Invision Community 5: Dark mode, accessibility, performance and mobiles!

[David N.]

I agree, this looks great!! Can't wait. 😃

[ekforum]

Thank you for the update, looking great.

Will there be a beta release of V5? Or we should wait until 2024? 🙂

[Marc Stridgen]

1 hour ago, ekforum said:

Thank you for the update, looking great.

Will there be a beta release of V5? Or we should wait until 2024? 🙂

There will of course be a beta release at some point, but we cannot say when. Please see Matts statement below

 

https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/475690-introducing-a-fresh-new-vision-for-invision-community-5/?do=findComment&comment=2956002

 

[ekforum]

10 minutes ago, Marc Stridgen said:

There will of course be a beta release at some point, but we cannot say when. Please see Matts statement below

 

https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/475690-introducing-a-fresh-new-vision-for-invision-community-5/?do=findComment&comment=2956002

 

Awesome thanks, would be great to test this 🙂 looks like a perfect layout for the new forum project that I just started on cloud hosting with invision. 

[Jordan Miller]

Looks awesome! 

Excited about the dark mode (system preferences option!!) and the addition of the mobile footer navigation. 

[Dreadknux]

On 10/12/2023 at 12:46 PM, The Old Man said:

A section for user customisation out of the box would be awesome, somewhere where we could add a background or form setting that each user could use to personalise the theme for themselves. e.g. users could choose a hero background image without having to select a whole theme just for the one they want, and the admin wouldn't have to add 10 themes with 10 different header images.

Actually this has made me think.

On my community, I have one 'core' custom theme and several 'child' themes where the only differences are in the colour scheming (header gradients, dark modes etc) and header images.

Jumping on this thought, it would be great to be able to offer user-selectable "alt" colour schemes/CSS as part of one theme, as opposed to having one key custom theme and ten children as mentioned above.

I'm thinking of a version of the Theme Select drop down where a user can select a "Colour Name" (i.e. "Sonic", "Tails", "Knuckles") and the theme's colours dynamically change to pre-set colours I define (i.e. blue colour version of the theme, orange colour version of the theme, red colour version of the theme). Colour schemes that I set as an admin, not a swatch that users can select for themselves.

Hopefully that either sounds like a doable thing to include in future post-V5.0 updates, or something that will be addressed in next week's theme blog (in which case ignore me!). 😄

[AlexWebsites]

Looks great and I'm happy to see that JS is reduced with CSS on some of the scrollers. What about advertisements, same positions? That's crucial or the bill isn't getting paid...🤣

I suppose we can use Google Auto Ads and let Google dictate our fortunes/misfortunes..🤪

[Dreadknux]

2 hours ago, AlexWebsites said:

Looks great and I'm happy to see that JS is reduced with CSS on some of the scrollers. What about advertisements, same positions? That's crucial or the bill isn't getting paid...🤣

I suppose we can use Google Auto Ads and let Google dictate our fortunes/misfortunes..🤪

I have Google Adsense with the Auto Ads on and I don't think the bottom-positioned auto ads are going to play nicely with V5's new mobile navigation bar... it's annoying because I really want that bottom navigation bar!!! 😆 But I've never liked having auto ad banners appear at the top of a page either.

I suppose it'll all come out in the wash when it launches and I road test it for public deployment on my community.

[Joel R]

Some questions and / or observations: 

- the Sidebar Menu offers a lot of links.  The (regular) browse menu on mobile offers much less links.  I'm guessing you have an option per link on whether to show on mobile? 

- Bottom mobile menu is nice.  This is a well established design theory by Luke Wrobleski from Google product design, but I actually thought many mobile apps were moving away from the bottom menu because it overlaps with some built in browser or phone options.  Thoughts? I don't think there's one right answer, just more interested in your perspective.  

- traditional view of menu only offers single row.  I already do this on my primary community today (not because of any special study on design theory, but for simplicity!) but would be interested in your perspective in why you're imposing this approach.  The current Menu structure already encapsulates this and more. Why change it? 

- performance improvements.  You removed JavaScript and a lot of CSS.  But then we also need splashy grid pictures of our latest trip to Australia and croc suit for the new Forum Feed / Big Grid view!

Edited October 14, 2023 by Joel R

[Noble~]

Looking forward to this, nice job team.😁

[UncrownedGuard]

This all looks so good!  Although I'm still super excited to see how Pages and Databases will be designed and hope they have a modern feel to them with category images, a less "database feeling" record layout, and such as well!

[Neville1]

Great work on this @Ehren!!

[Ehren]

On 10/14/2023 at 10:38 AM, Joel R said:

- the Sidebar Menu offers a lot of links.  The (regular) browse menu on mobile offers much less links.  I'm guessing you have an option per link on whether to show on mobile? 

When you add links using the Menu Manager, you can choose what menu(s) the link is shown in. Either the side panel, the horizontal bar, or the mobile panel.

On 10/14/2023 at 10:38 AM, Joel R said:

- traditional view of menu only offers single row.  I already do this on my primary community today (not because of any special study on design theory, but for simplicity!) but would be interested in your perspective in why you're imposing this approach. 

You basically answered this yourself haha 🙂 Simplicity. The "2 row" navigation bar was always a burden to restyle in version 4, and took up a fair amount of vertical space. Simplifying the navigation into a single row allows us to display the navigation bar in multiple ways, which you'll see more of next week.

On 10/14/2023 at 10:38 AM, Joel R said:

- performance improvements.  You removed JavaScript and a lot of CSS.  But then we also need splashy grid pictures of our latest trip to Australia and croc suit for the new Forum Feed / Big Grid view!

As always, the cover photos are optional. 👍

[Joey_M]

I have to say, whilst I aim to remain on v5. I do love the design and freshness of the upcoming version; it seems a lot more modern and polished.

There's a lot of great work in the product.

I'm hoping that there's no real issue down the line with hooks, which gives us more control over where things go etc.

[Randy Calvert]

On the topic of mobile, are there plans to help promote the PWA?  For example notifying the user the option exists and promote installing it?

[Matt]

On 10/14/2023 at 1:38 AM, Joel R said:

- performance improvements.  You removed JavaScript and a lot of CSS.  But then we also need splashy grid pictures of our latest trip to Australia and croc suit for the new Forum Feed / Big Grid view!

It's also worth noting that the removal of JS and CSS removes render blocking items, whereas cover photos are additional bandwidth but do not stop the page from rendering until loaded.

[AlexJ]

Dream come true 🙂 Nice work @Ehren 

[David Bryce]

Sorry to be dense…but I’m having trouble finding the new Dark Mode theme…? 😶‍🌫️

dB

[Nathan Explosion]

That'll be because v5 hasn't been released yet.

[Emediate]

Winning! And with @Ehren on board, we can all rest assured it will be top notch 🙂

[Dreadknux]

Hey @Ehren sorry for the topic bump but I was rewatching this and something came to me when seeing these newly-designed widgets:

Considering how great these particular 'scrollable column' widgets look both on desktop and mobile, is there scope to include these widget designs for custom content blocks in the V5 Block Manager (or as a built-in template to leverage in the AdminCP Block Editor)? I can just see myself using this particular widget design to list the latest records in a 'News' Pages CMS database, for example.

[Ehren]

Hi @Dreadknux

Funnily enough, this is something we discussed internally a few weeks ago. We're working hard on revamping Pages at the moment, so we'll be able to provide more information in the future about widget customizations 🙂 

[PrettyPixels]

I love the new accessibility features! As someone who works with accessibility for a living, I'd also really like to see the ability for users to scale text and make it higher-contrast for older or visually impaired members.

Is this something you'd consider adding?

Edited December 13, 2023 by PrettyPixels

[Ehren]

10 hours ago, PrettyPixels said:

I love the new accessibility features! As someone who works with accessibility for a living, I'd also really like to see the ability for users to scale text and make it higher-contrast for older or visually impaired members.

Is this something you'd consider adding?

It's not something we've planned for an initial release, but it's quite easy to achieve with the new CSS framework and is possibly something we can implement in the future.

With that said, browsers are very capable of scaling font sizes these days and since the entire UI is built using em's for sizing, the whole interface scales neatly. The color scheme also passes all contrast tests so far, and can be customized further using the Theme Editor if necessary 🙂