Matt

Changed Current Release to No

Well. That was an unfortunate typo.

So broadly speaking, a beta will be a true beta whereas in the past with new major versions, it's more alpha-like in that we might add some more functionality, or refactor bits of code on whim which means you get a really lengthy beta testing phase. With v5, we're being more careful to ensure the quality of the product, and even now it's incredibly stable and very polished and much more beta-like than alpha. That said, we are aware that we may need to revisit some features and tweak them, or potentially re-work bits of code so we're not quite ready for beta status. We're really hoping for a public beta by September. We're aware that we're running out of year and before long Thanksgiving arrives and signals the start of the holiday season. We haven't made any firm decisions about release schedules in terms of which Invision Community packages get beta first. My instinct right now is to release both the classic version and the Invision Community but we'll confirm closer to the time. We may stagger the final release, but that would be just to prevent support becoming overwhelmed with upgrades. But more pressingly, the next steps are: - [Coming next week] Public alpha: an install of Invision Community v5 for everyone to test, offer feedback and post bugs on. - Developer alpha: we've gathered a very small group of contributors to test and give feedback on the development tools - Finalise v4 to v5 upgrade tests - Public beta

Maybe sooner.

Thanks for the interest! We're about to enter the next phase of alpha testing, likely next week where more can participate.

There has been no significant changes to the follow system in v5. In terms of ETA, there can be no precise time until we know it's finished. v5 itself is pretty straight forward, but to launch it, we will need updates to our website, documentation, etc which all take time. Progress is good though, we're up to alpha 7 and hundreds of fixes have already gone in, lots of features changed based on feedback and even a few things added we've yet to blog about. We're ready for the next step in alpha testing, and we expect to have more news on that next week.

Changed Current Release to No

Changed Current Release to No

Do you mean like this? CleanShot 2024-07-25 at 10.00.00.mp4 August. Our current plan is this: - Test upgrades on clones of our own sites and convert our custom plugins/apps to v5 to weed out the low level bugs (in progress) - Have a small group of contributors to be given the zip to install, play with and give feedback for a short period (up next) - Open beta.

Q4 2024 is our current estimate.

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.

Changed Long ID to 5000008

Changed Long ID to 5000007

Changed Long ID to 5000006

Changed Current Release to No

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.