Matt

We're excited to bring you a first look at our new and innovative Invision Community feature: Live Topics. Live Topics is a hosted live chat and question-and-answer event that is converted into a forum topic upon completion. It combines the fun and togetherness of a live event with the permanence of a forum topic allowing you to continue the conversation long after the event has ended. Your event doesn't have to just be text based! Live Topics allows you to feature a live video for your attendees. You can present to your attendees while fellow hosts select messages from the attendee chat to raise as questions for answers via the video or message replies from other attendees. Once the live event has ended, the questions and answers are converted into a permanent forum topic. Additional replies to the forum topic can reply to a specific question raised in the live event. If you choose to answer on the live video, you can mark the timestamp of the answer, allowing members to jump to that segment of the video from the forum topic. We're thrilled to finally share details of this new and exciting Invision Community feature. Although this is just a first look at Live Topics, we will follow this blog up with others drilling into the details, and multiple use cases Live Topics offers. Live Topics is unique to Invision Community and will soon be available to selected cloud plans.

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!

When we speak to community moderators of busy sites about what they want to see in future Invision Community versions, most ask for ways to improve daily workflows. Community moderators are at the heart of every community, and those working with busy sites quickly find that repeating the same tasks reveals ways to save clicks and precious time. We recently released our alert system, which is a great way to get information to a single user or an entire group of members. Alerts can be set so the members have to reply before they can continue interacting with the community. Invision Community's November release now allows moderators to send a personal alert message to the author of the content they are moderating when their content is hidden, split, locked or moved. This video takes you through the workflow when hiding a comment. Combining the alert feature into the moderation workflow makes it easier to inform your members that you've taken action on their content. For example, you may notice a member posting a topic in the wrong forum. It's now straightforward to move the topic and let the author know why it's been moved and where to find it. Perhaps you've had to hide some content that doesn't fit your community guidelines. You can now let the author know when hiding the topic and the reason it's been hidden. Informing your members why you've taken action on their content helps educate, remind them of your community guidelines when needed and prevent confusion when they cannot locate the content they recently posted. Making a personal connection when moving or hiding a member's content helps keep a positive relationship throughout the community. Viewing alert replies While we were at it, we have also made it easier to track and respond to alert replies when sending them to large numbers of members. From November onwards, you will see the number of replies sent to your message when viewing alerts in the Moderator Control Panel. Clicking the reply count will show all personal message replies to that alert via a top-level filter. This new time-saving feature will come to all Invision Community platforms in November. @Daniel F proudly led development of this feature. 👏 We'd love your thoughts; let us know in the comments!

Welcome to our September developer's update! I can say with some confidence that both the Invision Community team and our marketplace developers have had a busy September as we prepare for PHP8. Thank you for your patience with this necessary step. As I've mentioned elsewhere, PHP8 is a pretty big jump and is much more strict about many things, and now throws fatal errors when before it would have been a harmless notice. PHP7 is now end of life, and security updates will no longer be available from November. Preparing for PHP8 I've talked about this on the forums a lot over the last few weeks, but I'll summarise the timeline here so you can prepare your plugins and apps to be PHP8-ready. September release (4.7.2): The PHP8 scanner will disable any plugins and applications that would cause issues with PHP8, but Invision Community owners can re-enable them if they choose to do so. October release (4.7.3): A warning shows in the AdminCP if Invision Community is installed with PHP7. As of October, the PHP8 scanner will disable plugins, but they can be re-enabled. November release (4.7.4): The PHP8 scanner will disable plugins and applications found not to be PHP8-ready. They cannot be re-enabled via the AdminCP. The only way to re-enable them is to upload a new version. Code changes to be aware of October hasn't been the biggest of releases, but it does come with the new Events front-end for Calendar, and this changed the parameter signature for getItemsWithPermission(), which is probably the most overloaded method we have. The new parameter signature is as follows: public static function getItemsWithPermission( $where=array(), $order=NULL, $limit=10, $permissionKey='read', $includeHiddenItems=\IPS\Content\Hideable::FILTER_AUTOMATIC, $queryFlags=0, \IPS\Member $member=NULL, $joinContainer=FALSE, $joinComments=FALSE, $joinReviews=FALSE, $countOnly=FALSE, $joins=NULL, $skipPermission=FALSE, $joinTags=TRUE, $joinAuthor=TRUE, $joinLastCommenter=TRUE, $showMovedLinks=FALSE, $location=NULL ) Note, $location has now been added to the list. If you overload getItemsWithPermission then you will need to update any hooks with his new parameter, or it will be flagged via the PHP8 scanner. The reason for this addition is to allow an easier way to get items via a latitude and longitude lookup. If you manage this elsewhere, you might find using getItemsWithPermission a much simpler way. @Daniel F has also been working on improving the GraphQL API, and the GraphQL library has been updated to 14.11.6. We'll cover the upcoming GraphQL changes in a future blog. Deprecations Invision Community is a mature product, and some features and code that we added in the past no longer make sense, work correctly or are no longer appropriate for a modern platform running on well-maintained servers. You can see the upcoming deprecations in this topic. I suspect the biggest change will be removing the option to allow Display Names to form part of the authentication credentials when logging in, which is coming out in November. The other to watch for is the removal of the sockets fallback for when curl is not installed on the server or using a version older than 7.36. It's worth noting that curl 7.36 was released in March 2014 and now has hundreds of CVEs (known vulnerabilities) however, our techs still come across the odd server still using an older version. We will likely run AdminCP notifications to warn those affected of the upcoming socket fallback deprecation nearer the time, as it has no version attached. Just be mindful of this in your own apps if you use sockets directly for anything. You may also note that we've started adding deprecations to the release notes. As a reminder, we do not approve Marketplace submissions that restore functionality we've removed. That's it for September! Hopefully, it won't take too long to run through your apps and plugins. As always, comment here, or reach out via the forums if you need anything clarifying. Happy developing!

This is our October maintenance release. Key changes include: Updates to the Calendar App (now Events app) to showcase online and offline events

This is our September maintenance release. Key changes include: PHP 8 Marketplace app/plugin Compatibility Scanner (please read before upgrading) Improvements to marking posts as solutions