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We would like to take this opportunity to inform you of an important decision we've made with regard to the Invision Community Marketplace. After careful evaluation and consideration, we have decided to discontinue the Invision Community Marketplace, effective October 30, 2023.
 
Over the past several years, we have noticed a decrease in usage of the Marketplace, with a staggering 75% decline in sales. In addition, we have observed a growing trend away from off the shelf customizations towards bespoke tailoring of a community by working more closely with developers. While it has been a platform for many dedicated and talented contributors to share their work, we believe it is time to re-focus our efforts and resources to better serve your present and future needs.
 
We understand that change can be unsettling, but we are excited to share with you our new direction. We are putting our efforts into enhancing the newly introduced Providers Directory, a platform that will enable you to connect with third-party providers for a wide range of services, including custom development, community management/support, conversion services, and other valuable resources. Additionally, many providers will have independent websites you will be able to visit to explore and obtain existing and new premade resources.
 
More details are to follow soon, but we would like to highlight a few key points:
     • Marketplace renewals will cease effective immediately
     • New purchases will end September 15, 2023
     • The Marketplace will be removed in the October release and disabled on October 30, 2023
     • You will continue to be able to install and manage existing and new resources via the methods provided by their respective authors
     • You will be able to obtain a key for each of your current Marketplace purchases and provide that key to authors to transfer your purchases directly to the author
We invite you to visit the Providers Directory and start exploring the opportunities it offers. This will allow you to familiarize yourself with the database and the resources it will provide in greater depth. Many of the current Marketplace contributors have already created their profiles – please check them out!
Of course, this does not mean the end of aftermarket development with Invision Community. We are currently building new development tools for Invision Community 5 which have easier ways to add new functionality.
 
We want to express our sincere gratitude for your ongoing support and trust in Invision Community. We believe these changes will enable us to better position ourselves to continue moving forward in meeting the present and future needs of our customer base.
 
If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out.
 
Thank you for being a part of the Invision Community family.
 
Update
We have posted our next blog covering the next steps for obtaining purchases from 3rd party developers.
 

Wouldn't it be nice if the Invision Community editor could re-use whole replies, text snippets, and even reply templates?
As we get ready to welcome more customers into our staffed community support area, this feature idea has become a reality to help form personalized replies.
Invision Community has a saved actions feature that allows the community team to perform multiple actions on multiple topics. For example, you might want to add a title prefix, move the topic and add a reply. This works great for 'canned' responses and actions, but it is less useful if you want to edit the reply to personalize it.
Stock replies allow you to set up entire replies, partial replies or even reply templates.

Stock replies via the editor
Once you have these set up in the Admin Panel, they are visible on the editor.

Stock replies are configured in the Admin Panel
You can choose multiple stock replies to build up a message with handy re-usable reply snippets.
stockreplies_video.mp4
Each stock reply has full permission capabilities, meaning you can specify which member groups can use each stock reply. For example, you may wish to create partial replies for your team but encourage members to use a reply template to report bugs, etc.

Using stock actions as a template
We hope you like this feature, which is coming to our 4.6.7 October release.

One of the most popular requests we get for Commerce is for a free trial period for subscriptions. We've heard from many clients that wish to allow their members a free, or reduced cost trial period before auto-renewing the full price.
I'm pleased to say that we've now added this functionality into Invision Community 4.5. Let us take a look at how it works.
Initial Terms
In 4.5 you can now specify an initial term that is different to the normal renewal term for any subscription plan or product. For example, you could make the initial term $0 for 1 week and the normal renewal term $10 per month which will allow you to create 1 week free trial. The initial term doesn't have to be $0, you can use any special price for the initial term you like.

Subscription Plans showing Free Trials
For developers creating their own applications with Commerce integration, this functionality is also available to you simply by passing a DateInterval object representing the initial term when creating the invoice.
Collecting Payment Details for Free Trials
Previously, if you were buying something that is free, the entire of the last step of the checkout would just be skipped and the invoice marked as paid.
In 4.5, if:
The user is purchasing something which has a free initial period, but also has a renewal term (i.e. is a free trial), and You have a payment method which can collect card details (Stripe, Braintree, etc) The user will be prompted to provide payment details that will not be charged until after the free trial. If the user already has a card on file they will not be prompted to provide the details again but will see a confirmation screen rather than the order just being marked paid immediately.

Checkout Process for a Free Trial
As you can see, allowing a free or reduced cost trial period has never been easier. We hope that you enjoy using this new feature of Invision Community 4.5.