10-16-2016, 02:55 PM
I'm making this sticky until @PLB reminds me to unstick it 3 months from now.
I figured I'd start a little discussion here on a few things...
1. Why am I doing a major release and calling it 4.1.6 instead of building on 4.2?
The installed base of UserSpice 4.1 is huge. I'm trying to make painful upgrades few and far between. In my mind, the vast majority of projects built on 4.1 will not be upgraded to 5.0. I have projects built on 4.1 (and even 4.0) that work great for their intended purpose and it just won't be worth the hassle. 4.2 Alpha served to develop a model for getting multiple social login platforms to work with UserSpice and now that work has been cleaned up and put into US5. Rather than have a lot of existing users try to go from 4.1 to 4.2 to 5.0, I think the best course of action is to keep fully developing 4.1 and then when it is time, let people go straight to 5.0. 5.0 will most likely be one of those "delete your entire 'users' directory and run this database migration" updates. We will be obliterating everything inside the users folder, so it won't really matter which version of 4.1 you're on to do the upgrade. 4.2 is different enough that I believe it would have caused problems and caused a 3rd branch of our code base that we'd need to maintain. I hope that makes sense.
2. New features
Two of the most obvious new features are the defined places to put your custom functions and analytics snippets in the usersc/includes folder. If anyone has noticed that things have been quiet for the last month for me at UserSpice, it has been because I have been dog-fooding and developing a few projects based on UserSpice. It's been fantastic for me to see how "real" people use UserSpice and one of the great needs was an obvious place to put our own functions. There are a bunch of other things that need to be updated, but a lot of that will come out in 5.0. Since I was updating the us_helpers.php file already this seemed like as good of time as any to put out this update.
3. Redirect features
PLB has been toying with a few different redirect options. I'll let him chime in on some use cases, but one feature that is being tested is the idea that any time you push out a get variable err, that message will be sanitized and posted at the top of the page. Something like Redirect::to('yourpage.php?err=You+Have+Been+Redirected'); will flash You Have Been Redirected at the top of the page. This is a great way to pass things like success messages to pages after you've sent people away. After some feedback, I fully expect to make a 4.1.6b version that will clean this up a little bit more.
4. Full release downloads are now being pulled from github.
It has always annoyed me that github puts all the files in a userspice4-master folder. Why? I didn't ask it to do that. One of the many things that annoys me about github, but it's a small price to pay for hopefully not bringing down the site whenever I push a new release.
I figured I'd start a little discussion here on a few things...
1. Why am I doing a major release and calling it 4.1.6 instead of building on 4.2?
The installed base of UserSpice 4.1 is huge. I'm trying to make painful upgrades few and far between. In my mind, the vast majority of projects built on 4.1 will not be upgraded to 5.0. I have projects built on 4.1 (and even 4.0) that work great for their intended purpose and it just won't be worth the hassle. 4.2 Alpha served to develop a model for getting multiple social login platforms to work with UserSpice and now that work has been cleaned up and put into US5. Rather than have a lot of existing users try to go from 4.1 to 4.2 to 5.0, I think the best course of action is to keep fully developing 4.1 and then when it is time, let people go straight to 5.0. 5.0 will most likely be one of those "delete your entire 'users' directory and run this database migration" updates. We will be obliterating everything inside the users folder, so it won't really matter which version of 4.1 you're on to do the upgrade. 4.2 is different enough that I believe it would have caused problems and caused a 3rd branch of our code base that we'd need to maintain. I hope that makes sense.
2. New features
Two of the most obvious new features are the defined places to put your custom functions and analytics snippets in the usersc/includes folder. If anyone has noticed that things have been quiet for the last month for me at UserSpice, it has been because I have been dog-fooding and developing a few projects based on UserSpice. It's been fantastic for me to see how "real" people use UserSpice and one of the great needs was an obvious place to put our own functions. There are a bunch of other things that need to be updated, but a lot of that will come out in 5.0. Since I was updating the us_helpers.php file already this seemed like as good of time as any to put out this update.
3. Redirect features
PLB has been toying with a few different redirect options. I'll let him chime in on some use cases, but one feature that is being tested is the idea that any time you push out a get variable err, that message will be sanitized and posted at the top of the page. Something like Redirect::to('yourpage.php?err=You+Have+Been+Redirected'); will flash You Have Been Redirected at the top of the page. This is a great way to pass things like success messages to pages after you've sent people away. After some feedback, I fully expect to make a 4.1.6b version that will clean this up a little bit more.
4. Full release downloads are now being pulled from github.
It has always annoyed me that github puts all the files in a userspice4-master folder. Why? I didn't ask it to do that. One of the many things that annoys me about github, but it's a small price to pay for hopefully not bringing down the site whenever I push a new release.