Matt

Welcome to our October developer's update! After a frantic few months of working on the PHP8 transition, we made it across the line with our November release (4.7.4), which requires PHP8 as the minimum version. Reminder: Invision Community 4.7.4 will disable plugins and applications that are not compatible with PHP8, and the only way to re-enable them is to upload a new version. Hopefully, you've had time to get your apps updated and through our review system. Thank you again for your patience throughout this process. The next big change will be PHP8.2, which changes how DateTime is overloaded, but that's a headache for 2023. Make sure you use PHP8 with your local development environments and set your IDE to PHP8 if it has this feature. If you need a refresher on the new functionality that comes with PHP8, then I recommend this blog or this video. Impacting Code Changes We've been very careful to avoid adjusting any parameter signatures this month, and we will endeavour to get you plenty of notice if we need to change things on a central method. The main change to look out for this month is the change to IPS\<app>\extensions\core\ContentRouter /** * @brief Can be shown in similar content */ public $similarContent = TRUE; We added a public method variable to note if this content type can be used in the similar content widget. This change fixes a bug where some content types, like Commerce packages, appeared in the widget but with incompatible metadata. Holiday Release Schedule It's that time of year when we start planning releases around the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. We try and avoid larger releases at this point in the year to reduce the stress levels on our support and development teams. No one wants a crisis during what should be a relaxing time with family and friends. The current schedule looks like this: 2 November: November release (4.7.4) First week of December: Smaller bug-fixing release (4.7.5) Early January: Patches or a very focused bug-fixing release (4.7.5.1/4.7.6) February: Full monthly releases as usual. Deprecations This month, we removed the older guest page caching. Those looking for a better replacement are having success with a free plan from Cloudflare. We also removed the Facebook promotion tool as Facebook keeps raising the bar for approval, and we want to focus on a Zapier replacement coming soon. Finally, we also removed Vigilink, which no longer works. Other News The November release features commits from @HeadStand, who is working with us part-time to chew through the backlog and work on feature improvements. She is a coding machine and has filled my inbox with GitHub pull request notifications which I'm very happy to receive! That's all for this month, happy developing!