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Braintree is a payment gateway provided by PayPal which provides some great additional features for PayPal transactions including a significantly improved recurring payments model. We are delighted to be bringing full support for Braintree for Commerce in Invision Community 4.4.
What is Braintree?
Braintree is a payment gateway provided by PayPal which supports taking payments by credit cards (including Apple Pay and Google Pay) and Venmo as well as PayPal, providing a good option for communities wanting to use a single payment gateway, and also brings improved functionality for recurring PayPal transactions.
For PayPal transactions, there are no additional fees and the checkout experience uses the normal PayPal experience your customers are used to.
Recurring PayPal Improvements
Recurring payments / Billing Agreements in PayPal have up until now been initiated by PayPal. Invision Community tells PayPal what the renewal terms of a purchase are, but then it's up to PayPal to take that payment and notify your community when it succeeds (or fails).
This comes with a number of limitations and problems. It makes it difficult for you as an admin to modify an existing purchase or for the customer to upgrade/downgrade. It also means the customer has to create separate Billing Agreements for each purchase. Most significantly though, it means if there is a delay in receiving the payment (such as an expired card) it is sometimes unclear what should happen on your community's end, and how it can be resolved if/when the payment is received.
Other payment gateways work the other way around. When a customer pays by card, for example, they have the option of storing their card details. Later, if they make another purchase or a renewal invoice is generated, Invision Community can tell the gateway to recharge the same card - and if it fails, allow the customer to provide an alternative payment method. This allow both you and your customers to have much greater control, and is much more reliable.
Braintree resolves this by allowing customers when paying with PayPal to save their PayPal account in the same way they would save a credit card on file. When paying with PayPal, users will see a simple checkbox which, if checked, will allow future payments to be taken with PayPal automatically.

Storing PayPal Accounts for Recurring Payments
Other Features
In addition to an improved checkout experience, our integration with Braintree supports:
Taking payments by Credit Card, including 3DSecure checking and the ability for customer to store card details on file. Braintree uses a fully PCI-compliant method of taking card details in a way that ensures the card information never reaches your server. Apple Pay and Google Pay Venmo, which also allows storing accounts in the same way as PayPal accounts. Offering PayPal Credit Handling chargebacks/disputes Support for Braintree's Advanced Fraud Tools
A Disputed PayPal Transaction
Existing Setups and Upgrading
The existing PayPal gateway will continue to be available for basic PayPal integration, and your existing set up will continue to work exactly as it does now after upgrading.
If you are using PayPal, especially if you are using Billing Agreements, we strongly recommend switching to Braintree after upgrading. While it isn't possible to convert existing Billing Agreements, you can allow existing ones to continue to work and use Braintree for new purchases.
Please note that while existing setups will work fine, from 4.4 it will no longer be possible to set up a new PayPal method with either Billing Agreements, or to take payments by card, as PayPal has deprecated the API this was using in favour of Braintree and it can no longer be enabled on new accounts.
As mentioned though, this does not affect any existing setups, which, if you do not switch to Braintree, will continue to work as they do now.
This blog is about our upcoming release Invision Community 4.4.

Cue the music; switch on the dramatic lighting, we've got fantastic news!
We're now running Invision Community 4.3 on here for some advanced testing before we unleash the first beta release.

There's a subtle hint above
If you need a recap of what was added, take a look at our product updates blog which takes you through the highlights.
As this is a pre-beta release, expect some funkiness as we scurry around and tidy up our custom theme wrapper and other areas as we spot them.
If you you find a bug, we'd love for you to report it with as much detail as you can muster in the bug report area.
We'd love to know what you think, let us know below.

We are well into development on IPS Community Suite 4.2 and are excited to start announcing all the new features and improvements.
Our next big release is focused on engagement with your members. You will see enhancements to our Reputation system, new ways to encourage people to register on your community, and enhancements to existing features to make them more interactive. There are also entirely new capabilities we cannot wait to show you ranging from new ways to organize content to tools to help promote your community.
Version 4.2 also features a refreshed AdminCP and default front-end design. Theme changes in 4.2 are mostly in the CSS framework so your existing themes will either work without issue or require minor changes to work in the new version.
Over the next several weeks we will be posting news entries with previews of upcoming features fairly often. Be sure to follow our News section, our Facebook, or Twitter to stay up to date.
We expect IPS Community Suite 4.2 to be out in mid-2017 with a public preview available sooner.
Everyone at IPS has worked very hard on this update and we think you will love it!

We are currently beta testing our next release, 4.1.12, which contains hundreds of bug fixes, dozens of improvements, as well as a handful of new features. In this post, I want to cover some improvements we've made to two key areas: activity streams and search.
Activity Streams
The first improvement we made is to change how the expanded/condensed toggles are displayed to improve their clarity. From studying the feedback from administrators and users, we discovered that many people did not realize the view could be changed. To improve this, the toggles now explicitly say 'Condensed' and 'Expanded', making it much clearer how the view can be toggled to your own preference.

More clearly marked expand and condense options for Activity Streams
Next, a common point of feedback about Activity Streams is that clicking a result and then hitting the Back button in the browser means you are put back at the first batch of results, losing your place in the stream. In 4.1.12 we improved this so that clicking Back will load the last batch of results you were viewing, enabling you to continue browsing from whence you left off.
Finally, in the Content Types menu we added an Apply button. We discovered that users were not always sure how to save the selection of content types they had made (which automatically happened when that menu was closed). To alleviate this, the new Apply button will save the selection and close the menu, updating the stream results in real-time as expected. You can still simply click out of the menu to apply changes as well.

The new Apply button in the Content Types menu
Search
While overall improvements to search (specifically the algorithms to match and return the results) are a matter of ongoing research and refinement which we will improve in the 4.2 series and beyond, 4.1.12 sees one small improvement to the options available to users. While you have always been able to search within a particular forum, category etc. while browsing that area, you were not able to retroactively filter into particular areas after performing a more general search. IPS Community Suite 4.1.12 adds this ability to the interface, allowing you to get more specific results from a particular area of the community.
Version 4.1.12 is currently in beta testing and should be released in the next two weeks.