With the beta on the horizon, I want to take a second to give a huge shoutout (and thanks) to everyone on the IC team, as well as all the testers who provided feedback.

I could be way off base here, but I’m guessing the testing period was longer than anticipated as the scope of IC5 continued to grow. If that's the case, I'm thankful you stuck to your guns.

The software feels premium and is extremely polished already, even though it's not even at 5.0 yet.

I know the work isn't done, but thank you for being so open to feedback and creating something great we can offer to our communities.

Thanks Mike! Glad you’re enjoying the progress so far.

I’m very much looking forward to a public beta so we can open it up to an even larger audience. 🎉

Agreed! I think V5 is going to be a massive step up, and I can’t wait to road-test it in beta and adapt all of my V4 stuff so I can refresh and turbo-charge my community! I think users will really dig the changes, and some of the new features like tagging, post editor UI and side-panel is going to be a game-changer! Thank you all for working so hard on such an amazing-looking product!

Thanks all!

We knew that we wanted a longer alpha testing cycle because we figured that the more stable we get it now, the quicker the later phases go. We also had a lot of new stuff to bed in, which took a few months but when we do get to the public alpha, I’m pretty confident that beyond self-hosting installation issues which will take time to get through, we’ll have a stable bit of software.

I’m also pretty sure that 5.0.0 Alpha 13 is more stable than 4.0.0 Final. 😅

We also wanted to test a lot with some of our private sites to make sure that the Pages changes weren’t going to affect the ability to do all the things you need to do, and it’d kind of suck to do a u-turn a few betas in whereas the alpha stage is the perfect time to evaluate this kind of thing.