CoffeeCake

@Saurabh Jain there is also a known issue where available updates will not appear immediately depending on the number of things you have installed from marketplace. You may need to go to ACP > Settings > Applications and click the "Check for updates" a number of times before available updates appear (we had to click it 8-9 times in testing for our installs). Once they're available, you'll see the counter on the application/plugin area increment and show that updates are available, and a link next to the application/plugin that says "Upgrade" which you can click to begin the upgrade process.

We don't use themes from the marketplace, so I'm not sure if the same applies there.

6 hours ago, Askancy said:

I believe that this new marketplace management is a very useful thing for contributors, although, the market should be accessible as well at testinstall.

For clarity, the Marketplace integration in 4.5 is available and works in a test installation, using the -TESTINSTALL license, so long as your installation is reachable from the Internet. In other words, IPS needs to be able to initiate a connection to your install. If your test install is on your local machine or inside a corporate network and you haven't made provisions with your firewall or router so that it is reachable from the public internet, the integration does not work. Remember, if you do this, you need to secure your test install behind additional HTTP authentication (i.e.  htpasswd).

@Stuart Silvester goes into that here:

On 8/11/2020 at 12:31 PM, Stuart Silvester said:

There is nothing stopping you using the Marketplace locally, you just need to point a URL to your test install (that's registered as the -TESTINSTALL license key) for the authentication system to work. There are plenty of 'dynamic' DNS type services you can use for this if you don't have the ability to set up your own DNS.

What doesn't presently work is:

• Adding plugins and applications from the IPS Marketplace to localhost installations (that don't have the -TESTLICENSE and aren't accessible to the Internet as above). These are typically used by developers to author themes, plugins, and applications and then redistribute them privately to test and production environments, or offer them from the IPS Marketplace to others for free or at a price. Prior to this unannounced change with 4.5, you could run multiple local virtualized installs for testing and development purposes and install third party applications and plugins from the Marketplace that live only on your local machine and are not accessible from the internet. You might want to test your own local changes against an install that has the various third-party integrations you've purchased from Marketplace present and ensure there aren't any compatibility issues or things that break due to conflicts, as an example, or to ensure a theme properly works with third-party integrations. Now, you cannot get these plugins and applications into a localhost install without obtaining the files from the developer directly.
• The ability to download, inspect, audit, or commit to backup file repository any marketplace applications and plugins prior to installing it in any environment. This is typically done to ensure compatibility with other modifications, perform code audits and ensure that best practices have been implemented by the developer, identify any potential issues, make backups of critical functionality, retain version history in a source control system (such as git), identify bugs, etc.

If the things that aren't working in the two bullet points above are important to you, @Lindy and the IPS team welcome your feedback.

For us, we do local development on a local install that lives in virtual machines on our development computers. We commit our work into source control and then when we've reached a place that we're ready to do user acceptance testing, we promote those changes into our -TESTINSTALL license that our testers can access. Once we're confident things are working there, we promote to production.

This is probably not the sort of rigor most causal administrators would bother going through, and likely not done by IPS Cloud customers. I'm not even sure they have access to run a local environment without getting a self-hosted license.

You can disable the display of posted images from ACP > Forums > Settings > Forum Settings > Topic Summary Settings and deselect the "posted images" checkbox, however it seems rather odd that there would be blanks like that present. I'd suggest what you're seeing is either a bug or perhaps the result (total speculation here) of the image proxy routine that runs during the upgrade of not being complete.

You may want to ask support for help. It does not display here unless there are actual images.

29 minutes ago, sonimik1 said:

Can I update with all applications and plugins disabled to avoid problems?

All plugins and applications have to be updated or can some work?

Thank you very much for the reply.

The 4.5 upgrader will automatically disable any applications and plugins that are installed during the upgrade. Unless the developer has released an update on the Marketplace that specifically states that it is compatible with 4.5, you should assume your plugins, themes, and applications will not work. After you've finished the upgrade process, you will go through an onboarding process to link with the new Marketplace feature. Due to a known issue, you will need to check for updates multiple times, depending on how many resources you have installed, and then install any available updates.

I strongly recommend doing a test upgrade with a copy of your site to see what has changed, test what you have and whether or not it still works, and look at how any changes to your themes may be incompatible. The jump from 4.4 to 4.5, in general, is greater than you might otherwise assume and is rather significant.

If you are self-hosted (not using IPS cloud):

You should make a full backup of your file systems and database and ensure you can successfully restore them before performing the upgrade. The only way to revert to the previous version is to restore from your upgrade.

If you are an IPS Cloud customer:

You should ask them using whatever support channels they give you for help and guidance on making sure you can restore from backup if needed. No idea how any of that works. Restoring from backup is still the only way to go back, yet someone else is running and scheduling all that for you.

Highly recommend @Adriano Faria for any of your modification needs. Let's keep him safe!

The default behavior was changed in the default theme. 4.4 had an edit link down by quote, and beginning with 4.5 it's been moved into the ellipsis in the corner now.

You'd need to customize your theme (or develop a theme hook) to restore it to the previous position. 

12 minutes ago, Adriano Faria said:

I can sell a plugin that shows a Hello World to you for $500.

Throw in an option to disable quicksand and I'm in.

24 minutes ago, Afrodude said:

We need a consumer protection form overpricing and developers who release their products then leave in just a few months.

Such is the risk we run relying on resources sold by others, and why it's important to be able to pick up maintenance of critical functionality for your community that you've come to rely on should others drop the ball (or simply be unable to) continue maintaining what you've come to depend on. Helpful to that effort is the ability to download and maintain code repositories of purchased plugins, applications, themes, etc. @Lindy welcomes your letting him know that this niche feature is something you'd appreciate to help guide potential future restoration of that ability.

It would be very nice to see things in the marketplace marked as abandoned or no longer maintained. Xenforo's market for modifications seems to do that at a cursory glance, yet I'm not a customer of theirs. It would be very very nice to have built in provisos that encourage developers to setup mechanisms that take effect when their resources are no longer able to be maintained by them. Suppose @Adriano Faria decides to go off the grid and move to a private island... or the private island swallows him whole in a tragic turn of events. What happens to the things so many have come to depend on?

You purchase things right now at your own risk, with no guarantee that anything will work or that it won't break your community, or that it will be maintained in any future capacity. When thinking about third party things, it's important to consider those inherent risks vs. the benefits of the addon/modification. It's a good idea to have plans in place for contingencies if those are things that are important to you. And, for goodness sake, test things in your test install before installing them on your live site. Hopefully those in the cloud have test installs included.

To borrow an analogy, "Apple," (IPS) in this instance, would suggest you download another similar app or hire someone to take on recreating your abandoned resource and let the "marketplace" of developers here sort that out for you. Things will sell at the rates people are willing to pay for them--you need to consider if it's worth the listed price to you along with the risks of depending on someone else when it comes to things like upgrading to new versions, fixing vulnerabilities, and very real risks of developers falling into quicksand. Before purchasing, realize that short of getting a download at that moment, all bets are off going forward.

Sorry, forgot that was a thing. No idea what the cloud experience is like. Then, maybe a support request will help you determine what point in time you can restore to.

1 minute ago, John T Davis said:

I've let our members know the daily digest is temporarily unstable and may or may not work, so I'm not going to worry about a full restore right now. Especially since I don't know when the last backup was taken. 🙂 

Now's a good time to get that sorted and automated, validate that your backups are working, and practice restoring in a test environment. Just in case.

I think the only way to revert to 4.4.10 would be to restore from a backup. Did you happen to make a backup prior to performing the upgrade?

Can you disable the application/plugin in the interim?

Also brought this up in testing. The workaround I found was to go to System > Tasks > updateCheck > run it a bunch of times over and over again until you see the menu item increment the available update number.

We aren't invited to some sort of cool kids club.....

Note, there's a bug though where a reply will include the post number of the previous post until the page is reloaded.

ACP > Support > Redis (under System Information) > "View"

5 hours ago, annadaa said:

I believe I understood that the applications were tested by IPS before being published.

IPS may be doing some testing and review of the code individuals submit on the marketplace. IPS also undoubtedly does review of their own code. Yet, as we are all imperfect humans, and as we run these applications in a multitude of environments and in an multitude of configurations, best practices say that we should be testing and performing user acceptance in controlled circumstances that mirror our production communities.

Just as IPS tested 4.5 prior to releasing it to us for beta testing, and just as talented developers do due diligence prior to release offerings on the marketplace, we too will continue to find unforeseen issues in spite of their best of intentions. A healthy development and integration ecosystem is dependent on the ability for thorough review of any modifications we make to our communities prior to our deployment on production environments. Having the ability to run local analysis and testing within a localhost environment furthers our ability to mitigate against unforeseen consequences for the individuals that have come to rely on our communities to simply just work, and to work well. No software company, given a near infinite resources (think Microsoft, Google, Apple) is successful at anticipating and eliminating critical bugs prior to shipping code. Any software company that thinks they can get this right in advance and offers that as a reassurance that things will just always work isn't taking the best perspective on the matter.

Limiting the mechanism to install and test things in a local development environment, as well meaning as it may have been, and for all the positives that may have been considered surrounding licensing, piracy and ease of use, ultimately hinders self-hosted communities from following these best practices and puts them at a disadvantage. It discourages the best practices of a thorough testing plan that, in my opinion, should be strongly encouraged by the vendor. A good portion of IPS customers use their cloud offerings and likely never touch code. They don't want to, and this works for them.

However, the ability, even if in some sort of controlled opt-in mechanism (i.e. the distribution of the IPS dev package), to download resources directly from the marketplace is a need for self-hosting communities that follow best practices. The vendor's willingness to enable and encouragement of development best practices, by extension, furthers their brand and reach as the stability of the platform on the various sites that run their solution is noted by others who ultimately end up becoming new customers.

I don't think IPS is trying to do anything other than to minimize the support overhead for existing customers. I'm sure, in their best of efforts to simplify things, they missed the use case for those of us who use a similar methodology to their own, and I'm hopeful they'll acknowledge this oversight and course correct quickly. We are, after all, imperfect humans, and this is just the sort of thing beta testing should highlight.

I'm hopeful this is an oversight that will be promptly addressed prior to release.

"Solar flares" 

In all seriousness, though, it looks like some issue with encoding. With no idea what the code is or what it's setup to do, we'd just be speculating.

That seems rather broken. Are you sure you haven't accidentally added it to your non-registerable e-mail address filters?

@Makoto can you share your plans for 4.5 support? Thanks 🙂

@Makoto can you share your plans for 4.5 support?

You can change the root app portion of the URL by editing the furl.json file in applications/<the app you're interested in>/data/furl.json.

☝️ this guy is your best bet. But, be gentle with him, please. He has about 2,403 more things to upgrade for 4.5, and we need him to survive the long and cold winter.

56 minutes ago, hpcrazy said:

I would like to sell the streaming link to all members and in such case of course it would not work.

I'm not sure I understand this. You would add the group as a secondary group, so anyone who is registered on your community could purchase the product. It would not be necessarily limited to people already in a group. Purchasing the tickets adds the secondary group to the existing member, giving them permission to access the working link.

Customization is always an option too though.

Thinking a bit more about this, you could create a link only forum that is available/visible only to members in a given usergroup, and set up the product to move a member into that usergroup upon purchase. I guess depending on the number events, this might get unwieldy.

But something else to consider.

So:

1. Create member group for attendees to hpcrazy's virtual birthday bash
2. Create a forum with access only to those who are members of the group created in #1
3. Create product in store for ticket to attend that moves members who purchase into the group created in #1
4. Create a calendar entry and link to the product in the store created in #3
5. Member sees event in calendar, follows link to purchase tickets, successful purchase moves them into usergroup, they now have access to forum in #2 that has a thread to event or the forum itself is the link