Introducing a fresh new vision for Invision Community 5

[Clover13]

Really incredible work @Ehren and whomever else was involved!  Lots of really great features, and the ability to have more and more configuration based layout control is excellent!  Really liked the inline layout editing such as the header config with components for logo, navigation, breadcrumbs, etc!  Looking forward to seeing it in a hands on demo in the future!

Any plans on offering on demand demo sites for existing and potential clients to give a try for a brief period of time?  A lot of sites/products do this with their offerings, and could really help IPS elevate their sales.  Being on the cloud should make this a whole lot easier now too! 👍

[Charles]

We have offered an on-demand Free Trial on our site for years 🙂 

[Clover13]

24 minutes ago, Charles said:

We have offered an on-demand Free Trial on our site for years 🙂 

Ah, that's great, I can't recall if that was in place when I got my first site so many years ago.  I found the link for it in the menus:  https://invisioncommunity.com/clientarea/free-trial/

 

[abobader]

It sure worth the wait, well done guys, look great.

[Joel R]

2 hours ago, opentype said:

Some nice ideas there. 
I’m not a fan of minimizing the user info in the topic view though. The personal touch of clearly seeing who you are interacting with is getting more important these days, not less. If anything, this view should only be triggered if there is not enough space, not in full desktop view. As a typographer, the example screenshot is painful to look at.  3 posts with just one or two lines each that are waaaaaaaay too long for comfortable reading. This was always a problem with a default IPS installations but now it was made worse, not better. If the user info remains to the side, it also improves the readability of the post content. 

To unpack your post which has a lot of good points, are you asking about: 

1. Showing / hiding elements for user expertise, authority, and trust? And / or

2. Content denseness on the view screen? 

These are both important topics for deeper conversation and consideration for each community.  For some communities that are support oriented, showing reputation is important: getting an answer from an expert or an official company rep is important to validate the level of authority or expertise in the topic.  For fan communities around interests and hobbies that are more social based, you may want to turn off the feature.  

For content denseness, I agree.  Making sure that the screen above the fold packs as much information as possible.  Lots of opportunity in UIX for designers and themers to explore.  

[Joel R]

Some questions: 

1. Sidebar Layout - how does this interplay with our existing Sidebar of the blocks? Or do you foresee a left-hand sidebar (with Menu options) versus a right-hand sidebar (with Blocks). 

If we utilize the Sidebar Menu, does this replace the normal Navigation Menu? 

How does the Sidebar Menu interact with extremely long main pages? As an extreme example, you have 3 items in the Sidebar Menu but 100 boards or 100 posts so the Sidebar drags on and on but it's empty.  

2. Feed view - I like.  A lot.  My personal thoughts is that this works extremely well for a well-focused board, but not for overbuilt forums with 100 boards.  

The user avatar is a bit confusing.  Is it the avatar of the person of the last reply, or the avatar of the topic starter? 

How do you signify that I (as first person) have participated in the topic? How does this display when it's not text, such as a quote, code, or an GIF? Do you incorporate any iconography for elements like featured, pinned, promoted, answered, staff, etc.?

3. Compact View - I think this is one of the more elegant solutions to showing a user postbit for a mobile world.  

How does this interplay with the hovercard? 

Any consideration given to users with (and this is a real thing on my primary community) 100,000 content items + 10,000 reputation + a really long email?  This design looks fine when you have 5  badges and 5 points and a short email. 

[Randy Calvert]

The feed view looks amazing!  One thing to consider might be allowing us to use multiple views concurrently. 

For example say feed view for specific forums and then table for the rest. 

The idea is that this might allow us to highlight and give more “real estate” to a few specific forums and highlight the content inside while others could be in a more “compact” view. 

[Joel R]

I want to add that for a new lifecycle, this theme looks amazing.  

I remember the 4.0 Social Suite (raise your hand if you used 4.0!), and while no one doubts that 5.0 is its successor, this theme looks and feels so much more polished out the gate and it will only get better on this cycle.

[Ehren]

1 hour ago, Joel R said:

Sidebar Layout - how does this interplay with our existing Sidebar of the blocks? Or do you foresee a left-hand sidebar (with Menu options) versus a right-hand sidebar (with Blocks). 

If we utilize the Sidebar Menu, does this replace the normal Navigation Menu? 

The side navigation panel is completely separate from the widget sidebar, so it's reserved for navigation items only. When enabled via theme settings, the navigation panel replaces the horizontal header/navigation menu - so you can only use a single one at a time. The navigation links are managed via the Menu Manager, as you'd expect.

1 hour ago, Joel R said:

How does the Sidebar Menu interact with extremely long main pages? As an extreme example, you have 3 items in the Sidebar Menu but 100 boards or 100 posts so the Sidebar drags on and on but it's empty. 

The sidebar has independent scrolling which means you won't have a long empty space in either the sidebar or the content area:

1 hour ago, Joel R said:

Feed view - I like.  A lot.  My personal thoughts is that this works extremely well for a well-focused board, but not for overbuilt forums with 100 boards.  

The user avatar is a bit confusing.  Is it the avatar of the person of the last reply, or the avatar of the topic starter? 

How do you signify that I (as first person) have participated in the topic? How does this display when it's not text, such as a quote, code, or an GIF? Do you incorporate any iconography for elements like featured, pinned, promoted, answered, staff, etc.?

Just like the other views (table and grid), the avatar is of the person who posted the most recent reply. User participation isn't displayed in our existing views (apart from fluid of course), but is something we can keep in mind for a future iteration.

To prevent the index page from becoming overwhelmed with icons and badges, there are no badges for answered, staff, etc. Quotes, codes and gifs are removed, so only plain text is shown in the snippet.

1 hour ago, Joel R said:

Compact View - I think this is one of the more elegant solutions to showing a user postbit for a mobile world.  

How does this interplay with the hovercard? 

Any consideration given to users with (and this is a real thing on my primary community) 100,000 content items + 10,000 reputation + a really long email?  This design looks fine when you have 5  badges and 5 points and a short email. 

Thanks! The hovercard has received a UI polish in version 5, but still behaves as normal in the compact topic UI.

Here's an example with more data for you. The stats behave like bricks in a wall - they'll occupy the full width of the mini profile, as neatly as possible.

Desktop:

 

Mobile:

 

1 minute ago, Joel R said:

I want to add that for a new lifecycle, this theme looks amazing.  

I remember the 4.0 Social Suite (raise your hand if you used 4.0!), and while no one doubts that 5.0 is its successor, this theme looks and feels so much more polished out the gate and it will only get better on this cycle.

Thanks Joel!

[Randy Calvert]

46 minutes ago, Joel R said:

I want to add that for a new lifecycle, this theme looks amazing.  

I remember the 4.0 Social Suite (raise your hand if you used 4.0!), and while no one doubts that 5.0 is its successor, this theme looks and feels so much more polished out the gate and it will only get better on this cycle.

I’m showing my age, but I remember 2.0 and 3.0!   You dang kids get off my lawn!

(I still remember thinking how IPB 1.0 looked so much nicer than Ikonboard 3.X!)

[shahed]

Great work as always @Ehren

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

[Joel R]

One of the more unexpected and interesting new design choices is the highlight of nodes in the menu, not just the apps (eg. popular forum boards).  

Would love to hear more from IPS on best practices and what inspired this. 

Community owners can already do this manually. The current Menu Manager allows us to insert a link to, well, any URL.  I doubt most of us actually utilize it to highlight our popular nodes though! 

I'm starting to realize that the vertical menu gives more space for menu options versus the horizontal menu, so owners can add options like popular forum boards that we couldn't before.  There's some interesting experimentation and innovation community owners can do with the new vertical menu. 

[Ehren]

To clear any confusion, the "Popular travel forums" header is just a manually created header using the Menu Manager - it's the same as the "Browse" header for example. With version 5 though, instead of manually inserting URL's to certain forums, categories, albums, etc, you select them from a list and they'll display based on user permissions. They'll also highlight when active, like so:

 

[PoC2]

As @Matt pointed out – no two sites are the same, which is why I'm looking forward to several of the new features, but very happy they are being made optional so we can all assess if they are a good fit for our respective communities.

This already looks like great work.

Oh Dark Mode, how we've missed you...

[Cedric V]

Would it perhaps be possible to have an Edit button next to Quote? Instead of having it under the 3 dots ? 

[hpcrazy]

Looks amazing - I am looking forward till the version 5.x is available.

[Matt]

4 hours ago, Joel R said:

One of the more unexpected and interesting new design choices is the highlight of nodes in the menu, not just the apps (eg. popular forum boards).  

Would love to hear more from IPS on best practices and what inspired this. 

Community owners can already do this manually. The current Menu Manager allows us to insert a link to, well, any URL.  I doubt most of us actually utilize it to highlight our popular nodes though! 

I'm starting to realize that the vertical menu gives more space for menu options versus the horizontal menu, so owners can add options like popular forum boards that we couldn't before.  There's some interesting experimentation and innovation community owners can do with the new vertical menu. 

The sidebar menu gives you more space to organise your navigation. The current system of it being in the header means a lot has to be hidden to make it fit, which isn't the best onboarding experience nor does it help highlight important areas of the community.

The thought behind the node menu item was to make it easier to add specific forums (or gallery albums, etc) so you can better design your community. You may want to highlight a few key areas (we might choose to feature Community Insider, Support, Feedback) making those areas easy to reach wherever you are and to help new visitors to your community discover what is important. Likewise, you might wish to enable fluid view and list your individual forums in the sidebar so you have the best of both worlds, a feed view index and then easy access to specific forums.

The theme for Invision Community 5 is optimising the minutes you spend on a community to make them more impactful. We are considering the various lifecycles of a topic. The initial burst of energy that crackles with noise and distractions and also in the future where future visitors come to it cold and want to extract key information quickly.

[Matt]

11 hours ago, Joel R said:

2. Feed view - I like.  A lot.  My personal thoughts is that this works extremely well for a well-focused board, but not for overbuilt forums with 100 boards. 

I agree. We server a wide variety of communities, some having quite literally hundreds of forums with robust silos of information but there is a growing need for smaller more bespoke communities with a handful of forums.

After spending so long on my development installation of v5, I really crave the feed-like view of v5 on the forum index. I find it quite frustrating to only discover the most recent reply.

I do find it quite interesting that most regular members live in the streams of latest posts more than clicking through various forums to see what is new. It goes back to that concept of serving past you, current you and future you. Past you is new to the forum and needs the organisation to find a way into what could be an overwhelming amount of content, current you is still involved but likely hangs out in streams to just read the latest content and move on, and future you visits less so is less familiar but still wants to catch up as quickly as possible.

[Robert Angle]

3 hours ago, Matt said:

I do find it quite interesting that most regular members live in the streams of latest posts more than clicking through various forums to see what is new.

This is true on my well-established, long running board. I've spoke to a lot of members who visit and go straight to the Unread Content section of the Activity Feed, bypassing everything else.

 

[403 - Forbiddeen]

How will work the SEO? 

[Marc Stridgen]

48 minutes ago, 403 - Forbiddeen said:

How will work the SEO? 

Is there anything specific about SEO requirements you are looking for, as that's quite a broad question? 🙂 Of course, SEO is always something in which we aim to improve on over time, and have continued to do so well into version 4 too.

[FanClub Mike]

2 hours ago, 403 - Forbiddeen said:

How will work the SEO? 

It's a better user experience, easier navigation, quicker to access content, requires less scrolling, has a much-improved mobile experience, showcases helpful replies, and so on.

From my point of view, it's very SEO-friendly.

[PinPics]

17 hours ago, Randy Calvert said:

The feed view looks amazing!  One thing to consider might be allowing us to use multiple views concurrently. 

For example say feed view for specific forums and then table for the rest. 

The idea is that this might allow us to highlight and give more “real estate” to a few specific forums and highlight the content inside while others could be in a more “compact” view. 

Very excited to see this preview and definitely looking forward to some of the new features. It looks great!

I'd second the idea of being able to use the feed view in some forums and leave others in compact. That would be really great, since we could use feed view for some specific areas, without having to expand some of the lesser ones.

[usmf]

Nice to see this. Big changes can sometimes be difficult in my oldest community, but some of these options look like they're going to be nice. Looking forward to seeing more.

Will a group icon still be visible in the compact mode?

[OsmanK]

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?