SeNioR-

For reference: Android 14, November patch on Samsung (several different device models) 

In case you don't want to put the whole site offline but only a specific application, for example only Calendar/Events, you can put it offline by going to ACP > System > SITE FEATURES > Applications > Events > Lock Icon (on the right).

You have a CDN on Cloud 😉.  You’ll want to review those factor of heavy images and JavaScript which page speed is reporting there. Likely custom themes, third party addons, custom JavaScript, etc… may be influencing this. 

Which is apparently, just fine this morning 😄 

Time machine to 2025 and download v5.1 🤣

Just for clarification, Pages is getting a substantial update for v5 and is a core part of our community platform strategy.

I think the built-in Lightbox view falls short in some situations. To enhance the user experience, I propose the adoption of PhotoSwipe, which is a free and feature-rich alternative.
PhotoSwipe provides users with fast and smooth transitions between images, offering a more interactive experience. Additionally, features like zooming and dragging allow users to examine images in more detail. This change will make the visual content on our website more appealing and user-friendly.
With the IC 5 update, could there be an evaluation of replacing the built-in Lightbox view with PhotoSwipe?
License
It comes with an MIT license, allowing free usage for personal or commercial projects. For more information and to explore the details of PhotoSwipe, you can visit the PhotoSwipe Official Website.

Subscriptions have been available for some time now and offer a good way to monetize your community. It would be nice if each subscription had the option of multiple offers - time frame/settings. Most sites these days offer a discount for an annual subscription. In IPS, you have to create an entirely new subscription/box rather than something like:

 

Finally, I launched MarketPlace at valacoding.com.
Buyers:
On this site, as a buyer, you can order products and install/update them directly in your ACP as before you did in IPS Marketplace!! 🙂 . In addition, if a new version of the apps is released, they will be displayed in the ACP just like the IPS apps and you will be informed about new released versions.
All clients who have purchased my products must register on the site and send me info about the products (product name, order code provided by IPS) and the username registered on the valacoding.com site so i can update them.

for example :
Username
-Laxeri theme
****-****-****-****
-Menu plus
****-****-****-****
.
.
.
Note:  users who have already purchased products through IPS do not need to register a new order for those products. they just need send us the information that i mentioned above
--------------------------------------------------
Sellers:
As a seller, you can submit your products and enter the product link to your site.
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if you have any question, just PM me 
Please send any comments to my email address or PM. I welcome and will definitely check it out.

Best Regards
M. Vala (ReyDev)
valacoding.com

Hm, I can see why IPS made this change but to be honest, asking clients to seek custom app/plugin development is going to be a lot more expensive than finding an app on a marketplace that many customers will be able to purchase. I guess it will make me a lot more hesitant to spend my money on third party apps.

No offence but this is crazy.
what will happen for people hosting in the cloud? No mods?

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 an addendum, I would say that a core part of any community strategy is to convert guests into members. Members have more tools including notifications to make your site more 'sticky'.
Allowing guests too much scope will reduce the number of sign-ups you ultimately get. There is a balance of course, I dislike things like restricting viewing attachments (often photos) to members only and restricting the number of topics they read, but finding ways to encourage registration is a good long term strategy.

No, live topics are not cached.
The vast majority of traffic for any forum is guest traffic. This can be from bots, as well as people coming in from external links. We have some communities that may have 1500 people online, but 10,000 guests. Caching via CDN allows us to serve that traffic without touching any processing (PHP/MySQL/Redis, etc) for maximum efficiency. The cache lasts for around 15 minutes which is absolutely fine for communities. If your guests want 'live' updates, then simply encourage them to sign up. Logged in members will be served the live pages, not the CDN cache.

I figured I'd bump this one as a reminder for v5. 😛
 
I use attributes in several custom applications, and I always have to remember to add spaces for them to work. 🙄

Please keep the extension's behavior consistent across all the functions. Some extensions first check if the extension implements a certain function before calling it, while others expect the function to exist at all times and throw errors if they're missing.
 
For example, the core/ModeratorPermissions currently has 4 functions available (preSave, getPermissions, onChange, onDelete) but only preSave checks if the function is available before calling it:
/* Allow extensions an opportunity to inspect the values and make adjustments */ foreach ( \IPS\Application::allExtensions( 'core', 'ModeratorPermissions', FALSE ) as $k => $ext ) { if( method_exists( $ext, 'preSave' ) ) { $ext->preSave( $values ); } }  
The other functions instead are called without any check:
foreach ( \IPS\Application::allExtensions( 'core', 'ModeratorPermissions', FALSE, 'core' ) as $k => $ext ) { foreach( $ext->getPermissions( array() ) as $name => $data ) { // ... } } === foreach ( \IPS\Application::allExtensions( 'core', 'ModeratorPermissions', FALSE ) as $k => $ext ) { $ext->onChange( $current, $changed ); } === foreach ( \IPS\Application::allExtensions( 'core', 'ModeratorPermissions', FALSE ) as $k => $ext ) { $ext->onDelete( $current ); }  
While I understand that getPermission() must be always implemented (the extension would have no meaning otherwise), the other 2 functions onChange() and onDelete() are completely optional and cause empty functions to be left around. For example, this code below comes from the Blog's extension:
/** * After change * * @param array $moderator The moderator * @param array $changed Values that were changed * @return void */ public function onChange( $moderator, $changed ) { } /** * After delete * * @param array $moderator The moderator * @return void */ public function onDelete( $moderator ) { }

The only "built-in solution" I can think of would be to change the constant to send notifications in the background even when there's only 1 (the default is 5). That way you can bypass the delay.
However, if your site is very active, you'll end up with a huge list of background processes in ACP, though. Not really ideal... 🙄
 
This is the constant you need to add to your file in case you want to give it a try:
\define( 'NOTIFICATION_BACKGROUND_THRESHOLD', 0 );  
Here's the guide on how to use the constants.php file if you've never used it:
 

These UI changes are looking really nice, fantastic work as always Ehren. Having you join the IPS design team is undoubtedly one of the most exciting things to happen and your work here is just proving that every day. Looking forward to seeing even more!
I'm also now interested in seeing some of the improvements to the UX that complement the UI changes - in particular the mobile topic/posting experience, which in V4 is currently quite miserable now when you compare the ease of posting on social media apps. Just this morning I tried to post a topic about a news story I read earlier, and it was a constant battle of scrolling up/down just to reach post editor toolbar icons that had been moved off-screen as my post got longer (some elements, like the GIF implementation and URL insertion, are pretty clunky as well).
Not knocking the V4 experience as I know it's a decade old at this point and originally designed to serve a desktop experience over mobile - but at the same time, I can see why many in my community prefer to post status updates when it's currently so difficult to quickly and easily post a topic or a post on the forum via their phones. 😅

Awesome changes as usual, very well made.
Looking forward to them

Version 5 is a significant rewrite with numerous new features and breaking changes. It’s not just a new UI, so it won’t be possible to run multiple installations on the same database, sorry @WebCMS

It's not something we've planned for an initial release, but it's quite easy to achieve with the new CSS framework and is possibly something we can implement in the future.
With that said, browsers are very capable of scaling font sizes these days and since the entire UI is built using em's for sizing, the whole interface scales neatly. The color scheme also passes all contrast tests so far, and can be customized further using the Theme Editor if necessary 🙂

This is correct at the present time. If a post is already approved, and the user has the ability to edit, they would indeed be able to edit that without moderation

Yeah, I think we can stick in a bug report for this. It does make a pretty big loophole for spammers and bad actors.

Thanks @Clover13!
Relocating your ad would likely be the best solution here. You could technically use CSS to reposition the mobile menu, but a top menu doesn't really meet the goals of an "app-like" interface which we've been aiming for. It's not a setting which will come baked in with version 5, but it's certainly achievable with a couple of lines of CSS 🙂
I appreciate that, thanks Cedric! The amount of time that goes into a quick 4 minute video is more than I'd like to admit haha! 😅

Welcome to the third video of our sneak peak series! Today, we're really excited to introduce you to the new Theme Editor!
Built entirely from scratch, the new editor provides an instant, live preview of your theme, as soon as you modify a setting. It's a zero-code approach to creating themes, and has been designed to ensure your theme adheres to your color scheme and looks great on every device, with very little effort. Let's take a closer look!
 
Paragraph 1.mp4
 
To the left of the editor, you’ll see a live preview of your community. You can navigate to any page, as if you were browsing your site normally. At the top left of the editor, you’ll find icons which change the theme between the light and dark color schemes. Below that are buttons which change the viewport size, from desktop, to tablet, to mobile. This is a really convenient way to ensure your theme looks great on every device, without needing to manually resize your browser window.
Lets take a closer look at the Color Palette.
Editing colors in version 4 was a fairly time consuming process. For example, modifying the color scheme from the default blue to another color meant that 26 theme settings needed to be changed. In contrast, the Version 5 theme is powered by just 3 colors: Primary colors are responsible for styling the main elements on your page, such as the Start new topic button. Secondary colors control minor elements, such as pagination links, while the Base color is responsible for controlling the overall tint on your site.
Clicking on these colors opens a color picker. Let’s change this blue color to yellow.
 
Video 2.mp4
 
You’ll notice two things have happened here. First, the preview window updated as soon as we modified the color. All elements which were previously blue, now use yellow, such as the Start new topic button. Secondly, the text color in our button has changed from white to black. This is our automatic contrast feature and it ensures our text is easy to read on our new yellow background, since white text may be more difficult to read for some viewers.
Below the color picker is a text box, with our color displayed in HSL. You can paste your own colors in this box, in any color format and that color will be applied to your elements.
 
Video 3.mp4
 
The Base color controls the tint of your backgrounds and text colors. Let's try a few examples to demonstrate how easy it is to recolor your theme.
 
Video 4.mp4
 
Next up are Logos! Invision Community 5 has three logo types: a text logo, an image logo for desktops and an image logo for mobiles. Let’s edit our text logo.
 
Video 5.mp4
 
After changing the text to “Theme Editor Demo”, we can see that the logo in our preview window updates instantly with our new text. Below that, we have multiple options to help us style the text logo, such as font-family These fonts are a combination of system fonts and web fonts. The web fonts are hosted locally on your site for optimal performance. Additionally, we can also change the font-weight and font-size. We might want a different font-size for mobile logos, so that can be edited too. We can see a live preview by changing our viewport to the mobile option.
If you’d prefer to use an image logo, you can assign it using the Image Logo options. Image logos are made up of 2 upload fields, one for the light theme and one for the dark theme. Below these upload fields, a slider lets you resize your logo so it fits neatly.
 
Video 6.mp4
 
Layout options let you assign the default layouts in your community. In our first sneak peak video, we showcased the new side panel layout, feed view for forum categories, and compact view for topics. These can all be enabled via the theme editor using a simple select menu.
 
Video 7.mp4
 
Lets explore some Color options! In the Header panel, we can see a list of elements we can customize. Clicking on an element opens the Swatch List, which is a list of 22 colors that are powered by the Base, Primary and Secondary colors from earlier. We have 6 "light" base colors, 6 "dark" base colors as well as various shades of our primary and secondary colors. Clicking on any of these swatches will apply that color to your element.
But what if none of these colors suit your requirement? That’s where the Color Picker comes in handy. Here, we can easily choose any color, or even paste in our own color like before.
 
Video 8.mp4
 
A major hurdle with themes in version 4 was customising the header. Depending on the complexity, this would typically involve modifications to both the CSS and HTML. That is a thing of the past with version 5! If we flick over to our Settings tab, you’ll see a brand new interface for customising the header. A new drag and drop feature allows you to easily reposition header elements without touching a single line of code.
 
Video 9.mp4
It’s an incredibly fun tool to play with, and we’re really excited to hear what you think!
Below the drag and drop area, we can customise the header further by using sliders to adjust its height, or we can enable navigation icons with a single click. Body settings let you can customise global elements such as the body background color, text colors, the max-width of your site, the font-family, font-size and more.
Editing Content boxes has always required code modifications in the past. Using this new editor, we can adjust not only the colors of the boxes, but also the borders and shadows. Theme editing has honestly never been this easy!
 
Video 10.mp4
And there you have it! Our brand new theme editor. With a few simple clicks and drags, we've been able to create a customised theme that looks great on desktops and mobiles, with a new color scheme, new logos, a customised header, new page layouts and restyled content boxes - all without touching a single line of code.
Speaking of code, for those of you who want to apply more advanced customisations, we’ve added a really convenient way to access your custom CSS file, via a new dialog box.
Video 11.mp4
And last but not least - the new theme editor is fully responsive, so even if you’re away from the desk, so you’ll be able to change colours and settings, upload new logos, redesign your header and even add your own code!
 
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Developing this new editor has been a lot of fun, and it’s even more fun to use. Themes have never been easier to edit and we're really excited for you all to get your hands on it so you can have a play for yourself - but for now, let us know what you think the comments, and we’ll see you next time!

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