Marketplace

Enhancing the Mobile Experience with New PWA FeaturesAs part of our ongoing mission to ensure Invision Community 5 feels as smooth and modern across all devices, we’re pleased to announce several improvements in 5.0.10 that enhance the Progressive Web App (PWA) experience. What is the PWA and how do I use it? A Progressive Web App (PWA) is a mobile-optimized version of your community that users can add to their device’s home screen, just like any regular app. It launches in full-screen and supports push notifications and badges (when enabled). To install the PWA: iOS/iPadOS: Tap the Share button in Safari (square with an arrow), then tap "Add to Home Screen." Android: Tap the three-dot menu in Chrome, then tap "Add to Home Screen." The goal for this update is to make your community feel closer to a native app and to make the PWA more accessible, so lets take a look at what's new! Pull to Refresh on iOSAdding pull-to-refresh in the iOS PWA has been a popular request in our feedback forum and I'm excited to share that it has now been implemented. Just like in a native app, users can swipe down to refresh the page in iOS, making it easier and more intuitive to see the latest content. This feature replaces the Refresh button previously found in the mobile footer and brings the iOS experience in line with modern mobile app standards. light-pull-to-refresh.MP4 dark-pull-to-refresh.MP4 Loading animationNavigating between pages in PWAs could sometimes cause confusion due to the lack of a loading indicator. To alleviate this, a custom loading animation has been added which should reassure your visitors that the next page is actually loading. It’s a subtle addition, but it's one which many visitors would expect to see in modern mobile apps - and now they can! ScreenRecording_06-07-2025 13-25-43_1.MP4 Installation prompt bannerSome users may not be aware that they can install your community directly to their device like a native app. To help with that, we’ve introduced a new installation prompt banner to help guide them through the install process. This banner appears when users are browsing your community in a mobile browser. Tapping the banner brings up step-by-step instructions tailored to their device. It’s a gentle nudge that increases PWA adoption while also respecting your visitors choice with a dismiss button. ScreenRecording_06-07-2025 13-56-44_1.MP4 App icon badgesReceiving a notification on the community now adds a notification badge to the PWA icon on your home screen, even if the PWA isn’t open. It’s a great (and familiar) way to inform your members that there’s fresh content waiting for them, and it's just a single tap away. Badges.mp4 Redesigned enable push promptsEnabling push notifications has never been easier. You are now prompted not only in the main notifications menu, but also when tapping follow on any item. EnableFromMenu.mp4 More improvements coming soonThis is part of our ongoing commitment to make Invision Community 5 the best possible experience on mobile. We’re already working on additional improvements to make the mobile experience even more polished and I look forward to sharing them with you in a future update!View the full post

We've all been there. You accidentally remove the wrong block when using the Page Editor, and that custom HTML or WYSIWYG editor block is gone forever. You may have also moved some blocks around, only to realise the layout was perfect before. The new Invision Community 5 Page Editor is a powerful tool that enables you to create custom pages using your community data. We know how effective it is; we have used it to build out this site. We also know the pain of deleting the wrong block or wanting to revert to a previous layout. Our Invision Community 5 July release introduces the ability to roll back to a previous version, providing confidence in using the Page Editor, knowing that any action can be undone. The video shows the Page Editor rollback in action. In this example, I "accidentally" removed a text editor with custom text inside. In the past, this would have meant recreating it from scratch, but now you can view past versions of the page from within the Admin CP and restore it with just a few clicks. Each time you change something when using the Page Editor, such as adding a block, editing a block's settings, or changing the block template, a revision is stored. When you click the "Finish Editing" button, a manual save event is stored which is a great way to navigate the list of changes. Those manual save events act as definitive versions of that page. The filters allow you to review those changes quickly, and even show just the changes you made in your last Page Editor session. Accidental deletes, experimental layouts gone wrong and incorrectly edited settings are now a thing of the past. We hope that you find this new feature useful. I know we will!View the full post

Invision Community's advertising system enables the inclusion of linked images in your community's feeds to highlight events, draw attention to important updates, and promote external services. You can even monetise your community by selling advertising space via the built-in commerce tools. In Invision Community 5’s July release, we’ve added several improvements to the advertising system to make advertisement placement more flexible and even allow them to be placed in emails. Let’s dive in! A flexible approach to advertisement placementThe system enables you to place advertisements between topics when viewing a list and between posts when viewing a specific topic. However, the current setup only allows for advertisements to be displayed at set intervals, which may not achieve your desired results. For example, if you set an advertisement to appear every three rows and repeat once, it could end up appearing on the sixth row instead of the intended placement. The update introduces an additional option that allows you to place items via intervals, for example, every 10 rows, or via a specific list position, such as after the third item. In addition, you can now specify which forums you want the advertisements to show, giving you even more flexibility when targeting content. Selling email advertisement slotsNew to our Invision Community 5 July release is the ability to sell advertisements in select emails, such as notifications. You could do this for internal marketing, or to generate revenue for your community. The advert will appear at the top of the email. You can set up advertisement sales from the built-in Commerce functionality. You can choose to sell advertisement space on your community, or you can sell advertisement space in notification emails. Furthermore, you can choose which member groups receive these advertisements as well as target specific areas of the community. In addition to these features, we’ve given the Page Editor widgets a refresh to improve their functionality. We continually strive to enhance existing features, and we hope you enjoy the updates to our advertisement system!View the full post

Invision Community proudly powers the newly launched AI Skills Hub, created by Innovate UK in partnership with PwC! Invision Community 5 offers a broad range of capabilities beyond just classic forums that enables you to build out an entire interactive website with community at its heart, and that is what we did for Innovate UK. The AI Skills Hub is part of the UK’s national push to upskill workers across high-impact sectors like agriculture, construction, creative industries, and transport. With an urgent need for practical, ethical, and industry-specific AI training, the Hub brings together learners, employers, and training providers in one seamless digital environment. Invision Community is the perfect platform for this project. Let’s take a look at some of the functionality we provide. Organize webinars and eventsThe AI Skills Hub runs a full schedule of in-person and online events along with webinars all organized by our built in Events manager. Members can follow these calendars to get notified instantly when new events are available and confirm attendance with the RSVP system. Create pages, courses, and blogsOur pages application allows AI Skills Hub to create resources, statistics and FAQ that look great across all devices — no need to learn a complicated CMS or how to code. Additionally, leveling up skills is key to the success of the AI Skills Hub. This is where our courses functionality stands out as the backbone of the learning pathway system. Members can learn about tech-stacks, generative AI and more in a structured process. In a fast moving sector, it’s important that members are kept up to date on key topics. Our built-in blogging functionality helps the AI Skills Hub keep their members in the loop. With the ability to subscribe, it’s easy to ensure members are brought back to the site. “AI is here to stay,” said Zlatina Loudjeva of PwC in the official press release. “To benefit, workers must take charge of their development.” We couldn’t agree more—and we’re proud to be part of this project, proving that Invision Community is much more than just a forum platform! To see what Invision Community has to offer, you can start a free 30 day trial (No credit card needed)View the full post

You can get a lot of data from your Invision Community. We have charts and graphs for almost every item you can think of from reactions used to time to solution. However, it can be hard to extract meaning from the raw data and even harder to organise the charts. Our June release of Invision Community 5 aims to solve both of these problems with “My Charts” transforming into a much more useful “Saved Reports” feature and the addition of a key community health metrics dashboard. Let’s dive in! Saved ReportsPrevious versions of Invision Community had the ability to save charts to a single page that only you could see. This was fine but it meant that all your key metrics were jumbled together and you could not share this curated dashboard with other team members. The new Saved Reports feature solves these problems by allowing you to optionally save to a new custom report page that all your team can see allowing for logical grouping of saved charts. When you want to save a chart, you’ll see some new options. You can opt to store the chart in an existing report, or create a new one. Reports are like pages of a dashboard. For example, you can create a saved report called “Forums” and store all the forum-based metrics you wish on that page, and then create a separate report called “Members” and store member-based metrics on that page. Now you can organise all your commonly used statistics into one place with a logical grouping which saves a lot of time scrolling up and down trying to remember which chart you wanted. Each saved report page has tabs for charts and blocks, which means you can now store activity blocks right to your report dashboard. Finally, you can download a single CSV of all the charts into a single file which you can then process externally if you so wished. Saved Reports is available on all Invision Community plans. Community HealthNow that you have all your data organised, how can you see the health of your community? Is it based on the number of posts made per day, or the number of reactions? Partly, but there is more to the story when looking for trends over time. To help answer that question, we have created a new special report called Community Heath which contains key charts fed from multiple data points and crunched with our own algorithm to produce a visual indicator of how your community is doing. Let’s take a closer look at each of these charts and break down what each mean. Author Diversity Knowing how many posts have been made is good, but do you know if a very small number of people wrote them? A healthy community has a broad range of voices contributing to topics. This chart uses an algorithm to smooth the data. The actual number of authors isn’t as important as the trend. A ratio of 1.0 means nearly every post is from a different person showing greater diversity. Responsiveness This chart is another algorithmically generated trend line depicting the time between posts within topics. This is an important metric to help you understand the spread of posts across your community. The time of the first reply is important, but so is the speed of ongoing replies. Engagement This chart takes a variety of different interactions and combines them into a single metric over time. The interactions include reactions, following, solving and creating content. This chart is likely one of the most important as you can see trends over time and if engagement is falling or growing. First Response Time A responsive community where members get answers to their questions and replies to their topics is a sign of a healthy community. This chart uses some smoothing to produce a trend line you can monitor over time. DAU/MAU The Daily Active Users / Monthly Active Users ratio indicates how “sticky” your members are. It depicts the trend line of how often your monthly users come back daily. Any value over 1 means that your community is receiving a greater number of daily users than the monthly average. This chart is taken from our community and you can see when we announce new releases (May and June) we get a spike in returning members. What do they tell us? You can combine these charts to get a better understanding of your community. For example, you can see we had big spikes in returning visitors, but our engagement and first response times remained fairly average which indicates that people returned to read, but not contribute which is consistent with people returning to read about the latest release. You can also tell that our author diversity is fairly healthy with a value of 1 meaning every post is by a different person. Any community will have a core group of people that post more, and our values are consistent with a good number of unique voices. Overall, this shows that our community shows healthy signs of distributed activity and good responsiveness. You can also see that there are times where a smaller number of voices make the most contributions to our community. We might choose to engage those who haven’t posted as much by asking more questions and creating more opportunities for replies. The new Community Health metrics will help you understand your community data. We’re excited to see what your community trends are and how you can use the data to keep your community healthy. Community Health is available on Invision Community Creator Pro plans and above.View the full post