opentype

… and unlike the older social media platforms, those video platforms are not content hubs which link out to other sources. They are all about scrolling endlessly on one platform. Not to mention that they require a very specific type of sensationalized content to get views and a following. It usually doesn’t easily combine with our special interest forums.

Elon ruin this category of social media services. Twitter was once the place to be, now the audience is scattered across multiple platforms or left this sphere entirely. I moved my Twitter accounts to Mastodon, but the content gets so few views, it’s hardly worth it anymore. I see no clear benefit in starting over on Bluesky or Threads. They don’t provide a clear USP. It’s just yet another Twitter alternative without a large enough active audience. And with Facebook (pages) dying too, posting on social media to drive traffic to our communities seems to wind down.

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”.

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. 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.)

That’s doesn’t seem to be related to my product. It just looks like creating blocks is failing on your installation. If you can replicate that consistently, you might wanna reach out to IPS for support. Also, make sure the Support section in the ACP isn’t reporting any problems with your database.

Setting up a Pages database is describes in the IPS help guides. A block template for displaying FAQ: https://opentype.space/free/

How fast will you switch?

As a typographer, I’m a big fan of limiting the column width to create good text line lengths. Full-width forums are awful. But yeah, here it’s goes way too far in the other direction now. In comparision: Facebook, Twitter, Invisioneer on desktop. The main content area for text and images is too narrow. On my own communities I have: Which in comparison looks like this: My users love it.

I don’t care much about the (technical) difference between cloud and self-hosted. Both options have their pros and cons, but get you essentially the same outcome. But I have to care a lot about paying $16,59 a month (for self-hosted) vs. $169 a month (for a comparable cloud offer). It’s literally 10 times as much.