Clover13

5 minutes ago, Nathan Explosion said:

This was always based on 4.7.x - it never went more granular than that to 4.7.11 and so on; if it had then developers would have been needing to do updates each and every month just to reflect support for each new version (4.7.12 or 4.7.13, etc.)

End of the day - do your due diligence; check the developer's site, see if a new update has been released and check the change log if one is provided. Test, if you have the ability to do so, and if still in doubt, ask the developer.

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.

12 minutes ago, Clover13 said:

Figured it out.

Once your Docker containers are up and running, run the following command from terminal:

docker inspect -f '{{range .NetworkSettings.Networks}}{{.IPAddress}}{{end}}' WHATEVER_YOUR_MARIADB_CONTAINER_NAME_IS

This will return an IP address that you can then use in the Host form field of the IPS installation Server Details section in the screenshot I originally posted.  Then proceed with the rest of the install.

Realizing this may be due to the IPS file system being externalized from the Docker container.  I need to revisit adding the IPS file system as part of the Docker build so it is entirely self contained and internalized.  I'm missing something in the setup there.  Never the less, it is a "a way" to connect the IPS install to the MariaDB container.

Figured it out.

Once your Docker containers are up and running, run the following command from terminal:

docker inspect -f '{{range .NetworkSettings.Networks}}{{.IPAddress}}{{end}}' WHATEVER_YOUR_MARIADB_CONTAINER_NAME_IS

This will return an IP address that you can then use in the Host form field of the IPS installation Server Details section in the screenshot I originally posted.  Then proceed with the rest of the install.

Just adding to this,

• "Remember My Filters" on the listing page doesn't seem to be uncheckable unless you click the "Clear Filters" in the filter dialog below the Add Record button.  A re-save of it unchecked restores it as checked still.
• The "Save" of a filters with "Remember My Filters" unchecked seems to only filter on filter properties that have either been defaulted by the field config in the database OR by user action (i.e. selecting values).  However if you check "Remember My Filters", it suddenly considers and uses all filter properties.  If they have not been defaulted or user acted upon, they are considered unselected/empty and therefore no results show (if they are required form properties that always have a value).

41 minutes ago, Ryan Ashbrook said:

To start, I would avoid using dashes in the database name. Use letters, numbers, and underscores only.

OK, same error with underscore notation for the database name.

Trying to set up Docker locally with IPS, I have a container running with Apache, PHP, and MariaDB.  The IPS4 pre-check is all green, and I am stepping through the installation but running into an issue with the Server Details and an error of "No such file or directory".  Not sure what else needs to be done, but hopefully someone else has run into this before.  I can connect to the database OK and run a sample query via VSCode SQLTools.

1 minute ago, Matt said:

Ehren will go into more details but things like ipsType_ no longer exists, it's much more structural 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!

5 minutes ago, Matt said:

 

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! 👍

Seems the setting only works for new PMs, not for existing ones which can still be replied to by a blocked member.  Should be both, as often times someone is blocked after the blocking member receives PMs they didn't want or the conversation escalated to wanting to block the other member.

Interestingly if I delete the original PM (created before the member was blocked), and they subsequently use that PM in their mailbox to reply back, it won't show an error but it also won't be received by the member blocking them.  No idea where it goes or what happens there, but it should show an error to the sender similar to them creating a new PM to a member that has blocked them.

Also I don't think it's a good approach to force the blocking member to delete the original PM with the blocked member as often times it contains evidence of the issues between them that an admin may need to see or the blocking member may wish to share.

Is there a way to embed and overarching parent Google Map into a Pages page with all the Pages Address field entries from a given Pages database?

Looks like you are using CF on your site, and you're capped at 100MB unless you are on a Business+ plan.  Look under Network >> Maximum Upload Size in CF for your site.

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!

1 hour ago, opentype said:

It always worked like that in 4.x. 
I usually avoid using default values for fields because of this behaviour. I’m sure it’s all “working as intended”, just not exactly what a user (or even admin) would expect. 

Suggestions:

1. show the actual number of filtered items
2. don’t pre-select default field values (which are useful in the record form and during record creation) in the filter widget. 
3. (Clover’s point 3 is just a side-effect of point 2.)

Yes on #1, the summary result count should match the actual count of the results.

Regarding #2, I think defaults serve a purpose both in the report presentation layer and in facilitating form/data entry that feeds those reports, but those are two different use cases with potentially two different sets of requirements/goals. 

I have done this type of work extensively in a corporate setting, and filter management is an essential aspect that has clear coupling to the presentation and the filters should align for the sake of clarity throughout.  The far more complex scenario is getting into multi-component/context and sharing filters across contexts to keep that holistic multi-component presentation unified (even across pages).  With that said, in the IPS world, the Pages reports are single page/report oriented so it's a 1:1 coordination and in that it should always match. 

You can have defaults for a default landing page, but those defaults should not override user selection otherwise you fall out of sync between filter and report, thus leading to confusion for the user.  That customized filter (user selection) is a completely different view and should be treated as such.  With proper analytics, you can observe user trends and frequently filtered target screens to prioritize your own product's (site's) menu links and bubble up those higher demand views.

Also yes on #3, it is a side effect of #2, was just adding that in there to highlight exactly that.  Once you create this disjoint between filter and report it leads to unintended and unclear views.

1 hour ago, Jim M said:

Do you have a database we can take a look at this on? 

I'll add notes to the Client area if you want to review my sites that show this.  But if you set up a simple database with a select box with multiple values and set a default value, you'll see where the default will initially be selected on page load even though the resulting result report isn't filtered on it.

It seems when using a Pages Database filter for a corresponding database on a page, there are some issues in what is presented/selected in the filtering vs what is presented in the records list.

1. The record count displayed does not reflect the filtered record count but rather the total unfiltered record count in the database.
2. If you set field defaults, they are highlighted in the filter but not actually filtered on
3. If you clear a field default, the records will be filtered correctly, however the filter state will show the default is selected

Ultimately there are just several disjoints between the state of the filter and the actual results.

So just an oddity that I found related to a permissions issue when importing a database with fields.  Permissions aren't set at first and naturally members can't fill in required fields they aren't permitted to see/create/edit them, however they can still create a record without completing these required fields (as defined in the Pages database fields in AdminCP).  If the page requires it (i.e. Title and Content) but it is submitted with a null/empty value, the record entry should probably throw a permissions error or something to that effect versus allowing the record to be entered without them.  Without a title, the record gets created but trying to access it will result in an infinite redirect.

10 minutes ago, EmpireKicking said:

Are you still doing your plugins and still supporting it? going to have your own site

Please see the following a few posts up  

1 hour ago, Joel R said:

Such a great idea!  

So happy to see others have the same lightbulb go off of crafting smarter menus of links.  The hard thing now is how do we customize and craft those menus for different member journeys??  🤔

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).  

1 hour ago, Dreadknux said:

Do you happen to have a link to your community so you can illustrate the solution you've described here? Sounds super interesting!

I do like what you're saying about user interests and responding to that via menu navigation, and the challenges surrounding that. I've been thinking about this in relation to my community's actual homepage. At present, I have custom blocks focusing on the three major pillars of my community (News, Wiki, Forum/Activity Feed) which is fine for what I need it to do but I'm keen to explore more of a curated activity feed tailored dynamically to user activity/interest, with maybe featured/pinned content 'anchored' to the feed to ensure many/all visitors see important items. I'll be interested to see what V5 may bring in terms of 'Our Picks'/'Activity Feed' enhancements in that area. 🙂

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.

Just now, Daniel F said:

Yeah, absolutely. Sorry, I thought it would be logical that it should be something related, so I didn't mention it.

It seemed like it would be to me, but I'm not an SEO expert by any stretch so figured was worth asking.  I can also see someone thinking it's simply a good idea to keep the traffic on their site by any means necessary and redirect anything they intend on deprecating to some other area of their site to achieve that (which could harm them, likely more than just deleting the old page).

31 minutes ago, Daniel F said:

If it's something helpful but outdated, I'm deleting it, but not without creating a redirect to the new helpful content!

I don't know the answer, but I'm assuming not only doing a redirect but to new and similar helpful content, not just some other helpful content that might be of different subject matter? 

I can see Google considering it misleading if you say for example had a site related to pets with an outdated article on cats and you redirected it to a helpful one on dogs just to funnel the traffic to other areas of your site?

Take a look at @onlyME's apps:

https://ipsappzone.com/file/6-featured-content-pro/

https://ipsappzone.com/file/17-slider-maker/

7 hours ago, opentype said:

It would require customization of the feed template. A Pages record reply is treated like a forum reply, which also doesn’t repeat the attachments posted to the original post.

You mean the activity stream feed template?  In this case that's the streamItems template, which just shows the following within a loop to output each stream item:

{$result->html( $view, $sort != 'date', TRUE )|raw}