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).
comment_802Welcome 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. 👏
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