IPS leaks major update coming to one of its premier apps

[JoelR]

One of the IPS management team members leaked out a part of their future V5 roadmap by saying one of their most popular apps is getting a huge update:

The fact that they already know Pages is getting a major update means they already have a strong idea about how they want to further develop the app. One of the changes we already know is that IPS previously announced incorporating Blogs into Pages, but this seems to be much more.  Pages is already a very robust and mature app, with plenty of options to create custom databases - in fact, it's one of my most favorite apps out of the IPS ecosystem.  Not many other legacy forum developers offers anything close to the robustness of Pages, which is a database builder, a page builder, and a template manager all rolled into one. 

What do you think is part of the substantial update for Pages in v5?   

[Claudia999]

Hi @JoelR

with a new version of the CKEditor some things will improve - then there will be TOC, for example.

But as much as I hope for changes in Pages... Because we haven't been able to read anything about it so far, I'm afraid it won't be very good. I'm afraid for example, that Pages will become cloud-only and existing Pages articles or databases will only run in legacy mode. Yes, call me a pessimist.

[PrettyPixels]

3 hours ago, Claudia999 said:

I'm afraid for example, that Pages will become cloud-only

I hadn't even thought of that! 😬 Moving Pages to cloud-only would be a huge problem. Cloud is prohibitively expensive and most people simply can't afford it in this economy.

I'm not a fan of shortchanging the self-hosted users in software features to pressure them to cloud.

As for Pages features, I'd really love the ability to nest records, so you could have a main record with multiple child records. This would be great for online books, blogs, bands and song lists, or anything along those lines.

There should be permissions to control who can post records or sub-records, too. That's the only way it would work for a blog or other member-owned content.

I'd also love the ability to allow users (or admins) to optionally charge to access records. This would work similar to clubs.

[dismalbliss]

5 hours ago, Claudia999 said:

Yes, call me a pessimist.

Pessimist! 😆

I don't think we have anything to worry about. The new license pricing structure was designed/intended for moving forward with v5. I think Pages including it's new features will still be part of the self-hosted product.

Things like Lessons/Courses are added functionality, like a plugin or app. Pages is Pages and while an overhaul will probably streamline it's use and hopefully make it more understandable for the beginner, it's still Pages in the end.

[JoelR]

13 hours ago, Claudia999 said:

with a new version of the CKEditor some things will improve - then there will be TOC, for example.

Is this because CKEditor 5 will natively support Tables of Content?  

https://ckeditor.com/docs/ckeditor5/latest/features/table-of-contents.html

13 hours ago, Claudia999 said:

I'm afraid for example, that Pages will become cloud-only and existing Pages articles or databases will only run in legacy mode.

Let's hope not.  IPS has historically allowed all access to Pages functionality in self-hosted.  

One of the problems for clients is that other providers really don't have anything close to Pages.  They may offer Articles, but nowhere near the custom database functionality of a Pages database.  

[JoelR]

9 hours ago, PrettyPixels said:

so you could have a main record with multiple child records. This would be great for online books, blogs, bands and song lists, or anything along those lines.

That's a great scenario.  

I wonder, and this is me thinking creatively, if you can use the existing Database Relationship to somehow link records. You should be able to easily link 1 child to 1 parent, but I don't know if you can do 1 parent to many children.  

[opentype]

17 hours ago, PrettyPixels said:

As for Pages features, I'd really love the ability to nest records, so you could have a main record with multiple child records. This would be great for online books, blogs, bands and song lists, or anything along those lines.

It’s not really clear to me what that means, but I doubt anything will change in that regard. We already have categories and the “database relationship” field to link content from different or even the same database. That’s pretty exhaustive already. 

17 hours ago, PrettyPixels said:

I'd also love the ability to allow users (or admins) to optionally charge to access records. This would work similar to clubs.

Also unlikely to change IMHO, but charging for access can already be handled through user group permission on the database and category level. 
(The could move Pages into clubs to allow it to work like clubs automatically.)

[opentype]

And regarding the original question:

I am pretty sure they make it more non-developer friendly, which has been the biggest complaint over the years. Pages is a great foundation, but it really only works well if you understand enough HTML to customize the field output, templates and so on. They probably tackle that somehow. No idea how deep they will go. They could just throw in some new templates and blocks, but they could also re-imagine the whole drag&drop layout system. 

But personally, I am not a big fan of the “IPS sweeps” method, i.e. focussing on one app for a short time and addressing some of the user concerns before leaving the app untouched again for several years. 
I would rather see PERMANENT improvements. For example: I could go through every Pages field (example) and list possible improvements, but stuff like that remains unchanged since 4.0 and probably doesn’t make the list for their 5.x “sweep”. 

[JoelR]

10 hours ago, opentype said:

Pages is a great foundation, but it really only works well if you understand enough HTML to customize the field output, templates and so on. They probably tackle that somehow. No idea how deep they will go. They could just throw in some new templates and blocks, but they could also re-imagine the whole drag&drop layout system. 

Pages - the most powerful application that clients won't use LOL.  

If they had overhauled the theming to allow drag-and-drop layouts (similar to the WordPress Elementor system), I could see them allowing clients to design Pages database in the same way.  But they didn't.  Which makes me really wonder how much they can focus on this pain point.  And shipping with more templates and blocks can only go so far; clients will STILL request more styles and templates and customization.  

[Clover13]

It would be pretty devastating for self hosted to lose Pages as a cloud only feature.

With that said, I do really like Pages, I think the only thing I'd like to see more of is pre-built or custom templates.  @opentype has some really nice ones, but his are the only ones I can even think of coming across.