Welcome to Invision Community 5!

Over the coming weeks, we'll be exploring a bunch of new features and improvements coming to our user interface including our brand new theme editor, a new mobile UI, dark mode and performance improvements thanks to a reduction in both JavaScript and CSS. To kick off this series, let’s take a closer look at the new sidebar layout and new view modes for the forum index and topic pages.

Sidebar Layout

Traditionally, Invision Community has shipped with a horizontal header and navigation bar at the top of the page, which is still available in version 5. We're introducing a brand new (and optional) sidebar layout, which can be enabled or disabled easily from within your theme settings. The sidebar not only provides convenient access to your applications, activity streams and search bar, but you can now add links to nodes for even easier access to popular or commonly used areas of your community. For example - a category from your forum, an album from the Gallery, or a product group from Commerce.

Forum Index: Feed view

One of our goals for version 5 was to re-imagine new ways for your visitors to consume content, and the sidebar layout is just one of our solutions. Table view has been the typical way of displaying forums, providing visitors with a simple summary of the most recently active topic. Grid mode introduced cover photos to forums and is a great way to make your page more visually engaging, while fluid view allows visitors to filter through a list of topics to easily focus on multiple areas of the community.

Joining these view modes in version 5 is our new Feed view. Optional cover photos and featured forum colours allow you to personalise each forum, and a list of recently active topics with snippets of the most recent reply allow you to easily see what each forum is focusing on at a glance. The topic list drops below the cover photo and converts to a scrollable list on small devices. It's our fresh take on content display, and we can’t wait to hear your feedback!

 

Topic pages: Compact view

In addition, Invision Community 5 also introduces a new, compact layout option for topics. We wanted to create a layout which placed focus on your content while still keeping all of the authors profile information easily accessible within a mini profile. Stats, rank, badges, reputation points and more can be found by tapping the icon at the top of every post. The mini profile strip has also been added to other areas of the software too, such as comments and reviews in applications like Gallery and Blogs, and will appear on the mobile layout when the traditional "table view" is used in topics.

Switching between the new compact view and the author sidebar view takes just seconds giving you complete control over your community.

 

As part of this view, you also have the choice to feature/pin the original post to the top of every page, making it a breeze for your visitors to easily understand the context of replies without navigating back to page 1. Pinned posts have a slightly larger font-size to distinguish them from replies, and we've thoughtfully truncated them on pages beyond the first to keep scrolling to a minimum.

 

The new sidebar layout and view modes offer a fresh and innovative approach to navigating and interacting with your community. We’re really keen to hear your thoughts on these new views and whether you’ll be unleashing them on your own sites! We appreciate that no two sites are the same, and those who are a fan of the classic header look will benefit from quick styling tools and a visual way to re-arrange the header elements which we’ll cover in a later blog.

We’re looking forward to showcasing a whole bunch of new features over the coming weeks - so stay tuned, and we’ll see you then!

 

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Great work @Ehren

In addition to Matt’s post, each of your members (where a new group permission allows) can also choose their own preference out of the views. So if you’d prefer to use the traditional table view for the forum index and the traditional column view for topics (even if the admin has assigned other layouts), that’s of course possible. We’re absolutely not forcing change, just offering more options than before 🙂 

Great work as always @Ehren

For me particularly like the new feed view. it just triggers some cool design ideas 😊

The touch in Ehren's Series 5 is really nice. I think IPS made the right decision by recruiting a good design developer. It is extremely pleasing to see Ehren in the new structure. Congratulations.

What I want to ask about is the compatibility problems of design developers in parent and child designs in this new structure. Is there any study on this subject?

11 hours ago, OsmanK said:

What I want to ask about is the compatibility problems of design developers in parent and child designs in this new structure. Is there any study on this subject?

I'll be doing a dev blog on the significant changes in how you create and edit themes in v5.

8 minutes ago, OsmanK said:

It's really good news to hear this from you personally. Hopefully, v5 has something in store for the developers as well.🫣

There's a LOT in v5: https://invisioncommunity.com/developers/devblog/

I am honestly blown away by how good all of this looks. I honestly wasn't expecting such a massive leap forward in design with v5, so this is all quite a wonderful surprise to me.

@Ehren and you all have done an amazing job with all of this.

Modern desktop resolutions have gotten so large now that we have such a massive amount of wasted real estate on the sides, even with widgets and everything else filling up some of that space. Migrating to a sidebar layout to capitalize on this just makes a ton of sense, and also makes navigating around seamless.

The new mobile layout looks wonderful too, along with the new forum layouts and everything else. It has been a long time since I've been this genuinely excited about a new IPS release.

Has the new feed view been released yet?