Introducing a fresh new vision for Invision Community 5

[Matt]

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.

[Ramsesx]

This looks great so far but will be a big pita to upgrade to it. Can't wait for the other previews, especially what you've done in the pages area. Please sign me in for alpha testing. Thanks.

[OsmanK]

5 hours ago, Matt said:

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

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

[Charles]

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/

[Kirill Gromov]

Will there be similar changes in Commerce and Page? User profile view?

[Joel R]

On 10/5/2023 at 3:13 AM, Matt said:

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.

Talking more to myself: 

So, the Sidebar Menu gives more space.  And more space means more opportunity to share links. And more opportunity to share links means we can customize the menu experience for different journeys of users: the new you, the returning you, the future you.

For the new you, I can see the first 3 menu links be things like "best of", "top guides," or "must read" types of links.  Essentially, items to help a new user get oriented.

For the returning you, I can see the first 3 menu links be things like "what's new", "my content" and trending content.  Essentially, items to help the returning user catch up and jump back into the latest conversations. 

It's hard to do that kind of personalization with the horizontal style, but I can see the Sidebar Menu empower community admins to create "personalized" menus in a way that most admins haven't done (or thought about!) before.  This is some food for thought that I think all IPS admins should consider as a takeaway when we re-envision our communities on 5.  

This is all assuming IPS keeps group permissions on menu items as is.  

Edited October 6, 2023 by Joel R

[Joel R]

On 10/5/2023 at 3:13 AM, Matt said:

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.

Some thoughts: 

1. This is only an observation.  I find it interesting that IPS approaches time spent on a community from a position of scarcity. To be clear, this makes sense - we have busy lives and many sites that we visit, so we need to optimize the time spent on the community to make it impactful.  Get me to what I want in the most efficient manner.  

On the other hand, I encourage IPS to also approach it from a position of (maybe just a little) greed.  Yes, get me to what I want to read or reply as quickly as possible, but also encourage and push and motivate me to also get involved or read something extra.  Help me go down a rabbit hole. That's the only way to grow my involvement in the site.  

Not asking IPS to adopt a full blown social media orientation where attention is the only point, but adding attention hooks and pushing engagement can only help our communities. 

2. The prototype of the topic as stated above is highly limiting. It matches a support topic.  

But it doesn't match topics where the discussion and commentary are the point.  For example, this topic! This topic doesn't have a "right answer" that anyone can Mark as Solved.  The breadth of conversations by clients and the diverse things we care about - developer updates, the edit button, content denseness, polite fanboy applause - is the point and the noise at the same time.  

Going to be curious how IPS innovates on these social and conversational topics. 

3. I wonder how we can cut down on the noise and distraction of a question by helping users ask a better question to begin with?

[Clover13]

I was thinking about the menu system some more and some of the challenges I have with my own sites.  I really like the sidebar menu being proposed for v5 because its vertical view shows far more detail of the menu with quick visual recognition.  The horizontal header menu in v4 is limited in visibility due to that horizontal nature and even further due to hidden submenus, so members (especially new ones) don't really know what's under there without exploring.  And others find it inconvenient to have to drill through menus to find something they really wish was at their fingertips.

To address this and in an effort to focus on funneling traffic to what I deem the most sought after areas of the site as a whole, I created my own "featured menu" of items that is effectively a content block at the top of the page such that it displays ATF on both desktop and mobile views (unlike a sidebar whereas the right sidebar displays at the end in mobile).  This is akin to the Popular menu being introduced in v5 at the top of the vertical sidebar menu.

Going into this deeper, the real challenge is members simply want different things and have different perspectives on what is popular to them.  Within a broader niche with subniches of interest for the member base, some may favor links and menu items others don't.  As such the most optimal solution is to really allow members to have their own customizable menu of Favorites that can be at the top (even above the site's Popular menu being worked on for v5).  So great idea to have a Popular section of site determined links, even better idea to allow members to Favorite links to establish their own.

[Joel R]

1 hour ago, Clover13 said:

To address this and in an effort to focus on funneling traffic to what I deem the most sought after areas of the site as a whole, I created my own "featured menu" of items that is effectively a content block at the top of the page such that it displays ATF on both desktop and mobile views (unlike a sidebar whereas the right sidebar displays at the end in mobile).  This is akin to the Popular menu being introduced in v5 at the top of the vertical sidebar menu.

Such a great idea!  

So happy to see others have the same lightbulb go off of crafting smarter menus of links.  The hard thing now is how do we customize and craft those menus for different member journeys??  🤔

[Dreadknux]

44 minutes ago, Clover13 said:

To address this and in an effort to focus on funneling traffic to what I deem the most sought after areas of the site as a whole, I created my own "featured menu" of items that is effectively a content block at the top of the page such that it displays ATF on both desktop and mobile views (unlike a sidebar whereas the right sidebar displays at the end in mobile).  This is akin to the Popular menu being introduced in v5 at the top of the vertical sidebar menu.

Going into this deeper, the real challenge is members simply want different things and have different perspectives on what is popular to them.  Within a broader niche with subniches of interest for the member base, some may favor links and menu items others don't.  As such the most optimal solution is to really allow members to have their own customizable menu of Favorites that can be at the top (even above the site's Popular menu being worked on for v5).  So great idea to have a Popular section of site determined links, even better idea to allow members to Favorite links to establish their own.

Do you happen to have a link to your community so you can illustrate the solution you've described here? Sounds super interesting!

I do like what you're saying about user interests and responding to that via menu navigation, and the challenges surrounding that. I've been thinking about this in relation to my community's actual homepage. At present, I have custom blocks focusing on the three major pillars of my community (News, Wiki, Forum/Activity Feed) which is fine for what I need it to do but I'm keen to explore more of a curated activity feed tailored dynamically to user activity/interest, with maybe featured/pinned content 'anchored' to the feed to ensure many/all visitors see important items. I'll be interested to see what V5 may bring in terms of 'Our Picks'/'Activity Feed' enhancements in that area. 🙂

[Clover13]

1 hour ago, Dreadknux said:

Do you happen to have a link to your community so you can illustrate the solution you've described here? Sounds super interesting!

I do like what you're saying about user interests and responding to that via menu navigation, and the challenges surrounding that. I've been thinking about this in relation to my community's actual homepage. At present, I have custom blocks focusing on the three major pillars of my community (News, Wiki, Forum/Activity Feed) which is fine for what I need it to do but I'm keen to explore more of a curated activity feed tailored dynamically to user activity/interest, with maybe featured/pinned content 'anchored' to the feed to ensure many/all visitors see important items. I'll be interested to see what V5 may bring in terms of 'Our Picks'/'Activity Feed' enhancements in that area. 🙂

I'd prefer not to share my site links openly, but I'll give you an idea here.  I use Activity Stream as my landing page and customize it to show what I want from a site content perspective.  Members can still create custom streams if they'd like but that seems like a high bar for most.  My members want maximum convenience and quick browsing experiences to get to what they are interested in (don't we all).  However that means they rarely use menus unless they must and whatever they're looking for is important enough to force them to open and use menus (i.e. you aren't really driving them to any content via the current v4 menus especially with a mobile hamburger icon).  This is another reason the v5 sidebar menu is good for desktop, as it will open the visibility up for members to see what's available vs hidden under submenus.  However for mobile, this still could be a problem as I assume that sidebar is a desktop only view otherwise you'd be stacking menu items in your most valued ATF content.

Regarding the actual "feature menu" I use, I put something simple together with font awesome icons that resemble the purpose of the link and created a simple Pages block to display these in a flex container.  As mentioned earlier, because it's inserted as a block at the top of the page content, it allows me to have these targeted links at the top whether on desktop or mobile.

Maybe there's other or better ways to do this but it's helped me focus and drive members to places of interest in a given moment of time while also allowing me to have "popular" links there when there aren't specific content links commanding that space. 

For example a similar niche Facebook group owner was complaining about Facebook taking down members ads to sell certain items, so I reached out to him to ask to post my site's Classified link.  He agreed, so I quickly added a Classified "feature menu" item to that site as I anticipated members from that group checking out the site to look for that right after I posted about it on the Facebook group.

Another example is I had a merchandise release for members, which they were chomping at the bit for, so I added that as a "feature menu" item to give it proper exposure and drive the sales.

Here's a sample screenshot of what it looks like at the top of an Activity Stream.  I just mix things in and out as needed based on whatever is going on at the moment or where I anticipate interest or want to drive traffic. 👍

[Clover13]

1 hour ago, Joel R said:

Such a great idea!  

So happy to see others have the same lightbulb go off of crafting smarter menus of links.  The hard thing now is how do we customize and craft those menus for different member journeys??  🤔

I think you have to give the ability to members to craft their own journey honestly.  Some things will be globally site purposeful, and others will be individually member interest driven.  The optimal solution offers both.  Ultimately you don't want members to have to work too hard to get to anything, and if they must then you want to facilitate it moving forward. 

The other aspect is you are responsible for driving members to areas of interest but the broader your site gets, that harder it is to drive that elegantly (at least for me).  Facebook implicitly optimizes this because they are tracking and targeting your interests for you.  Users there don't need much of a menu because the content is curated and customized for them based on their activity (on and off Facebook).  It's not just site global recent activity, but recent activity they know you are interested in viewing (without having to directly tell them or configure menus or an activity stream to achieve it).  

[403 - Forbiddeen]

Any predictions for the public launch? In this case, the final version.

[Matt]

1 hour ago, 403 - Forbiddeen said:

Any predictions for the public launch? In this case, the final version.

A final supported release is unlikely before 2024 just because we are heading into three consecutive months where there are holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year) so releasing a brand new version would increase workload at a time where we want our team to relax and enjoy those holidays. I've patched releases on Christmas Day before and it's not the best time. 🙂 

I think we can expect a public preview and some beta releases before then, though.

[My Sharona]

2 hours ago, Matt said:

a time where we want our team to relax and enjoy those holidays

Are you hiring?

[Jordan Miller]

6 hours ago, Matt said:

I think we can expect a public preview and some beta releases before then, though.

[ekforum]

This is looking very nice indeed and very social media-esk style of community. With each new version is a bit of a headache to update existing plugins and apps 😅  but on a fresh install or one with no 3rd party apps, this will be great as looks lovely!

What is the expected release date for version 5?

On 10/10/2023 at 8:48 PM, Matt said:

A final supported release is unlikely before 2024

Sorry, ignore my question above, I can see that you have already answered, sometime in 2024 🙂

[Makoto]

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.

[Ehren]

Thanks @Makoto - I'm glad you like it! Version 5 has received a huge code refresh and we wanted to provide a bunch of optional customization/design choices, so we're keen to see how sites start taking advantage of the new sidebar and UI layouts. 🙂

Looking forward to sharing more soon!

[David N.]

@Ehren Will it be possible to include other data (than what's visible on your video) in the mini profile strip? 

Two things that would greatly benefit my community are: 

1. Add the member signature in the mini profile (so that basically the signature would be hidden by default but people who need to see it would know where to look for it). 
2. Add a short bio in the mini profile (so you can know what credentials that member has). 

Thanks! Can't wait. 🙂 

Edited October 31, 2023 by David N.

[Ehren]

3 hours ago, David N. said:

@Ehren Will it be possible to include other data (than what's visible on your video) in the mini profile strip? 

You’ll be able to add any of your custom profile fields, so if a bio is already a part of those then you’re good to go 🙂

We don’t have plans to show the signature here though. 

[David N.]

9 hours ago, Ehren said:

You’ll be able to add any of your custom profile fields, so if a bio is already a part of those then you’re good to go 🙂

Ok that's great thank you!

[hmikko]

Nice job guys so far 👍 Seems very clean and neat. Liked everything I’ve seen so far.
But just to mention… don’t forgot to update emails 🙂 They need a small refresh as well.

[EDK-Tech]

On 10/5/2023 at 5:58 AM, Marc Stridgen said:

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.

Not sure how difficult this would be to implement but.

For the CMS/Pages application: The ability to choose different schema types for different databases and pages, such as an about page, using to json-ld generator. 

Also since different schema types have different properties, the ability to match/ choose schema properties with custom field types. 

This is similar to how yoast works. 

I'm not sure if this is fully possible with the Google data layer but that seems a bit complicated to implement.

[Marc Stridgen]

15 hours ago, EDK-Tech said:

Not sure how difficult this would be to implement but.

For the CMS/Pages application: The ability to choose different schema types for different databases and pages, such as an about page, using to json-ld generator. 

Also since different schema types have different properties, the ability to match/ choose schema properties with custom field types. 

This is similar to how yoast works. 

I'm not sure if this is fully possible with the Google data layer but that seems a bit complicated to implement.

Feel free to post up within our feedback area any specific suggestions you have such as these. Posting in this area, it will simply be buried in comments

 

EDIT: Ah, just saw you have 🙂