Matt

16 hours ago, AlexJ said:

It would be nice if Commerce can get some traction in donation tracking perspective. We have limited subscription option but bills are due every month/year. So having donation goals and who donated against that goal, provides more transparency. 

Already in, but we've not spoken about it yet.

10 hours ago, TSP said:

Yeah, I have to say I'm also worried about ad placement. We need a lot of control over how and where they are included. For example we have some ads which should display as a "horseshoe" around the content. To achieve this currently we have our own wrapper class around the necessary elements etc. 

Also, from looking in the video from Ehren there is a lot of settings to control and clicking into all sorts of menus with settings. Will there be some way to control it by editing a json file instead for example? That would make it easier and faster for many of us frontend and backend programmers to copy theme settings between different installations etc. Essentially what I'm asking for would be a "source mode" for the theme editor settings view on the frontend.

Those aren't theme settings as you're used to, those are CSS variables and are exported along with the theme, so you can just export/import the theme between installations.

Pages is its own thing, I'd imagine more complex templating for databases will be retained for that.

1 minute ago, TSP said:

I assume there is still some tool to export and import/upgrade custom templates and template hooks? Having to log in to each admin panel and define all these custom templates and hooks would be a pain.

Yes, theme export still works as you'd expect containing theme editor settings, any custom CSS from the admin and any designer CSS/JS.

2 minutes ago, TSP said:

Is custom theme variables still a thing and accessible within these templates? And will theme variables that have been modified on the installation be reset or kept upon upgrade/import of a theme?

Yes, they are retained. The default theme does not have any custom settings, so the tab isn't shown.

2 minutes ago, TSP said:

Will the same variables and functions we have available to us when making a template hook today be available to us from these new custom templates and hooks? I realize the names of methods, how you may invoke them, template logic etc., will be different, but my point is; will all the variables and functions that can be used in the template we hook into be available to us? 

Yes, you can use existing template syntax in the custom templates.

2 minutes ago, KT Walrus said:

You wouldn't need VC funding as you already have IPS Cloud business generating capital to invest in software development. Anyway, this is OT now, but it occurred to me that not having an open source version of your product is hindering your ability to grow to a large player in this industry.

And, I fear that you are about to lose even more third-party developers with your transition to v5 resulting in IC being a very niche product. Third-party developers are key to almost all successful growing internet companies.

Happily, this isn't the case, and marketplace sales have declined by 75% over the past few years showing that sales are not on the strength of after-market add-ons.

Just now, KT Walrus said:

Well then, please consider open sourcing v5. Many many of the most successful companies in our industry have an open source version of their products. Rather than shrinking revenue and profits, open source greatly accelerates sales and reduces future development and maintenance expenses as you can leverage the open source community and get millions of users and hundreds of thousands of paying customers. Also, it could lead to IPS Cloud being more reasonably priced, generating more sales and revenue.

Most of those successful companies have taken millions in VC funding so they can pay people until some point in the future they start making a profit.

2 minutes ago, KT Walrus said:

@Matt Please consider open sourcing v4 when you release v5.

Considered and decided against it faster than a quantum computer could have managed it.

16 minutes ago, DawPi said:

Publicly released. Are you aware of private, custom mods? 🙂

Esther is probably the most trusted name in that space, so we do indeed have that covered.

9 minutes ago, AlexJ said:

I wouldn't use IPS because IPS Nexus/Commerce can't even do basic donation tracking

Already in v5.

9 minutes ago, AlexJ said:

Why you need to push us to XF man..... I am not touching vB for sure.. so only choice XF for me. 

I think the sensible thing to do is wait for all the news of v5 to come out and then make an informed decision on your future. Trying to extrapolate v5 from a few dev blogs may lead to rash decisions.

I'd love to keep you as a customer, but if you do wish to move to xF then on the plus side you won't need to worry about new versions and there being significant changes in your future. 😄

That is correct, you can add, but you cannot remove or modify existing data.

We do have a limited template front-end hook system (yet to be blogged) but that again does not have a replace option.

What do you need to do that custom profile fields can't do?

12 minutes ago, Adriano Faria said:

Hello,

Is this part specific for content? I suppose we will be able to do this in other places too and not only in content related stuff, right? There are tons of templates and forms out there that we can extend today.

What other forms do you want extended? We did discuss internally the registration form where custom profile fields aren't powerful enough (in that there requires some PHP/SQL processing of input data).

For now.. dum dum duuuuuuuuum. We have no plans to remove it.

Great modification, and that will still be possible in v5.

I'm not really sure what is driving customer habits beyond what we're seeing as trends in the industry. The community market has become more professional and hobbyist communities which used to keep the marketplace alive by spending $5 to $50 on something they felt they needed for their members are being consumed by social media or other hosted apps like Discord.

My hope is that after market developers focus on few projects but more impactful ones. Wordpress has WooCommerce and Yoast which are incredibly popular and generate a lot of revenue.

Proxy classes/code-hooks just couldn't continue. Our code base was years overdue a clean up but it would have caused massive support overhead and massive after market development headaches were most of the marketplace needed updating.

2 hours ago, marklcfc said:

4/6 of mine I paid someone on here to make, as they were specific requests. My forum wouldn’t be all what it is without a few of them at least as it adds something different

What modifications do you have?

I agree. It wasn’t to suggest mods aren’t popular just that statistically more people choose to run “vanilla” installations. 
 

There has been a shift downwards in new applications for sure. I think that is just a byproduct of the forum market maturing and changing. 

I’m unsure what the question is there. 🙂 

I'll repeat what I said in my first blog:

Quote

Invision Community 5 represents a much-needed reset. It is a moment to reassess everything we know about extending frameworks and construct definitive pathways and workflows that serve you better.

Our aim is for you to continue crafting exceptional applications that bring fresh functionality to the Invision Community while protecting the integrity of our core functionality.

A Quick Recap

• Generic broad reaching tools such as monkey patching and template overloading have been removed.
• New precision tools with a specific use-case have been created.
• There are less opportunities to overwrite and change our UI and functionality but easier ways to extend and create new functionality.

We are being very intentional in restricting what can be changed with regards to our functionality and UI. None of this is by accident or an unintended consequence. We are providing tools to create features that side alongside our functionality, and less opportunities to replace our functionality.

We will have a better suite of development tools to enable this.

The third party developers are very important to us, but most customers choose to not use add-ons or modifications. Based on statistics we collect, the most popular plug-in on the marketplace has less than 250 current installations, and the most popular application has less than 600 installations.

I'd be surprised if only 20% of currently available plugins and applications were possible with v5. There may need to be some refactoring, some adjustment of the feature set but it's too early to say "well, we're going to lose 80% of the marketplace".

PHP just started crying.

I completely understand the anxiety and I get the fatalism, but please have patience. Wait until we have laid out the suite of tools. Then consider if some of your mods are even worth porting over. Consider your highest quality apps and then let us know if you need guidance on how to migrate them to v5.

Remember this is breaking news. Some of this code was only finished a few days ago. We are in the pre-pre-alpha phase. We are releasing news and listening to feedback, so there is no need to panic.

Also keep in mind that v4 will be maintained until 2025 at least.

33 minutes ago, teraßyte said:

No matter what awesome tools you may have in place, being unable to overload (almost) all classes like before is a huge issue.

But it can’t continue. In the past, we’ve changed the signature params in getItemsWithPermissions() and had to patch the release as tickets pile up as apps which overload that just break.

Internally we have a rule not to touch function params of commonly hooked methods. It means we can’t make changes to our PHP code without breaking loads of client sites. This means we can’t clean up and modernise our own code.

Just now, Charles said:

Sure. Basically, when we think Daniel, we think llamas.

Pretty sure it’s alpacas.

10 minutes ago, DawPi said:

I'm just curious, @Daniel F as far I remember you wrote that your SEO app will be ported into v5. But how? I can count all hooks used by this app and there are ~ 15 file hooks. Many of them are hooked into "not allowed by v5" areas. So how? 🙂

He will stare at me without blinking until I add in new tools. He can be quite scary.

Just now, Adriano Faria said:

Once and for all, will we be able to hook in class?

No, code hooks are no longer in Invision Community 5.

We have the listeners, UIExtension, menus and more limited theme-hooks as the primary toolkit.

4 minutes ago, DawPi said:

To be clear - inside system/ directory we would have access to Content and Member folders only? What if we want to adjust/modify Output/Sitemap/Helpers/Lang etc. classes and methods inside them?

Correct, there is less opportunity to overload/hook into/touch Invision Community 5. If you can give me some examples of why you'd want to overload those methods, we can help guide you to newer tools or understand why there is a need and consider adjustments to the dev toolkit.

1 hour ago, Kirill Gromov said:

The hooking of methods seemed to me close to ideal in IPS4 (although it had big problems), I did not think that IPSs would abandon this coding trick in IC5, which helped to fill the market with excellent solutions. Disappointed. But I still hope the team will please us with good news. Pending.

Monkey patching (code hooks) were convenient but the cost was very high in that we couldn't significantly alter our code without destroying most existing modifications causing WSOD, ISE500 or other errors on client communities. As PHP 8 becomes more strict about typing, return types, etc - a simple function signature change could break modifications.

Clearly, allowing almost every single class and method to be overloaded is not something that we could continue doing.

We also want to be a little more protective of some of our UI and flows. We want to build a toolkit that lets you build amazing add-ons and extra functionality but it will mean there is less scope for smaller apps that change some of our existing functionality.

The good thing about these blogs is that we get to have a conversation and learn from each other.

1 hour ago, Dll said:

Maybe it would have been a plan to hold off announcing this 1 tool until you were ready to announce the rest, or at least some of them. 

I'm always keen to get information out as soon as we have it fixed on our end. There are pros and cons but the earlier the feedback, the more chance we have at addressing it and making sure we've not missed any angles. Give it a few months and the v5 codebase will be much stabler and we'll be more reluctant to make big changes.

Some of the tools we're still actively working on, and stuff like theme tools are only about 80% complete, so there may be some gaps between blogs but we'll post them as soon as we have them ready.

7 minutes ago, Ocean West said:

So essentially what you are describing is a transaction (more than just crud operations) along with Pub/Sub or a simple que type system

Not exactly, it's more like the JS event system, you can listen in on events and execute your code when those events are triggered.