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Today we are pleased to announce our next major release for ExpressionEngine 3, User 4! In addition to being compatible with EE3, we've added a couple new features and made some improvements to User!

User Roles feature

Included in User 4 is a member role system that allows you to create, manage and assign roles to users, restricting blocks of content, forms, admin tools, viewing of channel entries, etc to users with sufficient privileges on the front end EE templates. This will be very handy for websites that have a variety of content administrators looking after different parts of the website on the front end EE templates. Different roles or complex layering of roles can be assigned to members and/or member groups and then checked/verified on areas of your site. There's also a User Roles Fieldtype available for channel entries. This allows you to assign role permissions to channel entries, and have members with matching roles only be able to see those entries. It could work almost like a content subscription feature.

Other changes

• Overhauled the User Authors fieldtype to now be a Related Authors fieldtype that mimics the EE Relationship fieldtype. Legacy User Authors tab is removed upon upgrade (but data is saved and restorable).
• Updated language throughout User control panel to be more descriptive.
• Renamed User:Stats template tag to User:Profile to better represent what it is. For legacy, the {exp:user:stats} template tag is an alias now and will still work.
• Removed the Reassign Ownership feature in the User control panel.

There's another big update for User that will be available soon after the release of ExpressionEngine 3.1 that will be a free update for User 4 license holders. More on that in a couple of weeks!

Some Important Information about our EE3 releases

We have decided that all EE3 converted add-ons will ONLY work with ExpressionEngine 3+ (if you've been around long enough, you'll remember that we managed to have a single code base work for both EE1 and EE2 back when EE2 was released). The EE2 versions of our add-ons will remain "feature-frozen", except for critical and security fixes. An EE2 compatible version will be available inside of the EE3 compatible download package. We know that many customers will have to wait until there is enough critical mass of third party add-on availability before they can begin using EE3 in the real world, so for the next 6-12 months, a new purchase or upgrade of EE3 compatible add-ons will also include an EE2 compatible version. You can use the EE2 compatible version until you're ready to upgrade to ExpressionEngine 3.x.

Due to the large amount of time involved with updating, enhancing and testing our add-ons for EE3 compatibility, there will be an upgrade fee associated with each. User in particular is $29.95 to upgrade. Buying upgrades can be done in your Account area. Customers that purchased a Solspace add-on up to 3 months before release of the EE3 compatible version will receive an automatic free upgrade. User 3.x customers from the past 3 months have already received this.