Clover13

It's only logical to be extensible. Almost every client will want to have customization capabilities and the strong majority will want truly bespoke features to stand out in their own marketability (even as hobbyist sites). Whether they are created internally or via a third party is irrelevant, the need for that ability remains and there's no escaping that. There will be more common use cases where many communities seek out the same features/apps, and that is where a marketplace has value to those communities. The same pattern we have now, but we have less visibility here on Invision Community once marketplace was removed and even less here once Providers Directory is gone. In trying to understand the value of removing the marketplace and Providers Directory for Invision Community as a company, IMHO its one or both of these things Their market is increasingly enterprise and hosting/promoting a marketplace or Providers Directory is inferior optics for their own marketing. It doesn't evoke enterprise solution grade features with a directory of independent freelance developers. That's not to say the solutions aren't high quality, it's just the optics as seen by an enterprise coming in to review the IC software and finding that level of feature enhancement support being promoted by the vendor. This is much different than being partnered with a large scale tech company that has strong brand awareness and marketability, which is high value to enterprise clients and immediately recognized when reviewing software for adoption within your enterprise. Promoting a marketplace or Providers Directory directly competes with their own custom services and costs them revenue if clients seek out those developers instead of IC developers. Doesn't really make sense for their bottom line to promote competitors of their own services, and lets face it, they're evolving IC and growing their own assets, they don't NEED third party developers for their core emerging client market. I can't blame them if those two points are accurate. They're a company, they're growing, they've been resilient in this market. With that said, it puts the responsibility on third party developers to make their own way. That's what we've seen already and will continue to see, again IMHO.

When I hear "major", I think 6.x I'd imagine you mean some new "major features" (significant), not a new major version already right? 😀 Looking forward to the website and doc updates and great idea to delineate Cloud from Classic to improve discovery/usability for those customers!

I understand the argument of deliberately building features for the IC cloud packages that use cloud native solutions (AWS products in this case) to build suite enriching features. Chances are IC will only continue to do more of that as they are cloud committed and their client base is a cloud majority. However in that you have inevitably increasing costs. The more innovative they get that relies on cloud products to enrich their own product, the more expensive their own costs become. So there is a level of pragmatism in carefully selecting features to target and understanding the scaling of their own cost and its impact on clients. That is a game (yes game) of calculated business risk and client tolerance. With that said, IC is becoming more sophisticated and professionally oriented, gravitating farther away from hobbyist sites. The cost of their chosen growth gets passed on to their clients, that is natural. And in order to be affordable, their clients will need their own revenue to support their sites. Feature growth and richness don't correlate with low cost. Now I don't know if IC needed to push to the cloud and I don't know how much of what they built truly relies on it, but they wanted to be more than a software distributor and become a hosting solution as well. The cloud provides them native uniformity, stability, scalability, security and (cloud) product extensibility while allowing them to focus on innovation AND also gain a revenue stream from hosting. Smart business but a bigger cost/revenue game that increasingly prices out smaller clients. FWIW I am self hosted on 4 sites now and want to continue to be primarily due to cost and flexibility (IC has their defined hosting terms and you have no say in customizations you may want beyond that). I'm hopeful they continue self hosted licensing and more so don't choose to release features to the cloud just to drive business there and forcefully phase out self hosting through an inferior subset of features. Only time will tell.

Right, sorry not to confuse with actual Guest member group of the software but a guest relative to the member who is RSVPing to the event. The overarching goal is to not require member's guests to an Event to sign up just for the sake of being accounted for in the Event's headcount. The +N approach was my thought as to how to solve for this as well, but it needs to be accounted for in the total RSVP count whereas if you have a threshold set, it's clear how many spots are left. I did create a topic awhile back on this here: https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/472005-suggestion-enhance-event-management-to-include-plus-n-attendees-in-rsvp/ Was hoping in v5 it would be considered since it wasn't for v4.

Question on Events and RSVPs, was there or is there any intention of having Guest level RSVP? It's pretty rare in my events to have just members coming, i.e. say a father is a member and we have a dinner, then he wants to bring his wife and two kids. It's not reasonable to expect the wife and kids to sign up just to join the Event, however it's very important to maintain an accurate headcount for RSVPs relative to capacity at the Event restaurant. If v5 Events don't handle this, I'm curious to see how others manage it or plan to. It has historically been a challenge on my sites.

Regarding the patch to 4.7.20, it did seem to run the full upgrader on my sites (assuming by full upgrade you mean when all of the templates/CSS files, database, etc are going through batches of checks and updates)

Hey @Matt , it's a nice facility within the AdminCP that it auto-detects the version differences (based on the underlying code perspective) and adds a banner to update. The only caveat in this instance is there is already a version 4.7.20 and now a new patched version 4.7.20, there should never be two 4.7.20 versions. IC seems to follow semver in convention but not practice, as this security fix should have probably been 4.7.21, but I see there is already a 4.7.21 in Beta (https://invisioncommunity.com/release-notes/4721-beta-1-r133/). Given that, this security patch should have been 4.7.22 and that existing 4.7.21 beta never goes beyond beta but instead gets merged into a new 4.7.23. I know it can be a pain to manage, but this would make it clear as to what is included in what version and also display properly in the AdminCP (although the banner helps allude to which version of 4.7.20 is actively running in this case, but that isn't good practice). And thanks to Egidio Romano for identifying the security issue! 👍

Is there any benefit to deleting themes before versus after? Or is deleting them via the ACP after not possible (i.e. they are removed from the ACP)?

Awesome news! For the self hosted clients, I'd imagine this is an opportunity to clean up a lot of old/unused v4 files as well given the significant changes in v5. Is that handled as part of the v5 upgrade or would you recommend we do some cleanup before/after?

These are phenomenal enhancements to the suite! Very well done and excellent presentation!

That's beautiful! Really well done! Great video identifying the limitations of v4 and addressing enhancements to close those gaps. Looking forward to giving this a try!

Any sense on conversions of v4 Pages assets to v5?

Got ya, yeah I had no idea how that check worked or if developers reviewed and approved every bug/patch release to pass that check. The upgrade check (assuming developer has implemented it) should also pull in changes once you've upgraded but you'd only know that after you upgrade and something potentially broke. So I guess it's always a matter of how much you're willing to risk with third party apps working and the amount of effort you feel you need to put into verifying it before doing a live site upgrade.

So as some of you have upgraded to the latest version of IPS v4.7.14 with Marketplace removed, what is your workflow for the upgrade now that the upgrade itself no longer verifies third party apps/plugins are approved for the target IPS version by the developer? Running a TESTINSTALL website and upgrading everything then manually spot checking everything before upgrading any official sites (good practice BTW) Going to N developer sites and verifying each of your apps/plugins is marked as compatible, noting some just say 4.7+? It was certainly always helpful to get a comprehensive preview of what was identified as version approved by devs during an upgrade. Not sure how this exactly worked, but that part is missing now.

As I was just reading your blog on Theme Tools and the part where you said "the short version is that the CSS framework has been completely rewritten from scratch with a new approach to how CSS classes interact with page elements.", I was wondering this exact thing. I'll have to wait to see the deeper level details of the CSS framework to better understand once they become available! Thanks Matt!

Not just the selector or element class being targeted, but what are applicable CSS properties IPS may already have defined that can be used in those areas. An IPS CSS Guide so to speak. There are a lot of IPS defined CSS classes to control formatting, so I was just thinking along the lines of bubbling that up into the editor in some way (i.e. things like ipsType_normal, ipsType_bold, etc) versus a site owner creating new (and potentially duplicate/excessive CSS). So it's both about exposing available CSS to use in target areas and then also applying them to the desired target elements for that theme (in the use case presented in the video, the option to use IPS CSS property XYZ and the ability to apply that all buttons or just to that singular target button). The overarching goal is higher reuse of existing code and global/uniform application of that customization across the suite so look and feel remain consistent. Not every IPS natively defined CSS property will be available as a UI feature, so having some editor level exposure and reuse of those natively available CSS properties is highly beneficial (at least in my eyes).

Wow! This is honestly, in a word...incredible! Exceptionally well done @Ehren, feature rich and superb UX! One of the biggest enhancements I can see being added is some level of quick linking or hover effect to expose the available CSS properties for a given component (button, header, etc) within the theme editor. In your example, maybe when you hover the button you converted to upper case, fill the CSS editor box with the available properties or maybe a modal showing the documentation of available properties. That is one of the biggest hurdles I have with theme editing, in that I often have to find examples of what I want to do in the suite or come up with my own CSS properties to achieve the effect (potentially adding unnecessary code vs reusing what may be available but is unknown). Overall this has truly elevated the ability for site owners to control their themes in a magnificent way, seriously raising the bar of what this suite offers to a new level! Very well done! 👍

Very nice work @Ehren! Lot of thought put into the changes and seeing those good ideas come to fruition! The only stickler I saw for my sites is we use a sticky footer ad which could become a conflict with the layout with the mobile menu at the bottom. Would be great to have an option to put it up top maybe. Otherwise, I'd imagine it can float above the footer ad if needed with a little CSS. Smart UX with the sign in and sign up buttons bubbled to the primary view when in guest mode! System preference dark/light mode is excellent as well to tie into a user's natural device preferences! On the tech side, that massive JS reduction should help tremendously! I've been finding a lot of ways to do things I want with CSS and avoiding JS libs as well. Great stuff!

I think you have to give the ability to members to craft their own journey honestly. Some things will be globally site purposeful, and others will be individually member interest driven. The optimal solution offers both. Ultimately you don't want members to have to work too hard to get to anything, and if they must then you want to facilitate it moving forward. The other aspect is you are responsible for driving members to areas of interest but the broader your site gets, that harder it is to drive that elegantly (at least for me). Facebook implicitly optimizes this because they are tracking and targeting your interests for you. Users there don't need much of a menu because the content is curated and customized for them based on their activity (on and off Facebook). It's not just site global recent activity, but recent activity they know you are interested in viewing (without having to directly tell them or configure menus or an activity stream to achieve it).

I'd prefer not to share my site links openly, but I'll give you an idea here. I use Activity Stream as my landing page and customize it to show what I want from a site content perspective. Members can still create custom streams if they'd like but that seems like a high bar for most. My members want maximum convenience and quick browsing experiences to get to what they are interested in (don't we all). However that means they rarely use menus unless they must and whatever they're looking for is important enough to force them to open and use menus (i.e. you aren't really driving them to any content via the current v4 menus especially with a mobile hamburger icon). This is another reason the v5 sidebar menu is good for desktop, as it will open the visibility up for members to see what's available vs hidden under submenus. However for mobile, this still could be a problem as I assume that sidebar is a desktop only view otherwise you'd be stacking menu items in your most valued ATF content. Regarding the actual "feature menu" I use, I put something simple together with font awesome icons that resemble the purpose of the link and created a simple Pages block to display these in a flex container. As mentioned earlier, because it's inserted as a block at the top of the page content, it allows me to have these targeted links at the top whether on desktop or mobile. Maybe there's other or better ways to do this but it's helped me focus and drive members to places of interest in a given moment of time while also allowing me to have "popular" links there when there aren't specific content links commanding that space. For example a similar niche Facebook group owner was complaining about Facebook taking down members ads to sell certain items, so I reached out to him to ask to post my site's Classified link. He agreed, so I quickly added a Classified "feature menu" item to that site as I anticipated members from that group checking out the site to look for that right after I posted about it on the Facebook group. Another example is I had a merchandise release for members, which they were chomping at the bit for, so I added that as a "feature menu" item to give it proper exposure and drive the sales. Here's a sample screenshot of what it looks like at the top of an Activity Stream. I just mix things in and out as needed based on whatever is going on at the moment or where I anticipate interest or want to drive traffic. 👍

I was thinking about the menu system some more and some of the challenges I have with my own sites. I really like the sidebar menu being proposed for v5 because its vertical view shows far more detail of the menu with quick visual recognition. The horizontal header menu in v4 is limited in visibility due to that horizontal nature and even further due to hidden submenus, so members (especially new ones) don't really know what's under there without exploring. And others find it inconvenient to have to drill through menus to find something they really wish was at their fingertips. To address this and in an effort to focus on funneling traffic to what I deem the most sought after areas of the site as a whole, I created my own "featured menu" of items that is effectively a content block at the top of the page such that it displays ATF on both desktop and mobile views (unlike a sidebar whereas the right sidebar displays at the end in mobile). This is akin to the Popular menu being introduced in v5 at the top of the vertical sidebar menu. Going into this deeper, the real challenge is members simply want different things and have different perspectives on what is popular to them. Within a broader niche with subniches of interest for the member base, some may favor links and menu items others don't. As such the most optimal solution is to really allow members to have their own customizable menu of Favorites that can be at the top (even above the site's Popular menu being worked on for v5). So great idea to have a Popular section of site determined links, even better idea to allow members to Favorite links to establish their own.

Ah, that's great, I can't recall if that was in place when I got my first site so many years ago. I found the link for it in the menus: https://invisioncommunity.com/clientarea/free-trial/

Really incredible work @Ehren and whomever else was involved! Lots of really great features, and the ability to have more and more configuration based layout control is excellent! Really liked the inline layout editing such as the header config with components for logo, navigation, breadcrumbs, etc! Looking forward to seeing it in a hands on demo in the future! Any plans on offering on demand demo sites for existing and potential clients to give a try for a brief period of time? A lot of sites/products do this with their offerings, and could really help IPS elevate their sales. Being on the cloud should make this a whole lot easier now too! 👍

To be clear, as I was one who brought up the security concerns in this topic, I absolutely was not referring to any known instances or developer here, but merely the potential for it to occur and increasingly so when IPS becomes 100% hands off with third party applications. Apologies if it came across that way. I've seen enough security exploits in my own career (not anything IPS or IPS third party related) to warrant the concern. Again not a reflection of any developer here or the quality of their code, I'm simply proactively thinking about the possibility and considerations regarding preventative measures. If anyone feels such a security concern is completely unnecessary or overkill, I would appreciate your particular insight as to why. I certainly don't know the underpinnings of IPS code, so perhaps there is a reason a client doesn't need to have an elevated concern over it. I'd still like to know what IPS corporate customers do, if it's anything like the corporations I've worked with (unrelated to my IPS projects), there is full fledged InfoSec and AppSec scanning of all application code before any deployment with Production (real user/member) data. Generally for a hobby site, I'm not very concerned with data loss (with regular backups available to restore as needed), but I am concerned about data breaches involving PII.