Matt

Exactly. We have a bunch of milestones for "open up alpha site to a small number of customers", "first beta" and "final" but it's hard to give a definitive date because each of those milestones are unpredictable in what people give us in terms of feedback and volume of bugs. If all goes well, I think late summer is realistic for final. If we need to rethink some features, then perhaps a bit longer. If no bugs are found (it'd be a miracle...) then a bit sooner. The first beta release will be probably the most exciting and when the starting pistol is fired for everyone.

I wrote a little update on development and timelines here. For dev news, Esther wrote a fair bit in our dev blog. Has the code changed a lot? Yes.

We do. We just haven't published it publicly.

I'm happy to share a little more insight into why we switched from CKEditor with v5. CKEditor 4 reached end of life in June 2023. The licensing has always been very permissive allowing developers to choose between GNU 2, GNU Lesser, or Mozilla. These essentially allowed you to combine their product within a commercial product as long as you honoured the license. For example, the Mozilla license requires you to keep all copyright notices in place, etc which we do. CKEditor 4 still has "limited time support" but we cannot use this version as this version, v4.23 and above, are now a propriety license which is no longer open source, so we're stuck with their last open source release with no upgrade path outside of a commercial license. When we set out our roadmap for Invision Community 5, it made sense to use CKEditor v5 which we did. To be clear, it's a completely different product to CKE v4 and it was a fair struggle to rewrite all our plugins as they have a much more complex document model. But we did it. However, over the last year we've become increasingly concerned with CKEditor's stance with open source, and indeed it's been clear for years that they really only want open source products to use CKEditor via the GPL license, and not commercial. While the GPL 2 license is a bit vague about bundling with a commercial product, we felt that the communication coming from CKEditor made their stance quite clear their direction. Furthermore, CKEditor 5 (v.38) was released in late May 2023 just after we had done most of the work and this version required a "Powered by" graphic on all CKEditor usages in the bottom corner when using the GPL license. To be clear, I don't have any issue with any of this. CKEditor is a great product and they've given it away for years for little financial compensation, so having a commercial option makes sense, and it's something we pursued with them. To give some context, Froala's commercial license is about $2,000/year and Redactor was $1200/year. CKEditor wanted $36,000 a year for a commercial license. We felt that was just too much to justify and made the decision to switch out the editor now, rather than do it in v5.1. We did a lot of research and found a modern and fast React based editor which we've built our editor around. We have a commercial license with them that offers us Slack based support direct with their dev team. The editor is also 400% faster than CKEditor 5. As mentioned previously, they have a lot of AI tools and the scope for creating a really custom editing experience for Pages is there in the near future. Given that we've had to build our own toolbars, etc, it's taken more time than a simple drop in replacement but we're on phase 3 of that part of the project and it's coming along great.