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ernestdefoe.online

Extensions, themes & support for Flarum and Invision Community

Vibe coding for the community web. Report a bug, request a feature, or dig into the source — this is where the tools you use get built, in the open.

We do custom Bespoke Invision Community apps. If you have an idea for something you want then use the contact form to get in touch with us.
Knowledge base

Things that cost me a day, so they cost you none

Working notes from building Invision Community and Flarum applications. Mostly the failures that give no error at all — the ones where everything installs cleanly and quietly does the wrong thing.

92 articles

Invision Community 5

86 articles

Extensions and contracts

39

What each extension point is for, what it must declare, and what happens when it is wrong — which is usually nothing visible.

Languages and text

5

The string table, translation, and the places where text does not appear where you expected it to.

Theming, templates and forms

9

Theme hooks, CSS that survives both colour schemes, and building forms that do not throw on render.

Background work and scheduled tasks

5

The queue system, work that has to happen after the response, and jobs that finish without doing anything.

Data, settings and storage

11

The database layer, settings, tags, file storage, and backing up a live site.

AI features and expectations

5

What these features do, what they cost, and what buyers reasonably but wrongly assume they do.

Application structure and releases

11

The JSON files an application is made of, versioning and upgrade steps, and testing from the command line.

Realtime, chat and calls

1

WebSocket gateways, relays and the server-side pieces live features depend on — where "it works when I test it" and "it works for your members" are different claims.

Nothing matches that.

Content behaviours are TRAITS, so instanceof is always false

Hideable, Taggable, Lockable, FuturePublishing and the rest are traits, not interfaces. Testing for them with instanceof compiles, runs, throws nothing — and is false for every object on the site.

Wrong

if ( $item instanceof \IPS\Content\Taggable )   // always FALSE
{
    $item->setTags( $tags );
}

The feature simply never runs. Nothing in a log, nothing in a test that only asserts "no exception was thrown".

Right

if ( \IPS\IPS::classUsesTrait( $item, 'IPS\Content\Taggable' ) )
{
    $item->setTags( $tags );
}

classUsesTrait() lives in init.php and accepts either an object or a class name. Core uses it everywhere for exactly this reason:

if ( IPS::classUsesTrait( $topic, 'IPS\Content\Hideable' ) and $topic->hidden() )

How to catch it

php -l cannot see this, and neither can a test that only checks a method returned without error. Assert the positive case explicitly: that a known-taggable class is detected as taggable.


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