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Welcome to the final Alpha release of Invision Community 5! It’s the final alpha…Yes, that time has finally come. Two alphas after the last time I said this. But this time I mean it! If you want to know what was changed, the release notes are here. We’ve now moved the Bug Tracker to our support forums ahead of the beta, so please report any issues there. The hold up was due to an optimisation branch to reduce what was a silly amount of queries per page. We wanted this to go into an alpha as there’s a lot of changes, and we didn’t want the first beta to be obviously broken. It doesn’t set the right vibe. 🫠 Why so many alphas?I’ve seen this question pop up a lot, and it’s a valid question. We’re on Alpha 16. That’s a pretty big number. We started releasing alphas 14 weeks ago, so we’ve averaged just over 1 release a week. Does this mean that it’s been a really bad process and something has gone terribly wrong? Absolutely not! Version 5 has a brand new UI, brand new CSS, loads of new and rewritten JS, loads of new features, a new editor, a new page builder, and so on. That’s a lot to not only test to make sure there are no bugs, but also in terms of feedback from testers. We’ve made a lot of changes over the past 14 weeks based on that feedback. We also decided to make sure we kept releasing alphas as often as we could. We didn’t want to wait 3-4 weeks before each release. When we move to beta, it is to signal the end of new features, large refactors and any potential u-turns or revisions to existing new features. We want beta to just be about bugs, bugs, bugs and not introducing new ones by adding surprise new features. In terms of stability, I am completely confident that you could use this alpha on your production community and be totally fine. I know this because we’re using it on a few private sites internally. You may consider an alpha to be a raw and largely untested piece of software, but with Invision Community 5 it is not the case. It’s very polished and very well tested already so we’re hoping for a very short beta testing phase. It’s more akin to an early ‘release candidate’ than rough and ready product to be beaten into shape. We could have released 6 alphas and 8 betas, the labels aren’t that important. Now is the time to move into beta though as all the heavy lifting and major testing has been completed. I’ll do a wrap up blog post on our main site to review a few newish features that we haven’t announced yet (but you’ve been using here for ages now). Thanks for your patience. 👏

Guess what? Alpha 14 is on it’s way through CloudLand® If you’re curious as to what has been fixed, check out the release notes. Will there be another alpha? Or will it be beta? Find out next week! Or maybe in an hour when I release another alpha as this one broke something important.

https://www.specsavers.co.uk

Welcome to Beta.. uh.. Alpha 15! We were planning on Beta 1 this week, but we’re working on a few branches that aren’t quite ready, including a lovely optimisation branch to make sure v5 is ready to go but there were a few bugs that were being reported multiple times, including weird Chrome/Edge bugs so, welcome to Alpha 15! Out now in all good stores CloudLand®

I’ll just add a few thoughts and a little history on top of the excellent technical details Matt added above. When we first approached v5 and the need for a new editor given that CKEditor 4 was end of life, no longer open source and only supported with a commercial license, we naturally went with CKEditor 5. What happened with CKEditor 5?Well, it wasn’t great. CKEditor 5, like TipTap, and all other modern editors had a very different way of parsing content. Instead of treating everything as strings, it wants to create nodes for each tag, which meant that HTML editing would be problematic. Matt spend a few months working on it and we got it into a finished state but there were a lot of issues. The first was that there was no easy way to add custom buttons without recompiling the JS, which made it impossible for a distributed piece of software. Secondly, the compiled JS was huge and it was taking 3-4 seconds for the editor to open. And finally, I became very uncomfortable with the direction of travel CKEditor was taking. They made it clear with recent blog posts that they only wanted open source projects to use CKEditor without a commercial license. Their open source version switched license types and forced a “Powered by CKEditor” icon on every editor at the bottom of the editing window. To remove this, and to use it in a commercial product you’d need a commercial license. I consider this fair. After all, the CKEditor developers should get paid for their work in paid software and clearly their current model of providing an open source product with an optional license wasn’t generated enough revenue. We contacted them and enquired about a license that we could distribute, that did not use their cloud deployment/CDN and did not use any of their advanced plugins and we were quoted $35,000/year with basic support of a maximum of 24 support tickets a year. So we were left with a bloated and slow implementation that could not allow for custom buttons that cost $35,000 every year with the risk of that price increasing year on year. Even though we had it finished and working in v5, we knew we had to make a tough decision. Enter TipTapWe did a lot of research into various editors. From fully functional editors such as TinyMCE to more raw editors such as Quill and just about everything in between. We wanted the best balance of ease of development, good support and speed. TipTap fit all those requirements when others did not. We bought an enterprise license which gives us access to their developers via Slack which has been really helpful. The cost of this license is about a third of CKEditor 5. So what about HTML editingLike CKEditor 5, and all modern editors, doesn’t think of input as merely a string to parse into blocks, but it looks at the document (the editor contents) as a tree of nodes. Each node is handled in a specific way, so you need to ensure all possible HTML tags are handled via extensions. This is great because it’s faster, more secure and arguably easier to write extensions to handle custom buttons and plugins but it also means the editor has no concept of ‘source mode’. There is no source, it’s an internal array of items. It is a common request but there is no clean solution at this time and none of the suggested workarounds actually work reliably. However, we also felt it was important to take a step back and, as Matt said above, not just give up and add in a text area instead of an editor when you want ‘HTML editing’ because for one, most people do not not to compose a complicated post in a text area manually entering HTML tags. They want to edit the already created HTML in the editor, which isn’t easy. Clicking edit would destroy the contents as TipTap has no way to create a document tree for random HTML pasted in. Part of this solution was to embrace the ease of which TipTap can add extensions. It is the reason we created the editor permissions framework to allow you (the admin) to have specific functionality that others do not get. It’s important to remember that v5.0.0 is the very start of the future for us. We have lots of plans to add more extensions, such as tables in minor point releases but we have to draw a line and say “this is fine for the first version”. If you are using source mode heavily and pasting in JS and tracking code, then let us know the specifics. I bet there’s an easy way to do it in v5 that doesn’t rely on your hand editing posts which is time consuming. It’s also likely that you won’t upgrade to v5 right away and watch how it develops as v4 will still be supported with bug fixes. Hopefully you can see that TipTap is not just a second choice because CKEditor was expensive, it’s actually far superior in every way but also we didn’t just decide to remove HTML editing on a whim. Let’s work together to build proper tools and not just give up and throw in a rough workaround.

So good! Well done to the whole team as usual; you have all made history for Invision Community! 🥳 I’ll be upgrading on my live site as it is still a fresh community and there isn’t a lot of data by way of topics, posts, attachments, members, etc. It should be a smooth upgrade and can only help iron out any issues during the v4 → v5 upgrade process. I always run a vanilla installation without plugins or full on customisation too which mitigates the majority of issues that can come up.

Only you know what’s good for your community, but don’t let the keyboard warriors on the internet sway you either way. Do a feature comparison, be logical in what you require (some do a pros and cons list), and you’ll find the right fit. When there is too much incorrect and fanboy/fangirl noise, you’ll never be able to pick your ideal software.

It’s about to be released. ☠️

The lack of Undo button costed me a good long post here where I talked about my motivation and experience here, as a tester, about IPS, XF, some required addons, wanted features. Pleeease add this button :) Anyway, everything looks great, I like your team, it is very nice to be able to talk to you like this (not a client yet, so have no rights on the main community, but this ability to talk adds to my decision what software to choose) and I am waiting for Beta.

We’re now using Alpha 13. This alpha fixes a few minor issues with installation (minor because installation totally failed which means alpha 12 technically only had 1 bug). It also brings more stability to positioning things, a few UI updates and general bug fixes. The full list is here.

I am absolutely in love with the improvements that have been made to mobile viewing. As someone who prefers to do as much on mobile as possible, I really appreciate the obvious work put into the UI and navigation for mobile users. A previous frustration with v4 was the lack of having the same functions and information available on the mobile view and with v5 I am hard-pressed to find any of these same limitations. It no longer feels like mobile is a barebones copy, but a true extension of the community. I was also super impressed to see the features of the new theme editor, especially the ability to have a live view of all formats while you're editing. I enjoy this focus on simplicity and ease of use in 2024 when we all have better things to do than manually edit css files. It took me a while to find anything I thought needed improvement, but after some consideration here is what I could come with: The mobile topic list view, at least to me, is a tad confusing. The author's photo on the left, with the last posted user's written name also on the left gives the immediate impression that the topic was posted by Ehren instead of the author. I would suggest moving the last post author back to the right somehow, in order to create that separation of the two authors. Even just switching the last post author with the view/reply stats would do the trick. I find the tag placement a little… off. This is a tough one because I understand that you've got to be able to account for many different uses, text-lengths, and amounts of tags in the layout, so your options are limited I imagine. In a perfect world, I think I would love to see tags placed at the very bottom of the topic view in its own row or along side the view/reply counters. My gripe with tags is some topics have them, and some don't, so when it inserts tags into the middle of the information like pictured above, it kind of throws off the flow for the non-tagged topic, if you will. By putting them at the bottom of the topic view, I think would alleviate this break-up of the flow and instead allow it to be perceived more as additional instead of information that the other topics are missing. In absolute fairness, I am an old man with bad eyes for seeing tiny pictures and a distaste for tags in general, so this could just be my “get off my lawn” moment. Overall, I am thoroughly impressed with everything I have seen so far with this new version. I am not a current customer of your product simply out of the lack of need, but this new version has me sitting around asking myself how to explain to my wife why I need this just so I can play around with it. Keep up the amazing work and thank you for taking the time to review my feedback.

Invision v5 doesn't look bad and really makes an impression, but something is missing, and our users keep saying this over and over again. You go to an Invision Community page, log in, or visit it later, and you don't immediately see at first glance if there's anything new. Users have the option to create their own streams, and in the Invision Community, this is also displayed at the top as a Icon. Would it be possible to get a badge that shows if there are new contents in this stream, and maybe even how much is new? This would give the user a wonderful overview of what is new where in the community. Would something like this be feasible?

This has been addressed for the next update 🤝

Agreed. These buttons will be relocated to the header in the next update 🤝

Hello team, v5 is shaping up quite nicely! I am still really disappointed about deprecating HTML support. This is really a major aspect of a CMS software I want to use for my website, and I need a way for me (and only me, the admin) to edit the HTML source of my articles and courses, even if that means doing it in the ACP instead of using the editor. Even if that means giving up on using the editor for these articles once I start customizing the HTML. I use Invision Community to publish Articles and Courses and have used custom HTML in v4 for multiple reasons, including (but not limited to): 1. HTML anchorsFirst let me stress that I am aware of the TOC widget however I can’t use it because I don’t want the TOC to be in its own widget space at the top of the article or in the sidebar (where I place ads to monetize my site). So in v4 I’ve designed my own TOC that is within the article (as is the case in most blogs/articles around the web), and I’m perfectly happy with it. Seems like with v5, I will be losing that capability, and that is worrisome. Moreover I use HTML anchors outside the TOC, for example to link to a specific part of the article within the article itself, or somewhere else in the community. For example I may respond to someone in the forum and linking to a specific HTML anchor in an article. Seems like I will no longer be able to do that in v5 (unless I use the TOC widget which I don’t want to use). For reference here’s what my TOC looks like — and I want to keep it that way: 2. Custom HTML boxesI know I can use the boxes from the editor however it seems like I’d be limited in the design. For examples the boxes require a title, when I don’t need one. Here’s an example of a custom HTML box I’m using to highlight tips in my articles, and I was hoping I could create my own kind of custom boxes for my courses as well. 3. Custom buttons or custom HTML for styling text in unique waysOn our site we use custom styling for highlighting key commands to make them stand out. I have designed a custom Key-Command button for me (admin) and the moderators to use to highlight key commands in Articles, Courses or even in the forum. Unless I’m missing something, I don’t see a way to do this in v5? Here’s what it looks like: … in conclusionThis high level of flexibility allowing me to use HTML to customize my content with nearly endless possibilities is what really attracted me to the Invision Community platform, and by now I’ve implemented it in my workflow. I am constantly thinking of new ways I could use custom HTML for future articles or courses I intend to publish. Having to give up on these features would be a huge step backward for my site.

They are an open source product using the open source version. They wrote that blog one month after the version of CKEditor that requires attribution on every editor. If they have not added that, then they risk compliance issues - and CKEditor has a very active compliance department. But as far as I can tell, they don’t have a source mode editing function.

Yes, and yes. We haven’t done a huge amount of v4 upgrade testing, so maybe don’t do that on your live site.

definitely, we await alpha 16 & 17. it is a must until we get to alpha 100

That is simply not true. If you search on IPS for even a moment, you will find at least the reference to https://www.invisioneer.org/ And this directory: Invision CommunityProviders Directory

I’ve downloaded an old version of Xcode (which has an iOS 13 simulator) onto the 2015 MacBook Air and I can see the culprit in the code. I’ll do my best to make it more functional on older software 😅🤝

Hello, If possible, could you please elaborate on what you would like changed here? The entries are intended to be contained within a single box, with borders to separate them: There was an issue with a lack of margin between the title and the description if that’s what you’re referring to? That’ll be fixed in an upcoming version.

as much as I enjoy sparing with @Matt about features I think I must have - I am really enjoying the immense effort of the entire team :) I am hoping to disable all third party additions for a while and introducing the new normal as a feature not a failure. bravo on new beta!

It doesn’t really look very good to have the sign up/sign in buttons wedged between the mobile header and breadcrumb. Can we have the option/have them moved to the mobile header, to the right, where the logged-in user avatar would usually be?

Just for you Matt. Meet Aspen, my Japanese Spitz. 🥰

It’s working now. It wasn’t yesterday when I also posted the same links on my Club forum

Please add quick link editing by double clicking like in v4.

I love the option that Twitter has that allows you to quickly translate a post using Google Translator. Implementing this option on Invision Community would be a huge step forward! Another example is bsky.app, there is a link that opens a new page.

Yeah, so there are a few reasons From our perspective, source mode is kinda like giving up on using the editor. Yeah it enables you to do anything, but that also was the number 1 cause of the editor ending up in a broken state and needing to go in and edit HTML to fix it (or file a bug report/support ticket). We want to offer tools that just work, so that you and everyday users alike can simply use the editor's features without needing to give up and edit the source HTML We would like to implement modern features including realtime collaboration and AI. I don't want to get off track delving into the details on that but raw HTML editing doesn't play nicely with those features... Selection management and collision reconciliation become major concerns. Not only does tiptap not natively support it, neither did Ckeditor5. It's just a complicated thing to do the way editors work today because the HTML isn't the source of truth for the editor state. So it's not like we went in and decided to remove it, but rather it would have taken too much time writing loads of code to halfway emulate the way editors used to work. (Yes, I'm aware of the general HTML support ck5 plugin but from our experience it didn't work smoothly because it didn't properly distinguish between block and inline nodes. It also caused performance problems when you have a lot of levels of nesting)

This decision was made after attempting to utilize CKEditor5, but there were a couple critical limitations It would have cost a ridiculous fortune to use on distributed software because they changed their license structure from cke4. This is especially important when you consider the v4 pricing model assumed the cost was $0. Furthermore, despite the cost it came with very little support and assistance, whereas with Tiptap on the other hand we get direct access to their development team who have been very helpful The demos on their site may look really pretty and work in a very snappy manner, but what they don’t show you is, just like most editors today, it requires manually bundling their source code such that extending it would be impossible on the front end. We also found it didn’t play nice with js bundlers and weren’t able to get the bundle size down to an acceptable level. This ties into what I was saying about it being a custom bundled JS app in that CKEditor5 doesn’t really have the custom button/plugin marketplace CKEditor4 had. The short explanation is that they required extension of classes which only exist inside nested dependency modules to create plugins, so an externally loaded plugin wouldn’t really be able to extend the class. In CKEditor4, there was a global CKEDITOR variable which devs used to add toolbar buttons and do dev things. With tiptap we are able to deliver extensibility and robustness. I’m not in agreement on this. Unlike blogs or news publishing, on a forum-based community, the majority of content comes from users who really don’t need or want hyper control over the exact post layout and HTML structure. More advanced things like v4 source mode are generally only something you want admins doing, but the stance we’ve come to is that feels very much like giving up on using the editor to achieve things the right way. In 2024, you shouldn’t need raw HTML in a finished CMS application…. it isn’t effectively managing your content if that’s the case. You are correct that certain content structures are not going to be supported out of the box. That being said, We are going to be implementing table support in an early point release as it is such a commonly requested item There are a lot of features and quirks to consider with tables. We found CKEditor5’s solution had a lot of CSS and bloat which made it tricky to setup and have a very clunky feel in our software. If I were to sum up our perspective on Invision Communtiy 5, we want to make it really easy to use really powerful, modern tools. This requires simplifying some areas and changing how others work, including the editor. Tiptap was chosen after weeks comparing and rigorously testing available options and it stood out as the best option to achieve our goal.

Haha, you don’t have to believe me. The product speaks for itself! The team have been hard at work making sure it’s as good as it can be.

That is great news, thanks for replying. I can’t wait to read up your dev guides on how to achieve this (and I hope I can understand them). If I can do a TOC, add anchors to HTML links and give custom classes to span elements so that I can custom style them with CSS then that would be all I need.

The wait is definitely gonna be worth it! 🥳

In our community, many files and images are always attached. However, only a few users take care of scaling the images, which quickly leads to long and cluttered posts. Could we somehow get a unified thumbnail display for attachments that are not specifically embedded in the text, so that it looks much more organized? Maybe an option for the insert button that you can choose whether to insert full size or a preview image in the text. Display in the Invision Community: Display what it could look like:

Lazy loading images is only a good idea if the image is “below the fold” (outside the screen while the page loads). Since logos are at the top of the page, they will always be on the screen during page load, so lazy loading is not ideal for them. You’ll even get suggestions from PageSpeed tools telling you to remove the attribute if it exists.

Will we small self-hosted users ever get to see this amazing features? 🥹

Or perhaps only show the icon if previous display names exist. 👌

It should become an adult before it can go out to the dangerous world.

So close!

i guess i came late to the party

Yes, that menu has been removed entirely.

Today? ☀️😁

Maybe it has been released, but there has been no announcement about it. 🥷

Even though v5 uses very modern CSS code, care has been taken to ensure old devices can still render everything correctly thanks to fallback code. With that said, if the operating system on these devices purposely isn’t being upgraded, it becomes incredibly tough to start supporting them. The usage of iOS 13 is only 0.01% according to “CanIUse”, and I wasn’t even able to find a used 6S which was running iOS 13 on any marketplace website in my country, so this is most definitely a very uncommon situation. During development, I’ve been testing v5 using a Macbook Air from early 2015 (before the iPhone 6S was even announced) and it’s working great. I believe your iPhone 6S would also do the same if you were to upgrade, since iOS 15 comfortably handles v5. I agree that v5 could look a little more presentable for vintage operating systems, but I can’t make any promises that everything will work (CSS isn’t the only culprit here, we’re also using modern JS and new HTML elements too).

Awesome! Will the beta next week be available for download for self-hosted clients? Will it include an upgrade script from V4? I have a self-hosted V4 forum that I would very much like to upgrade to V5 beta…