Matt

Wow, great work! If you have the means to do this, then this is an excellent start. It's also worth reevaluating plugins every 6 months or so to see if they are still effective or if you rarely use them or they had no impact on your community.

Fairly soon, we're going to start getting some information out on how to prepare for v5. We want to get the timing right so that people aren't making huge changes to their community and then having to wait a few months for v5. The basic things will be PHP version, MySQL version, big changes (support desk, status updates, tagging, etc) along with third party things (theme editing, plugins, etc).

We have to kind of feel our way through it. We have milestones, like: Alpha 1 Upgradable Alphas Upgradable from 4.x Alphas Beta x lots Final But the timescales are really determined by how much feedback and how many bug reports we get. Rarely, we need to rethink a feature or code and do a bit of reworking. I would expect the beta process to be fairly short given how thorough we are with the alpha. We've yet to build zips and have people install it on various servers which always adds a little volume to the tracker. That'll be coming up fairly soon.

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Changed Current Release to No

If we're doing infinite scrolling for topics then it makes sense to do the same for topic lists, which means that on several pages, the footer would not be accessible, but on other pages it would be. That's a poor experience IMO. Another option is to do it in a container, but that may be a bit odd too. We have discussed this internally for years but can't really come to a consensus on how to do it. Infinite scroll would solve a lot of problems too, especially in figuring out pagination which is quite complicated and expensive to do.

The one big barrier to this is that you may never see the footer of your site again, and that is an important area to a lot of customers.

We don't use AI on a wide scale like that, and I don't think AI is quite there yet. I use AI in a few ways, but you always have to check the output as it's often wrong, or uses method names, and database table columns that don't exist. I use Github Copilot which has access to our Github repository so it can learn about our code and make sensible suggestions from either prompts, or auto-complete, for example: CleanShot 2024-07-18 at 09.01.20.mp4 I sometimes use ChatGPT to avoid looking up syntax or functions and to avoid a bit of trial and error which probably saves 5-10 minutes on a bad day. These tools can help a little, but they don't really wholesale fix issues and find errors. I think that'll come eventually. During development of Invision Community 5, we have several safeguards in place to minimise bugs. Every single change is put into review via a pull request before it is merged into the development branch. The review has an automated PHP lint tool that checks for syntax issues and won't allow it to be merged if it contains them. We also do a human review on not only the code, but also the change to make sure it does what we wanted it to do. Some of these reviews go back and forth for weeks, others are merged quickly. That said, bugs are part of software development, that's why we have alpha and beta testing. The v3 to v4 transition was complicated as it was a complete rewrite from scratch, we had a much smaller development team and it took much longer than originally planned.

We're up to Alpha 4 over in the secret alpha testing club and things are progressing nicely. There's been a lot of improvements to the theme editor, and the text editor. We've made some improvements based on feedback to several areas including advertisements as well as fixed a ridiculous number of bugs. I think the alpha testers will agree that it's pretty stable now and closer to beta than a raw alpha. We'll be launching Alpha 5 tomorrow and this will be upgradable via the AdminCP. Internally, we're going to test a clone of this site and upgrade that to see how that goes. In the mean time, is there anyone else here that wants to join the alpha team? We're ready for more people if you are. Just let me know! If you're just curious, you can follow the releases and fixes here.

Changed Current Release to No

If you're basing this on the alpha, then just keep in mind it's alpha and we're still very much working on it.