A Zayed

There's a lot for your members to love with Invision Community 5, and we recently covered five of the best features. Today, I want to discuss five features your team will love. One of the main concepts for Invision Community 5 was to reduce the complexity of power-user tools like theming and page building. These functions had been built around those with deep technical and coding knowledge, locking out many community teams. We also wanted to build new tools to help busy community teams organise, moderate and identify trusted members. Did we achieve that? Let's look at five new features we think your team will love in Invision Community 5. The new theme editor I can't describe how much I love the new theme editor. It is everything we wanted for Invision Community 5 and more. Now, anyone can manage their theme without needing to be knowledgeable in HTML and CSS. There's so much to discuss, so it's best to head over to the news article we put together. From an easier way to select colours and drag-and-drop header arrangements to simpler ways to upload logos and preview your community on tablets and mobiles, the theme editor puts all the power and complexity of managing themes into the hands of your community team. The editor, combined with the new views, such as the feed view for forums, article-like featured first post in topics, and the new sidebar view, Invision Community 5, really does take things to the next level. The new page editor We've taken the concepts of drag-and-drop widgets to a higher level with Invision Community 5. You no longer need to create custom blocks using HTML and CSS to produce fantastic custom pages. With the new page editor, you can access a library of pre-built widgets with multiple view options, such as grids, rows, and carousels. Coupled with the power of Pages databases, you can quickly build custom pages to showcase the best content from your community. Jimi, a valued customer, recently created a walkthrough video showcasing the new theme and page editors. It is a must-watch to experience the system's power. Assign topics Getting the right help to your members at the right time can take time and effort. Pairing a community question with the expertise of specific team members can require some manual overhead with external systems. It can also be difficult to hold your team accountable, ensure they are answering questions in good time, and get an overview of their assignments. These issues are fixed in Invision Community 5 with the topic assignments feature. You can assign a topic to a specific member of your team or a group of members. You also have complete oversight on the volume and time required to reply to your entire team. It's a great feature that helps keep your community running smoothly. Badge creator and icon picker This feature is a dark horse. At first glance, it looks like a nice feature, but perhaps it is something that you may not use. However, I believe this is a feature your team will love. There are many areas where you may need custom graphics. We have rank badges, one-off celebration badges, custom reactions and more. In the past, you'd have been required to do this with apps like Illustrator or Photoshop and import them back in. As part of our vision to bring power tools to everyone, we built a badge creator that allows you to combine over 1,700 icons and hundreds of emojis with badge backgrounds to quickly create custom badges and reaction icons. It really only takes a few minutes to create all the custom graphics your community needs. In addition, there are now many areas, such as menu items, where you can use icons and emoji to enrich your user experience. Who doesn't love the ability to create badges without needing a designer? Community Experts Community experts are vital to the well-being of any community. The Pareto principle holds true in your community. Twenty percent of your members create eighty percent of the interactions across your community, but featuring those members to newer users can be difficult. In the past, we've relied on metrics such as the date they joined and the number of posts they've made, but these celebrate longevity but not expertise. Invision Community 5 uses a bespoke algorithm to identify and feature experts based on the speed, accuracy and helpfulness of their responses. This not only celebrates those members with an exclusive badge and notification, but it also helps other users identify those community leaders who are more likely to help them and guide them through their journey with you. We think your team will love that Invision Community 5 identifies these members for you and allows them to help lead your community. I could have easily written about ten features your team will love, but these are my top five. Do you agree? Which features are you most looking forward to? Let us know in the comments.View the full post

As we move closer to releasing Invision Community 5, I wanted to review a few key features I believe your members will love after you upgrade to Invision Community 5. The all-new editor We have to start with the brand new editor, recoded and redesigned from the ground up. The new editor is not just faster and leaner, but also remarkably user-friendly, ensuring an upgraded experience for your members in Invision Community 5. Your members will love the streamlined toolbar that no longer hides buttons on smaller devices. They'll also appreciate the new emoji and icon panel, which allows them to insert over 1,700 icons to enhance their posts. Content boxes, resizing images, and media embeds via drag handles will also be well received. Finally, small UI improvements, such as new line arrows on blocks that can be tapped or clicked to insert new lines accurately, will end fiddly cursor placement and settling for poor spacing. The editor is the most important touch point within your community, so we wanted to ensure that Invision Community 5 does this perfectly. New live community features I can speak from experience that when I see other people typing, I'll stick around to see what they say. Likewise, if I post a topic and I see multiple people reading it, I'll keep tabs on it to see if any replies come in. These are not just great engagement features but also an exciting experience. Invision Community 5 takes it further, blurring the lines between group chat and a traditional topic. Now, when a new reply or reaction is made, it will appear magically on your screen, keeping your members on site for longer. Your members will love feeling like they are part of the live community and watching reactions and replies in real-time. They'll also appreciate seeing their notification bell numbers increase without having to refresh or move between pages. Topic Summaries Time is our most valuable resource. Your members use many apps and communities in a day, so when they make time to visit your community, we want to ensure that they get the most from your forum in the shortest amount of time possible. Long topics are great but few have the time to read through dozens of pages. Topic summaries take the very best of a topic and remove the rest, allowing your members to optimize their time well while on your community, making their experience more efficient and productive. They'll love keeping up to date with more topics without scrolling past gifs and side quests. Dark mode and the new mobile experience Late-night scrolling becomes much more comfortable with Invision Community 5's native dark mode. Your members will love being able to choose a mode or allow it to sync with their devices, giving them a uniform experience across the many apps they browse. They'll also appreciate the new user experience, which includes improved performance, better accessibility for screen readers, and a vastly improved phone experience. We've made sure Invision Community 5 is mobile first. The new tagging experience Invision Community 5 reinvents tagging to make it more community-focused and increase content discovery across all apps. With its new tag pages, you can easily bring gallery photos, forum topics, events, and blog entries into a single page in Invision Community 5. Your members will love following their favourite tags to get notifications on new content and discover more of your community they are interested in without having to browse many forums and different areas of your community. These are just the top five features we think your members will love. Are you looking forward to these features or perhaps some of those not mentioned here? As always, let us know in the comments.View the full post

Invision Community 4.7.19 will be released in November and contains many updates along with the report center improvements. While Invision Community 5 moves through the beta process, I wanted to let you know about all the updates coming in Invision Community 4. I've already spoken about the Report Center updates, which bring more professionalism and compliance to that area, and this blog will outline a few other highlights for the forthcoming release. Dormant Account Login Notification Keeping member accounts secure is a top priority for all community teams, and with data breaches containing usernames and passwords regularly shared on the dark web, it makes sense to be vigilant to a potential account takeover. Your members will now receive an email if a successful login occurs six months or more since the last log in to ensure the account is still in the right hands. If the account owner is not responsible for logging in, they can contact the community team to ensure the account is returned to the owner. Prepare for Invision Community 5 We have added a new information dashboard to the AdminCP so you can review the impact of the upgrade and ensure the PHP and MySQL versions are suitable. Of course, our Invision Community Cloud customers need not worry about this as we take care of it for you. You can also see impacting items you may want to know, such as deprecated and removed features that your community currently has enabled. This dashboard is a great starting point for evaluating your upgrade when the time comes. SEO Improvements We regularly review SEO best practices to ensure that your community presents itself in the best way to search engine bots and spiders. This update comes in two parts; the first is a new crawler setting to reduce links on the page for guests and search engine bots. This new feature removes hyperlinks around dates in comment feeds and removes the sharer menu item that shows the sharing box. These links dominate the crawl budget for little value, leaving little time for crawlers to work their way deeper into your content. The second SEO-focused feature is the permalinks to specific comments throughout the community. Currently, the permalinks point to a content handler (do=findComment&comment=123) that locates the correct page number and then issues a 301 redirect to the correct page (topics/1-topic-title/page/2/#comment-123). While 301 redirects are not a problem for search engines, and it's been a long time since a 301 redirect incurred any SEO penalty, the permalink is in a different format to the actual comment URL, which is handled via a fragment. Putting aside search engine optimization for a moment, working to eliminate a lot of redirects positively impacts performance. The new permalink is simply the actual link using a fragment to locate the post in the browser's viewport. This removes the need for a 301 redirect and reduces any search engine confusion over the permalinks canonical URL. Of course, the page number may change if topics are merged or many posts deleted, and we have some client scripting magic to handle that eventuality. It's an exciting time here at Invision Community with a brand new version in development and several new features for our stable product line. Let us know if you have any questions in the comments.View the full post

Invision Community 5 is currently in beta testing for all customers with the Invision Community Classic license. Invision Community Cloud customers can request a private demo to test the latest version. After months of development work, we're pleased to move Invision Community into beta testing, the final phase before its stable release. We'd love your help to find the last few bugs. You can join our Invision Community 5 Beta Testing Club and download the beta onto your test site or request a cloud demo. During the early stages of testing, we've implemented a lot of feedback, and I wanted to show you a few of the key changes we've not discussed in previous news blogs. Image Resizing Our brand new Invision Community 5 editor has many great features and quality-of-life improvements, one being the ability to resize images via drag handles. You can still specify a precise pixel value in the image menu, but the ability to resize using grab handles makes it easier to find the right size for your images. ResizeImage.mp4 Embed Resizing We can also resize embeddable media, such as YouTube, in the same way as you resize images. You can resize by using the grab handles or set a specific pixel value, giving you fine control over the size of your embedded media. embedresize.mp4 Page Editor Widgets We spoke about our new page editor in a recent blog, but a common request was to make it easier to find the right widget without a lot of scrolling up and down the menu bar. We've implemented a search filter enabling you to quickly find the right widget and a favorites system to pin your most used widgets to access them much quicker. widgets.mp4 Pages Database Layout Options A common request has been to make changing the look of the Pages database index and listing easier. Currently, with Invision Community 4, this means coding new templates by hand or using one of the many excellent pre-designed templates available from third-party developers. With Invision Community 5, we've brought the same magic we used with widgets to databases, allowing you to select from many layout options such as rows, grids, and wallpapers. You can still use a custom template, but these new layout options make it much easier to get the UI you need for your community. pagesDatabase.mp4 These are just a few of the many changes implemented since we opened Invision Community 5 for testing. We hope to see you in the beta club soon!View the full post

Invision Community 4.7.19 contains a significant upgrade to the Report Center to improve compliance and professionalism within the reporting workflow. The existing report center functions well enough but lacks some of the more professional tools modern communities need when managing complaints. In previous versions, a member or guest reported a piece of content, such as a comment or topic, which was then handled by the community team behind the scenes, and the report closed when dealt with. It was up to the community team to inform the original content author if any decision was made and to inform those who reported the content of the outcome. The Invision Community November update improves the report center with a better workflow, including asking those reporting the content the reason for the report, notifications on the report outcome, and the content author being notified as to why their content was moderated. Now, a report can be closed as valid or rejected. These new completion statuses allow you to signal whether your team found the report valid or whether you decided that the report was not required and thus rejected. Let's look at what has changed. Admin Control Panel The initial Report Center interface now has various options to control how the public reporting form works. From here, you can configure how reporting works for guests, whether they are required to leave a name (email is always required), and whether a message is required for the report. Content Author Notifications In this section, you can create notification templates that can optionally be sent to the author of the original content when choosing to complete or reject the report. Report Types In previous versions, report types were solely for automatic moderation. In this update, we've brought report types to both automatic moderation and public reporting. Gathering the reason content has been reported is vital in deciding the outcome. Each report type can also accept a message sent to the person who made the report depending on the valid or rejected outcome via an email notification that can be opted out of. Reporting Content Now, when a logged-in member or a guest user reports content, they can select from one of the pre-configured report types. If a guest is making the report, they are asked to leave their details along with a message to accompany the report. Managing Reports When managing reports via the ModCP, the interface has been updated to make the status of the report and the reasons for the report clearer. This screenshot shows green rows, which are new reports that still need to be managed by the team, along with yellow rows, which are currently under review. Each row of reported content can have multiple reports from different members, and the reason for those reports (such as Spam, Offensive, etc) is shown in labels. Viewing reported content now shows more detail in the user reporting section. If a guest has reported the content, the guest's name and supplied email address are shown, and clicking this allows you to send an email to them. The reason for the report is now shown. For each user report, you can change the submission reason, and this change is logged in the moderator comments to create an audit trail. You can now mark the report as Complete or Rejected, which will trigger an email for all those who have reported this piece of content. You can also send one of the notification templates to the content author to update them on why their content has been moderated. This email to each person who reported the content contains the date, content title, and reason for reporting, along with the pre-configured message for the report outcome. In this case, the report was flagged as valid, and the message to the person who reported it confirmed the outcome. Putting it together These changes help automate notifying both the author of the content and the person who reported the content on the outcome. Let's look at an example flow to understand how these new tools help the workflow. In this example, User A (Author) creates some content, and User B (Reporter) decides to report this content, choosing "Offensive" as the reason for the report. The moderation team picks up the report, examines the reported content, and decides that the report is valid, so they mark the report as complete and choose to use a notification template to tell the content author (User A) that their content has been removed. As the report has been flagged as complete, the person who reported the content (User B) receives an email telling them the report has been upheld and action has been taken. We hope these changes improve your experience with the report center. Let us know what you think below.View the full post

Can you start from a stock Invision Community 5 installation and have it themed, customized, and a new homepage built in under an hour without relying on custom templates and coding? Yes, and Jimi Wikman, a long-time Invision Community customer, did just that in his latest YouTube video. Jimi has over twenty-five years of experience in development and twenty years of experience in graphic design. Invision Community 5 has been in testing for a few months now, and Jimi produced this amazing walkthrough of Invision Community 5's new page editor and theme editor while re-creating his own site. Our vision for Invision Community 5 was to put the power into the hands of everyone, not just those who are proficient in PHP, HTML, and CSS. Jimi's video shows this vision as a reality as he moves through the theme editor to create his custom theme, and the page editor to build a custom homepage. Sit back and enjoy watching Jimi put together a new site. Thanks Jimi! If you're interested in testing Invision Community 5 for yourself, just join our Beta Testing Club.View the full post

Introducing new Page Builder tools in Invision Community 5 Widgets are an incredibly powerful tool for displaying curated content of your choice on any page of your community - and despite the extensive array of settings for customizing their data, they've often been limited in terms of their design options. But this changes thanks to the new Page Builder tools in Invision Community 5! Widget Designs Previously in version 4, widgets would often have 2 designs: one for the main content area and a more minimal version for the sidebar. This worked well, but it meant your page was very limited in terms of design as you'd typically need to use the same table-like layout for most widgets. Anything beyond that would typically require a custom block to be coded, often with additional HTML or CSS. Version 5 offers much more customization by allowing you to change the design of each widget with the click of your mouse - no coding necessary! When dragging a widget onto your page, a new toolbar at the bottom of the page appears, holding all of the widget design options. Lets take a look at some below! Grid A familiar a very layout used elsewhere in the suite, the Grid design neatly aligns entries in a grid with a large cover photo sitting up top. A great combination of visual imagery alongside meta data such as entry descriptions. Featured A spacious list and a great way to feature content, pardon the pun. Wallpaper Perfect for content which includes uploaded cover photos or thumbnails! The Wallpaper design stretches each image to make it occupy the entire background, overlaid by a minimal amount of content. A subtle gradient sits behind the text to ensure it's easy to read, even on detailed images. Rows (table) The Rows design is a very familiar one, used very often throughout other areas of the suite. Content is displayed in a neat table, that collapses into a more compact design on small screens. Minimal Great for displaying a lot of content in a compact area! Minimal only shows primary information and hides meta data such as entry descriptions and stats. Great for sidebars, or areas with limited width. Minimal Grid The Minimal Grid design removes large meta information and displays content in a nice, compact grid. A nice option for displaying a lot of content while being cautious of vertical space. Carousel The Carousel option is quite unique because it can be applied in tandem with other widget designs, and is a perfect way to make the existing layouts even more compact. For example, by default, the Wallpaper design is aligned as a grid, but with the Carousel option enabled, the layout is converted into a carousel instead: Carousel-widget.mp4 Here's another example, using the Featured and Carousel options: Blog - featured carousel.mp4 Fun fact for developers: All of these designs use the exact same HTML structure; the only thing that differs is the class name on the parent element. This makes it incredibly easy to adjust the design of your own widgets without needing to manually code multiple layouts. Widget Areas Version 4 was often quite limiting when it came to aligning widgets in pages. Widgets could be dragged into a stacked, vertical list but that was typically as far as you could go in terms of design. Version 5 introduces a new concept called Widget Areas, which allow you to align multiple widgets in a variety of ways. Lets take a look! To create an area, you simply need to drag one widget on top of another. Blog - areas.mp4 By default, they'll align themselves into a grid, but can be realigned with ease by using the toolbar at the bottom of the page. The toolbar also holds controls for adjusting the width of widgets, and the gap between them: Blog - alignments.mp4 Widget Designs and Widget Areas in Version 5 make it incredibly easy to create a completely custom page in a matter of seconds. We're really excited for you to get your hands on these new tools in Invision Community 5, and are looking forward to seeing all of these new page designs in the wild, in the very near future!View the full post

We recently announced the new Invision Community 5 editor which adds many new exciting features such as semantically correct header tags, custom boxes and more. As the new editor is a step forward in technology, some legacy features had to be left behind. We received a lot of messages about these changes, and have created new tools based on that feedback to ensure you still have the tools you need. The new features are based around restricting some high level editor functionality for specific member groups and enabling an easy way to add custom embeds. Permission Levels Invision Community 5 puts a lot of new tools in the editor, including header tags, boxes and positioning tools. These are useful features, but perhaps you do not want your members changing the semantic structure of the page by adding H1 tags. Or maybe you don't want them being able to add custom boxes wtih colors. Based on this feedback, we have introduced a permission levels system. At the heart of the system lies three editor permission levels: Minimal, Standard and Advanced. Specific editor features are assigned to one or more levels. For example, you may only want header tags and content boxes to be for the 'advanced' permission level which only administrators can use. These permission levels are configurable via the Admin Control Panel. When is Each Restriction Level Used? Now that we have set up the permission levels, we need to apply them to member groups. We do this by simplying heading over to the Member Groups section of the Admin Control Panel. In the "Content" section of that form, there are two new options: Default Editor Restriction Level: This is the restriction level the group uses by default, for example in Forum Topics and Blog Posts. Editor Restriction Level for Comments: This is the level used for Comments (including Topic Replies) throughout the Community. When a member has multiple groups, they will use the most permissible editor setting out of all groups. Custom Embeds With news that, because editor technology has moved on, the ability to toggle into 'source mode' and directly edit the underlying structure of the editor document was removed, many people told us they used that feature to add custom iframes from specific services they use. We understood the need for custom embeds, and we've added the option to create iframe elements with any whitelisted URL from a link. CleanShot 2024-06-20 at 15.49.43.mp4 Additionally, iframes created this way have configurable height and width so you can resize to your liking This feature has two editor permissions: "Can Embed External Content," and "Can Convert Links to iframes". Adding iframes into a post can potentially be a security issue, so strong controls are needed to ensure there isn't abuse of this system. The editor will only allow links to be converted to iframes if the domain has been whitelisted. The whitelist exists in the new tab, Admin Control Panel > System > Posting & Editor > Embeds. The feature can also be entirely disabled from here. That wraps up this round of changes based on your comments. We hope that you enjoy this update to our Invision Community 5 editor and we always appreciate your feedback.View the full post

We recently announced the new Invision Community 5 editor which adds many new exciting features such as semantically correct header tags, custom boxes and more. As the new editor is a leap forward in technology, some legacy features had to be left behind. We received a lot of messages about these changes, and have created new tools based on that feedback to ensure you still have the tools you need. The new features are based around restricting some high level editor functionality for specific member groups and enabling an easy way to add custom embeds. Permission Levels Invision Community 5 puts a lot of new tools in the editor, including header tags, boxes and positioning tools. These are useful features, but perhaps you do not want your members changing the semantic structure of the page by adding H1 tags. Or maybe you don't want them being able to add custom boxes with colors. Based on this feedback, we have introduced a permission levels system. At the heart of the system lies three editor permission levels: Minimal, Standard and Advanced. Specific editor features are assigned to one or more levels. For example, you may only want header tags and content boxes to be for the 'advanced' permission level which only administrators can use. These permission levels are configurable via the Admin Control Panel. When is Each Restriction Level Used? Now that we have set up the permission levels, we need to apply them to member groups. We do this by simplying heading over to the Member Groups section of the Admin Control Panel. In the "Content" section of that form, there are two new options: Default Editor Restriction Level: This is the restriction level the group uses by default, for example in Forum Topics and Blog Posts. Editor Restriction Level for Comments: This is the level used for Comments (including Topic Replies) throughout the Community. When a member has multiple groups, they will use the most permissible editor setting out of all groups. Custom Embeds In response to news that the ability to toggle into 'source mode' and directly edit the underlying structure of the editor document was not implemented because editor technology has moved on, many people told us they used that feature to add custom iframes from specific services they use. We understood the need for custom embeds, and we've added the option to create iframe elements with any whitelisted URL from a link. CleanShot 2024-06-20 at 15.49.43.mp4 Additionally, iframes created this way have configurable height and width so you can resize to your liking This feature has two editor permissions: "Can Embed External Content," and "Can Convert Links to iframes". Adding iframes into a post can potentially be a security issue, so strong controls are needed to ensure there isn't abuse of this system. The editor will only allow links to be converted to iframes if the domain has been whitelisted. The whitelist exists in the new tab, Admin Control Panel > System > Posting & Editor > Embeds. The feature can also be entirely disabled from here. That wraps up this round of changes based on your comments. We hope that you enjoy this update to our Invision Community 5 editor and we always appreciate your feedback.View the full post

Invision Community v5 takes a fresh approach to tagging and content discovery. It overhauls the concept to bring content across different sections together with a beautiful new tag page. Tagging is a powerful concept but underused with Invision Community 4 due to overly complex interfaces in different areas of the suite, a confusing open tagging model option and no real benefit in content discovery beyond a simple list of content items. A driving force behind Invision Community 5 is the question of how we can help time-pressured community members find the content that most interests them. Invision Community has robust taxonomy through forum and category structures, but what about content in less visible areas such as Blogs, galleries or Events? How can we bring those together to homogenise the type of content and focus on the content itself? Taxonomy via tagging across all applications in the community suite is the answer. However, we needed to re-approach how tagging was implemented in the Invision Community to bring our new vision to life. Out with the old The current tagging system is implemented loosely, allowing open tagging, which is more akin to hashtags than high-level taxonomy. Allowing forums, albums, and blog categories to define their own tags turns tagging into more of a status label, which does nothing to help bring disparate content together. In with the new With a new focus on taxonomy and content discovery, we set about rebuilding tagging for Invision Community 5. The UI to tag items is the same, but now each defined, globally available tag has its own page with cover image and ability to feature items within that tag page. A uniform approach to different content items in the UI breaks down the barrier between content types and focuses solely on the content. Tags featured on its page are automatically displayed on the community Featured Content page. Finally, tags can now be followed, allowing your community to get a daily or weekly digest of all new tagged items, bringing people back to read more of the content they love. Let’s take a closer look In Invision Community 5, all tags are defined in the Admin Control Panel. The ability to use open tagging and per-node tags has been removed, but don’t worry—the upgrade system will offer conversion for those tags. Once defined, the tags are available for all content types and feature on a dedicated new tag page. This page features cover photos and more information on the tag via a description. Content from across your suite will be displayed on this page. If a single piece of content has multiple tags, it will appear on every relevant tag page making it easy to have content in multiple areas. If you want to permanently or temporarily feature individual content, perhaps your latest news or product release, you can do so right from the tag page. Featured content will show on the community’s Featured Content Page. Blurring the lines Now that we have an attractive and focused page for each tag, we can start to blur the lines between applications and, indeed, forums and categories, offering a new way to organise content. For some communities, the need for multiple forums to categorise content is diminished, and instead, tagging can be used to separate and find content from across the community. Tags can be featured in the menu system, offering new ways into your community for new visitors, regular community members, and even those who visit daily. Invision Community 5 is fearless in challenging past decisions or streamlining features to make them stronger and more focused. Our new approach to tagging takes a vague and underutilised concept and pushes it front and centre in any content strategy. How will you use it in your community?View the full post

Invision Community 5 has a brand new editing experience powered by a lightweight, fast React text editor built for mobile and modern browsers. The venerable CKEditor v4 at the core of our current editor is starting to show its age, so we wanted a clean slate with Invision Community v5 with an editor that was optimized for mobile use, easily extensible and had a feature set that would take us into the next era of Invision Community and beyond. The obvious choice was to consider the latest version of CKEditor, but it didn't fit our needs as it wasn't easily extensible, external plug-ins would no longer be possible, and its large footprint would affect page speed scores and be painful to use with a mobile connection. After a long search, we settled on Tiptap as the base for our editor. Written in React, loaded in chunks when needed for optimal performance and with many APIs and extensibility options, it was the perfect fit. Aside from the technical improvements, the editor offers new tools and a great base for writing our own plugins. I'll walk you through the main features throughout this blog. If you want a more technical deep dive, then please see my development blog. The Toolbar The toolbar has been redesigned to put the most commonly used styles first, with the least used styles and functions into an ellipses menu. The new paragraph menu contains the header styles, as well as the code block. The plus menu adds lists, boxes and quotes. The benefit of this new compact menu is that it displays just the same on mobile. Currently, there are different editor styles for desktops, tablets and mobiles with some style buttons removed to save space. With Invision Community 5, this is no longer the case. Even the smallest display gets all the functionality. mobile-toolbar.mp4 Emojis & Icons Emojis have become a great way to embellish writing and express emotion. The new emoji picker has been modernized with larger emojis and tooltips to showcase the emoji shortcodes. The Icons tab, new for Invision Community 5, allows you to add Font Awesome Icons directly to your content. Lastly, both the emoji selector and the shortcode suggestion dropdown support arrow-key navigation, so you don't have to move your hands from the keyboard to the mouse. Content Boxes The feature I'm personally most excited about is boxes. The concept started as an abstraction of spoilers because sometimes you just want "a box" - a section that stands out from the rest of the content, something we do manually in our documentation and guides on this site. Each box has a tile and the following options: Expandable - You can mark a box as "expandable" which is functionally the same as a spoiler. One improvement is that expandable boxes use native HTML details and summary elements instead of plain Javascript animated divs. Colors - You can optionally keep it grey on grey like spoilers, but I think that's so boring! The colors automatically adjust to the theme colors, so it will look great in dark and light mode. Float (left/right/none) - You can make the box align to the left or right of other content just like you can for images Width - When the box is floated, you can set the width to big, medium or small. Boxes.mp4 Link Expansion Invision Community has long expanded some links, such as YouTube, offering more context or even a mini-player where appropriate. With Invision Community 5, we've added support for embedding dynamic link previews using site metadata. This is a preview of a topic on our forum. For those unaware, the Open Graph (OG) Protocol is essentially a way webpages can specify a title, image, and description to be dynamically embedded on another platform. This is the underlying technology when you see the link preview in Meta, X, Slack, or iMessage. Code Blocks and Inline Code The new editor adds inline, syntax-highlighted code blocks and inline code. Both formats can be applied via the toolbar, or optionally, you can wrap text in a single backtick (`) to convert it to an inline code block or triple backticks (```) to convert it to a code block. The code blocks also support numerous languages for syntax highlighting, including a new custom highlighter for the Invision HTML Template Syntax (Invision Community theme creators and application developers, you're welcome!) Semantic Headings and Relative Sizes Invision Community 5 adds a block selector with headings 1 through 6 in the new editor. It's possibly the most common request I hear so that people can use consistent styling rather than just big bold text in a paragraph tag. Semantic headings are also ideal for SEO and accessibility. In addition to the block selector, you can create headings with the corresponding markdown shortcut. Consecutive pound signs (#) at the start of a line followed by a space (the number of pounds corresponds to the "level" of the heading. For example ### creates a Heading 3 (<h3/>) creates the heading for you. Using clear header tags means screen readers and search engines can better understand your content as using absolute font sizes, such as 16px, can make it unclear what type of element is actually being used. Is it a heading or just a paragraph with large bold text? Furthermore, you may want different sizes depending on the content and device type. Mobile devices may benefit from a large base font size. So we added percent-based font sizes which change the font size based on whatever the default would be for that block. text-menus.mp4 Further UX Improvements The new editor in Invision Community 5 has several tangible improvements, including a mobile-first design. In the current editor, some functionality was hidden behind modals and double clicks, which are either not obvious on mobile devices or not possible at all. The new editor no longer relies on modals and instead uses buttons and dropdown menus that work perfectly with mobile and other touch-based devices. New Line Arrows For block content, such as boxes, images and quotes, we've added the ability to create a new line before or after the block with the click of a button. This was an issue of frustration for mobile and touch devices where it was not always clear where the cursor was and a finger is a much less accurate aiming device! Sticky Toolbar Anyone who has authored a long piece of content knows the pain of scrolling up and down to get the toolbar in view. To make writing longer content less stressful, we've made the toolbar sticky so that it will always be fixed at the top of the editor after scrolling down. sticky-toolbar.mp4 Markdown Style Shortcuts One common request is to support markdown in the editor. While we opted not to include full markdown support, the new editor recognizes many markdown-style formatting shortcuts. markdown.mp4 Colors A common challenge with rich text editors on sites with multiple themes is colors often need to consistently look right across all themes. This is even more important with Invision Community 5, as it has a native dark mode feature. For this reason, we opted to offer a reduced set of color options that all adapt dynamically to the theme. I mentioned this about box colors above, but this is also true of the font color. The difference in shade is slight, but it's very noticeable without it. Toggling between light and dark mode will never produce unreadable text. colors.mp4 We can't wait for you to try the new editor; it has already been very popular with our small testing group. Which feature are you most looking forward to trying?View the full post

Invision Community 5 has a brand new editing experience powered by a lightweight, fast React text editor built for mobile and modern browsers. The venerable CKEditor v4 at the core of our current editor is starting to show its age, so we wanted a clean slate with Invision Community v5 with an editor that was optimized for mobile use, easily extensible and had a feature set that would take us into the next era of Invision Community and beyond. The obvious choice was to consider the latest version of CKEditor, but it didn't fit our needs as it wasn't easily extensible, external plug-ins would no longer be possible, and its large footprint would affect page speed scores and be painful to use with a mobile connection. After a long search, we settled on Tiptap as the base for our editor. Written in React, loaded in chunks when needed for optimal performance and with many APIs and extensibility options, it was the perfect fit. Aside from the technical improvements, the editor offers new tools and a great base for writing our own plugins. I'll walk you through the main features throughout this blog. If you want a more technical deep dive, then please see my development blog. The Toolbar The toolbar has been redesigned to put the most commonly used styles first, with the least used styles and functions into an ellipses menu. The new paragraph menu contains the header styles, as well as the code block. The plus menu adds lists, boxes and quotes. The benefit of this new compact menu is that it displays just the same on mobile. Currently, there are different editor styles for desktops, tablets and mobiles with some style buttons removed to save space. With Invision Community 5, this is no longer the case. Even the smallest display gets all the functionality. mobile-toolbar.mp4 Emojis & Icons Emojis have become a great way to embellish writing and express emotion. The new emoji picker has been modernized with larger emojis and tooltips to showcase the emoji shortcodes. The Icons tab, new for Invision Community 5, allows you to add Font Awesome Icons directly to your content. Lastly, both the emoji selector and the shortcode suggestion dropdown support arrow-key navigation, so you don't have to move your hands from the keyboard to the mouse. Content Boxes The feature I'm personally most excited about is boxes. The concept started as an abstraction of spoilers because sometimes you just want "a box" - a section that stands out from the rest of the content, something we do manually in our documentation and guides on this site. Each box has a tile and the following options: Expandable - You can mark a box as "expandable" which is functionally the same as a spoiler. One improvement is that expandable boxes use native HTML details and summary elements instead of plain Javascript animated divs. Colors - You can optionally keep it grey on grey like spoilers, but I think that's so boring! The colors automatically adjust to the theme colors, so it will look great in dark and light mode. Float (left/right/none) - You can make the box align to the left or right of other content just like you can for images Width - When the box is floated, you can set the width to big, medium or small. Boxes.mp4 Link Expansion Invision Community has long expanded some links, such as YouTube, offering more context or even a mini-player where appropriate. With Invision Community 5, we've added support for embedding dynamic link previews using site metadata. This is a preview of a topic on our forum. For those unaware, the Open Graph (OG) Protocol is essentially a way webpages can specify a title, image, and description to be dynamically embedded on another platform. This is the underlying technology when you see the link preview in Meta, X, Slack, or iMessage. Code Blocks and Inline Code The new editor adds inline, syntax-highlighted code blocks and inline code. Both formats can be applied via the toolbar, or optionally, you can wrap text in a single backtick (`) to convert it to an inline code block or triple backticks (```) to convert it to a code block. The code blocks also support numerous languages for syntax highlighting, including a new custom highlighter for the Invision HTML Template Syntax (Invision Community theme creators and application developers, you're welcome!) Semantic Headings and Relative Sizes Invision Community 5 adds a block selector with headings 1 through 6 in the new editor. It's possibly the most common request I hear so that people can use consistent styling rather than just big bold text in a paragraph tag. Semantic headings are also ideal for SEO and accessibility. In addition to the block selector, you can create headings with the corresponding markdown shortcut. Consecutive pound signs (#) at the start of a line followed by a space (the number of pounds corresponds to the "level" of the heading). For example ### creates a Heading 3 (<h3/>) creates the heading for you. Using clear header tags means screen readers and search engines can better understand your content as using absolute font sizes, such as 16px, can make it unclear what type of element is actually being used. Is it a heading or just a paragraph with large bold text? Furthermore, you may want different sizes depending on the content and device type. Mobile devices may benefit from a large base font size. So we added percent-based font sizes which change the font size based on whatever the default would be for that block. text-menus.mp4 Further UX Improvements The new editor in Invision Community 5 has several tangible improvements, including a mobile-first design. In the current editor, some functionality was hidden behind modals and double clicks, which are either not obvious on mobile devices or not possible at all. The new editor no longer relies on modals and instead uses buttons and dropdown menus that work perfectly with mobile and other touch-based devices. New Line Arrows For block content, such as boxes, images and quotes, we've added the ability to create a new line before or after the block with the click of a button. This was an issue of frustration for mobile and touch devices where it was not always clear where the cursor was and a finger is a much less accurate aiming device! Sticky Toolbar Anyone who has authored a long piece of content knows the pain of scrolling up and down to get the toolbar in view. To make writing longer content less stressful, we've made the toolbar sticky so that it will always be fixed at the top of the editor after scrolling down. sticky-toolbar.mp4 Markdown Style Shortcuts One common request is to support markdown in the editor. While we opted not to include full markdown support, the new editor recognizes many markdown-style formatting shortcuts. markdown.mp4 Colors A common challenge with rich text editors on sites with multiple themes is colors often need to consistently look right across all themes. This is even more important with Invision Community 5, as it has a native dark mode feature. For this reason, we opted to offer a reduced set of color options that all adapt dynamically to the theme. I mentioned this about box colors above, but this is also true of the font color. The difference in shade is slight, but it's very noticeable without it. Toggling between light and dark mode will never produce unreadable text. colors.mp4 We can't wait for you to try the new editor; it has already been very popular with our small testing group. Which feature are you most looking forward to trying?View the full post

Hello, Welcome to the community. Please PM with you ACP login details so that I check further.

Forum moderation management used to be straightforward. It was commonplace to assign a moderator to a single forum. They would be responsible for enforcing the rules, removing spam and generally modelling the behaviour you wanted to see within your community. As community management has matured and moderators are tasked with roles based on knowledge, help and support, there is a need for more nuance in managing topics within your community. For example, you may have specialists or teams of specialists who help answer questions about development, sales, or support. Topics that require this help may be posted anywhere within your community. Indeed, this feature was inspired by a need in our own support community to ensure customers get the right help from the right team member. We have questions on feature sets, purchasing, and support requests, each requiring a different team member. It is not enough to hope that the right person sees the topics; they must be assigned to ensure excellent service. What are the benefits of this feature? The ability to assign a topic to a single moderator or a team of moderators ensures that each topic gets the best outcome regardless of where it was posted. Having topics assigned helps moderators deal with issues quickly, as there's clarity over which moderators should handle the topic. It also helps keep your community team accountable by having the ability to monitor their workload and get statistics on the time it takes for your team to reply. These statistics also help the community lead assess quality control. How do you use this feature? There are two ways to assign a topic to a moderator or team of moderators. You can assign a topic when replying to it or do it from the topic's action menu. Once assigned, the assignee can review their assigned topics via the Moderator Control Panel and see which are assigned to them via the list of topics. Each moderator will receive a notification informing them they have a new assignment. Those with permission to assign topics to others will see all the assigned topics and who they are assigned to when reviewing the list of topics. The Admin CP contains a list of all assigned topics and also allows you to create and manage teams of moderators, such as "Sales Team" or "Developers." Finally, once the topic has been managed successfully, the moderators can remove themselves from the assignment completing the task. Assigning a specific topic to a single person or team in a busy online forum is a strategy that can enhance the effectiveness of the forum's management. It promotes efficiency, expertise, consistency, and accountability, which are vital for maintaining a vibrant and respectful online community. We hope you are looking forward to this feature and look forward to any comments you may have.View the full post

Finally, one of the most requested features for clubs in Invision Community is coming with our March 2024 release: Pages databases in Clubs. You may be surprised to see a new feature being introduced for Invision Community 4 during our flow of news for Invision Community 5, but as we're committed to Invision Community 4, we wanted to continue to bring optimizations and improvements to the platform. What is the benefit of this new feature? Clubs enable communities to host multiple micro-communities with many benefits. Clubs allow more specialized and focused discussions on specific topics. This can lead to higher-quality content and a deeper exploration of niche subjects that may get overlooked when posted on a busy forum. Clubs also offer the ability to tailor the community experience based on the needs of that community. That customization is what this feature focuses on. Pages is a powerful application that allows truly custom layouts for content areas. Simply by adjusting templates, you can create a news feed layout (it is what we use for this news blog area!) or something even more customized to your needs. The March 2024 release allows you to create Pages database categories directly inside clubs, including custom fields and templates. How does it work? Setting up your Pages database to allow clubs to use categories is simple. Simply allow categories to be created within clubs when creating or editing a database. Once that is done, club owners can add a Pages database category to their club in the same way they can add topics, galleries, etc. Once the Pages database category has been added, you can then add content as you would any other club area with the added features of Pages, including custom templates and custom fields. This example club uses a custom Pages database listing template to show the articles in a custom format along with custom field data. Likewise, viewing an article in this example club showcases the use of custom templates to present the content differently from the standard topic templates Invision Community uses elsewhere. Allowing Pages database categories inside clubs brings the opportunity for more complex custom areas making use of multiple custom fields along with truly custom layouts using templates. This is a great way to bring additional areas, such as news articles, into your club areas to compliment discussions. We hope you enjoy this feature, and if you have any comments, please leave them below!View the full post

Hi, I can't replicate this issue on any of my communities. I think you might have a conflicting plugin code that's interfering with the plugin function.

Hello @kmk You can add this to the custom.css file: .sueSlider #elEventHeader_details{ display: none; }

Live Topics in Invision Community 5 Introduced last year, Live Topics are an innovative way to host live chat and question-and-answer sessions, complete with the option for live video integration. Live Topics effortlessly transform these events into permanent forum topics once the event concludes, allowing your members to not only interact in real-time with the rest of your community, but also continue the conversation far beyond the events conclusion. As part of Invision Community 5, Live Topics will ship with a brand new design, rich-text editors and dynamic reactions. Let’s take a look at all three improvements, starting with the new design. Full-screen, 3 column layout When viewing a live topic, you’ll be taken to a new, minimal, full-screen, 3 column layout which provides plenty of space to simultaneously view your video, question-and-answer list, and live chat columns all at once. The width of the video can easily be adjusted using a simple drag and drop handle, allowing your members to shift their focus between the video or the question-and-answer list depending on the moment. Resize.mp4 The second column holds a list of dynamic question-and-answer discussions, while the third column boasts a redesigned chat area that more closely resemble an app-like experience. Questions-and-chat.mp4 For smaller devices such as tablets and mobiles, the video is always visible at the top of the page. The question-and-answer list and live chat collapse into their own tabbed area to conserve space. Mobile.mp4 Rich-text editors Text fields in Live Topics have been upgraded to CKEditor, allowing for greater flexibility when it comes to formatting text or posting emoji’s. Richtext.mp4 Reactions Reactions have been added to live topics for both the question feed and the live chat. Reactions update dynamically in real-time, offering valuable insights into the content your community deems significant in the moment. Reactions.mp4 A lot of thought has gone into transforming Live Topics into a much more user friendly experience. The refreshed, modern design combined with new real-time features make Live Topics a fantastic solution for hosting real-time community events, and we're looking forward to shipping these updates alongside Invision Community 5 later this year.View the full post

Hello Michael, Can you share the exception error?

Thanks @Michal Szafranski for figuring the secondary groups issue. This should be fixed in version 1.3.3 Also, to adjust the shadow effect, I moved the styling to a separate phtml template, so that you can modify it. Feel free to modify the below styling in these templates: highlightpost => front => styling => postsListing Modify the highlighted line, (It's written in the template twice)

Hello Michael, This shadow effect was manually added to your old setup. However, I liked the idea and added it to version 1.3.2. Please download the latest application version, try it and feedback.

Bring your community to life with the latest live community features coming to Invision Community 5. Last year we introduced new features that immediately showed who was currently reading a topic and who was replying. This feature leveraged new technologies to connect members with each other instantly. In this blog post, we'll delve into the latest live community features for Invision Community 5 and explore how they enhance our sense of togetherness within our communities. We'll examine how these features instantly notify us about new events, updates, or interactions and how they contribute to a shared sense of presence. These features go beyond the static posts and comments we've grown accustomed to and introduce a real-time element. Whether you're part of a support community, a gaming forum, or a professional network, these features will have you feeling like you're interacting with other community members simultaneously, fostering a strong sense of shared experiences. Posting We've all been involved in a busy topic where you're keen to see what replies your latest post has. Select packages on Invision Community 4 can see who is active on a topic and who is typing, but you have to hit refresh to see the new posts added to the topic. If you're anything like me, then you hammer refresh until something new appears. With Invision Community 5, this is no longer a problem. As you interact with a topic, new replies are automatically added to the topic without needing to refresh. This one feature brings the conversation to life, and you get a real sense of other members interacting with the topic at the same time as you. Reactions Did you drop a razor-sharp GIF or post something applause-worthy? Watch as others react to your content in real time with Invision Community 5. There's no need to refresh or return to the topic later to see who enjoyed what you wrote. Getting rewarded for your content is gratifying and encourages you to post more and show your appreciation for other's content via reactions. Notifications Notifications have long been a valuable way to be notified when anything important happens in your community. It may be that someone has quoted your content, tagged you in a post or started a new topic in a forum you're following. With Invision Community 5, you can watch the notification count rack up in real time, alerting you to new events that you may otherwise miss as they happen. We hope that you've enjoyed reading about these new features and look forward to them coming to select packages for Invision Community 5. They provide a sense of togetherness and immediacy, making it feel like we're interacting with fellow community members simultaneously. We're keen to hear what you think, please leave a comment below. The features discussed in this announcement will not be available for Invision Community Classic. Click here to learn more about switching to our platform to get this and other benefits.View the full post