IPS announced public release of beta next week

[JoelR]

https://preview.invisionalpha5.com/topic/202-alpha-16-released-beta-next-week/

Four months of alphas and 16 releases.  IPS considers their beta release to be more like an early release candidate with the amount of work they've put in to alpha.  

[TwinTurbo]

I have been following the IPS5 alpha news and what kind of timeline (approx, I understand it's impossible to predict) we are looking at for a production ready version (meaning can be used in a live website). 

And probably would have to add a bit more time for all the themes / mod developers to create the mods for IPS5. 

Stability and a refined version of IPS5 will probably allow for a vanilla deployment and then can customize with mods as they become available. I haven't used the IPS5 alpha, so what are your thoughts are IPS5's current status with respect to stability and refinement. 

[JoelR]

Well, the good news is that the public beta was announced today. 

When to upgrade is entirely a range of your own risk tolerance.  Theoretically, 4.0 gold would be the first release for production once they go through all of the beta releases.  Depending on your risk tolerance, you may want to wait even after that.