it functions but image groupings are broken. Quoting @Martin A. "meat mixed with stats" (lamb chops with hard drive metrics to be precise)
The images will display correctly in the snippet, but when you lightbox them out and navigate through them, with a data-lightboxgroup="g" value instead of "g12345" its grabbing all the images on the page and you can navigate through them all.
Apparently, (@Martin A. looked here as we troubleshot this just now), MySQL is clear here and returns the index_id in the array.
If anyone here is having problems and selfhosts (and is using Elastic) you can patch this by changing the template bit there from index_id to index_object_id (or index_item_index_id perhaps) which is present in the $indexItem array returned via Elastic.
This can either be patched in the code to return the correct bit in the array if Elastic is present, or one can hack at the template like we did. There's also the smallest of possibilities of a collision between different apps returning the same item_ids but that's something for IPS to hash out if/when this gets patched.
Locally this is Elastic 7.2.0 if this matters.

Ahh, I was looking forward to asking questions about the not yet released pay-to-access feature for IPS forums and pages, Hopefully, I'll catch the next one.

I have converted this to a ticket for you. Please watch your email for further correspondence. 

We share your frustration and I assure you that although this is the first major outage event in years and we have a solid 99%+ record, we are taking this very seriously and have already taken both internal and vendor related steps to minimize the risk of this happening again. We have also made improvements to our status and communications system so you remain better informed throughout these unlikely events. 
I'm deeply sorry for the inconvenience this event has caused. Cloud clients with further concerns are welcome to send a support email and we will be happy to discuss. 
Thank you!

It's just a new "way" to deliver the notification.
As long as the Notification extension doesn't explicitly disallow Push via the config (that's the 'disabled' bit in the config array) and their browser supports it, they can use it.
 
 

Wow, shout out to Randy for being such an expert enthusiast before we even release! I've said this before but this was lots of work over the past months and I am so excited for everyone to use it and provide valuable feedback to prioritize next features.

I am excited to officially announce the first release of Live Topics coming in our April release of Invision Community for selected cloud plans!
Live Topics is a hosted live chat and question-and-answer event that is converted into a forum topic upon completion. It combines the fun and togetherness of a live event with the permanence of a forum topic allowing you to continue the conversation long after the event has ended.
Recap: The first look at Live Topics including a video showing the main features.
I know many of you on our community have already had sneak peeks and have been patiently waiting, so without further ado, let's get into it.
Who is Live Topics for?
Live Topics is a great way to bring people together for a live chat event. We have been using Live Topics for our monthly release chat webinars. In the past we have used Zoom to host the live stream and take some questions. This approach is fine, however once the Zoom finishes, the chat history isn't available on our community. We upload a video for those who missed the event, but it doesn't feel interactive.
Live Topics automatically converts the questions and answers to a regular forum topic which allows the discussion to continue. Furthermore, the questions are separated from the general chat during the event making it easier for hosts to find and answer questions raised during the event.
Live Topics is perfect for anything from product release events to monthly bookclub discussions and everything in between.
How does it work?
Live Topics are live virtual events within a community. The process to creating a live topic is simple:
Schedule your Live Topic from the ModeratorCP. When it's time to start, a host starts the live session. This is the bread and butter of the system; attendees can answer your questions and post chat messages all in realtime. All done? End the topic. It will be converted to a regular forum topic for further discussion and reference.  
Scheduling and Managing Live Topics
Live topics are managed from the ModeratorCP.

When scheduling a live topic, you can configure the following options:
Duration - This is the scheduled duration that attendees will see before the event. This sets expectations of time for your community. Add To Events - This option creates a new Calendar Event in your Community. This allows the live topic to be searched, viewed, and promoted like other event within your community. Live Video URL - This is the url of a YouTube embed. You can also add this after starting the live session. (Support for platforms other than YouTube coming soon 🙂). We stream Zoom straight to a live Youtube video currently. Attendees - This option specifies who can attend the live topic. Leaving as "Recommended" allows any registered member to join. Staff - The staff are responsible for moderating user generated content as it comes in. The default setting will add all groups that are allowed to moderate live topics. You can adjust this default in the AdminCP. Additional Hosts - The hosts have the highest level of permission in the live topic. They create questions, update the video url, and guide the discussion. By scheduling the Live Topic, you are automatically a host but you can add more hands to help. All hosts get a reminder notification close to when the event is due to start. Require Approval for question replies/chat messages - During the live session, you will likely want to control the rate of incoming content (especially questions). Chat Message creation can be locked during the live session.  
Hosting the Live Topic
To start a live topic, you need to click into it from the ModeratorCP. Alternatively, if it was added to an Event you can click into it from there. Then just click start, it's as simple as that. Your attendees will see a waiting page with a count down.

It is worth mentioning that the live topic cannot
Run without any hosts in attendance. When hosts abandon a live session, it will automatically end within a few minutes Run longer than 6 hours. The aim of Live Topics is to accompany a live event and to be short term compared to regular forum topics. The live session will also end automatically in this case  
Once it's started, the UI is divided into have 2 main areas: One for Main Questions and another for Chat. Any video streams you embed are show in the top right and automatically started.

Main Questions (and Replies)
Main Questions and their replies are what will be preserved when the topic is converted into a forum topic. Only staff can create main questions in order to ensure smooth topic flow.  For each question, you can also configure if the replies are "locked". A main question can be unlocked, locked to all members, or locked to non-staff. When a question is locked, new replies cannot be created.  
Chat Channels
For each Live Topic, there is a General Chat and a Staff Chat Channel. If a member is non-staff, instead of the Channel selector tabs, they will see only "Chat". When a non-staff attendee creates a chat message, it can be marked as a "question". This lets the host know that the question was intended for others to respond to. Optionally, the host can even convert the message into a question so it's integrated into the standard topic post-conversion  
Live Stream Tools
Hosts can select a time in the live feed a main question was answered. The video embed can also optionally be changed mid session. This is useful if you don't know the live stream URL before hand.  
Moderation Tools
Staff can hide or delete questions, chat messages and replies. The reply and chat feeds can also be set to automatically hide new items on creation. Non-staff attendees can report content. Reports show in the staff chat channel. Last but not least, staff members can silence attendees. This takes away their privileges to reply and create chat messages.  
The Converted Topic
When the live session completes, our Cloud platform gets to work converting all that data into a regular forum topic. Converted Live Topics feature a questions box which allows you to drill down to specific questions within the topic.

The questions can be browsed individually, or even split into separate topics!
Lastly, new replies come with the option to select an originating question.

 
That's a wrap (for now)
We look forward to seeing all of you use live topics on your communities. As we've hinted elsewhere there are many more features coming soon, so keep your eyes peeled!
The features discussed in this announcement are not available for Invision Community Classic. Click here to learn more about switching to our platform to get this and other benefits.

View full blog entry

Yes. As the event progresses, it just feels like a live chat room.  (There is the chat side and the “questions” side.)  People can come and go as they want. 

Once it’s done, it automatically makes the forum topic and converts all the chat messages into replies in that topic. 

Unfortunately, it is not possible to deliver Live Topics to a classic self-hosting environment. Our "cloud" is not simply "some server space" but rather a complex array of technologies wrapped up in custom configuration and code.
Live Topics is not a PHP and MySQL application. It is actually a React and NodeJS app and uses the following technologies: NodeJS via ExpressJS server, ReactJS, Web Sockets/Socket.io, JWT Authentication, Redis, AWS SQS, AWS EC2 and MySQL. Those technologies are managed via a custom SQS queue which triggers command runners and workers. All this is bespoke to our cloud environment.
Even if you managed to set up all those services, you'd still need our configuration and custom elements.
By developing on a single platform allows us to rapidly deploy new features and functionality.
This makes it unsuitable for a self-hosting environment.

🌸 Welcome to this week's Invision Community Insight! 🌸
Thank you for checking out this weekly round up post. I hope you have had a wonderful week! In the comments below, feel free to say hello and let us know what you are working on. As for us, let’s dive into that below.
 
Current Happenings
We are beginning some spring cleaning in Our Community. I hope you enjoy this first round of changes and those that will appear in the coming weeks. 🧹 
 
Deprecation Communication
Deprecations are important to keeping our software clean and modern as needs change and the software evolves. We want you to know when deprecations are happening and how to prepare for those. When a new deprecation is announced or a removal is completed, we will communicate those in four ways:
Release notes: This is a simple description with a link to our new Deprecation Tracker. Deprecation Tracker: This will give a bit more information and any actions or advice from us regarding the change. Topic: To allow for a place to ask your questions, we will share in a topic. AdminCP notification: This will appear as a banner in your AdminCP. We recommend that you follow these areas in Our Community so you are notified of changes. There are new announcements and removals in the March release so check those out.
 
New Version
Our March release is out and ready for your community. As you know, we recommend that you keep your community up to date each month to keep it running smoothly and so you can enjoy the latest updates.
As a reminder, here is what is included in this March release, version 4.7.8. 🍀
https://invisioncommunity.com/release-notes/
 
On Deck
Live Topics is set for beta release in … April! 🤩 🎉 We are looking forward to hearing how you use live topics and how it evolves in its future versions.
If you want to see Live Topics in action and like to hear Charles and I talk about the release (or just talk in general 😉) follow and add the April Release Chat to your calendar. Hope to see you then.
 
Also in the upcoming April release, Commerce, Clubs, Gallery and Events will all get some attention. 
 
Peeking Ahead 
Progressing along nicely are our statistics and reporting improvements. A blog entry will be posted soon.
 
We are in the beginning stages of development for our Courses and Lessons application. If you want to help shape this feature, share your ideas and use cases with us. https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/472307-courses-and-lessons/#comment-2934996
 
Lastly, for those that like to see what we are up to line by line, here is the changelog for the week.
 
Changelog
 
Hope you enjoyed this week's Invision Insight round up. See you next week. 🙂

PHP is REALLY more useful from what I see. C# is centered more towards desktop apps, video games, handling your computer tasks. If you mainly only care to handle things on the internet browser world, then there isn't much of a reason to learn C#. I make video games and have an online website community, so I know a little bit of PHP (Very little) but im pretty fair with C#.

The command you sent me is great, but I can only use it on text. but I see you are telling maybe it's how it is turning the image into a string that may be the issue, rather than how I am turning it into a base64 encode. This is something I didn't think about. I will tackle that area; you may very well be correct.
 
 
 
@Stuart Silvester this is the error I am getting:

 
The last thing there mentions Dimensions, so I went to my gallery settings and set the maximum to the same dimension of the image I was uploading, that didn't seem to make a difference. So, I'm not sure what the error is telling me, unless it is trying to get the dimensions, but can't because it's getting the image as a fumbled letters and numbers like @IPCommerceFan was suggesting.

I appreciate you jumping in. You are saying I should try to encode a text field as well and see how it turns out on the other side? Will it decode any text field on its own or is there a certain place I should send an encoded string to for testing?

Your exact suggestion was why I tried using:
A = System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Escape(A); As this turns it into a URL friendly version. I will mess around with what you suggested with "Btoa" function, I never used it before but I will see if I can find a proper way to apply it and see if that helps. Again, thank you for your advice. I appreciate it. I just recently took on C# as the first programming language to learn, been at it for maybe 7 months. its alot to take in.

I'm not sure why, but recently the number of submissions with some issues related to guests and handling them increased a lot recently.
Sometimes it's harmless, like showing some content and using \IPS\Member::loggedIn()->member_id in the where condition, but sometimes it's really dangerous because either you're allowing an attacker/or just random visitor to delete all the guest accounts,to spam the board as guest, to flood peoples member table with hundreds of guest accounts and and and... There are dozen of bad scenarios which I've seen in the last months.
So, when working with the visitor object ( Member::loggedIn() ) in controllers, ask yourself=> Should this controller be accessed by guests at all? If not, just put the following code in the controllers' execute method to block guests.
/* Logged in?*/ if ( !\IPS\Member::loggedIn()->member_id ) { \IPS\Output::i()->error( 'no_module_permission', '2....', 403, '' ); } If it's only related to specific actions, call it in the specific actions! Never trust that a controller or method won't be called by somebody, just because the navbar link is visible to only logged in members:)
 
Also when you want to change something for the currently logged in member, don't expect that he's logged in! You really should make sure that the member is logged in and not a guest before you start to change some properties and use the save method to store the changes,  otherwise you'll save the guest instance in the members table, which will look like this which in 99.9999% isn't what you want & need;)

I needed this to be more robust, so I started poking around and discovered I could hook into \IPS\Helpers\Form\Text --> validate() and use custom php to do any kind of validation I want on a given custom commerce field! (custom Text field anyway, I haven't explored other types)
In case anyone is need of this and finds this thread during their search, this is where you can run custom validation:
//<?php /* To prevent PHP errors (extending class does not exist) revealing path */ if ( !\defined( '\IPS\SUITE_UNIQUE_KEY' ) ) { exit; } class hook491 extends _HOOK_CLASS_ { /** * Validate * * @throws \InvalidArgumentException * @throws \DomainException * @return TRUE */ public function validate() { $dataToBeValidated = $this->value; //$this->value is anything that is entered into any field on the order form. /* * Run any if statement on your data to determine whether it should return false, some specific value, etc */ if ($dataToBeValidated > 0) { $validation == 1; } //"$this" doesn't know the id of the field, but it knows the name. Here we will evaluate the value entered for the Nexus package custom field with an ID of 5. ( nexus_packages_fields.cf_id in the database ) if ( $this->name == 'nexus_pfield_5' and $validation == 1 and !preg_match('/[A-Z0-9]+/i', $dataToBeValidated) ) //we can add any number of conditions to decide whether the field should be validated or not { throw new \InvalidArgumentException( 'form_bad_value_nexus_pfield_5' ); //added langauge bit to dev\lang.php "'form_bad_value_nexus_pfield_5' => 'Custom validation failure message'" } return parent::validate(); } } Hope this helps someone, and if there is a better way, I'm open to suggestions!

This has now been resolved in our latest 4.7.6 release. Please upgrade to that release if you are seeing this issue. If you have the same problem after upgrading, please let us know.

I’m not judging in any way, just listing some observations about the developer/Marketplace situation in the recent years. 
4.5 tightened the rules drastically. Result: several developers left for good. price increases. Developments needs a self-hosted installation and possibly a demo website. It’s now 850 + 300 annually. Someone starting out as developer really needs some killer products to earn that back and then generate profits. Cloud testing of resources would make it even more expensive (+1,788 annually).  Shift/changes to cloud. The lower tiers don’t have the ability to install third-party products. This decreases the reach and makes running independent third-party shops less useful/profitable.  Signatures turned off. No possibility for passive advertisement through community posts.  Limited compatibility field. Sales can only be created for one version, limiting the income.  I have no magical solutions to offer, but are improvements for this something we could put on the table for 2023?
Currently, I am not very optimistic. We only have a handful of active developers left with continued announcements of departures. If it is still working well for some (?), it’s probably because of a large set of files and existing customers with renewals. But I can’t see how new developers would want to get involved in the current situation, replacing the ones who left or even growing the marketplace. 
I understand the costs and downsides for IPS. Paying for code reviews, chargeback fees and of course all the support issues with third-party resources. But then again: Looking at the broader field of online software: all the big players strive with and in part because of a flourishing third-party marketplace. So, improvement could easily be a “win-win-win” situation for IPS, developers and IPS customers. 
 
(I would have some suggestions myself but I don’t want to push the topic in a specific direction, so I am leaving it at the problem statement for now.)

Incidentally, the Similar Content feature works nicely! 
@opentype's 'OG Image for Commerce Products' marketplace item popped up, and I purchased it.  👍

Hey,
Some ideas to add to the Commerce system

1.  To add when setting up a new product the option to enter the cost price for the product and not just the actual price sold to the customer.
This way it will be possible to track the net profit and the actual income of the business by offsetting the cost of the product (maybe even adding it to the reports in the control panel, etc...)
2. To add icons to products, for example: on sale, holiday sale, deal, etc. (icon on the product image in one of the upper corners)
This will attract customers to buy more and it will be possible to highlight products in sale

 

 
Thnx !