CMS for news, articles and publishing bridged with Invision Community forums

[angle4cor]

Hello, 

My IPS board is attatched to a modest self written CMS for news and articles. I am looking for a solution where I could fully integrate the forums and CMS with the possibilities of having the same user account on both, various blocks with registered users, chatbox, newest posts/topics, etc. 

I am strongly considering WordPress due to its massive widget library and it being for free. I would also like to give Invision's Pages a try due to hopefully very smooth integration between the two.

Few questions about Pages:

• I have the Forums license at the moment. Are you offering free trials for Pages? I would like to try it out on my live board, not seperate install. 
• My board is licensed to a "forum.domain.com" and the current CMS is operating at "domain.com". If I would decide to add Pages to my subscription, can I use it within the same Invision account on a "domain.com" instead of "forum.domain.com/pages" for example?
• Does Pages or Invision in general have to possibility to automatically share the newly published articles to various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc?

[Marc]

1 hour ago, angle4cor said:

I have the Forums license at the moment. Are you offering free trials for Pages? I would like to try it out on my live board, not seperate install. 

We do not offer downloadable trials unfortunately. It would be a separate instance you would need to use, which is available as a trial on cloud from our main page

1 hour ago, angle4cor said:

My board is licensed to a "forum.domain.com" and the current CMS is operating at "domain.com". If I would decide to add Pages to my subscription, can I use it within the same Invision account on a "domain.com" instead of "forum.domain.com/pages" for example?

It would not be a separate installation. It would be part of your current install. So what you would do there is actually move your current community to root where your current CMS is. You can then set the pages application as your default application.

1 hour ago, angle4cor said:

Does Pages or Invision in general have to possibility to automatically share the newly published articles to various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc?

This is not something available at the present time. You could however potentially make use of things like zapier for these kinds of things.

[Joel R]

If you only need an extension for articles and news, I strongly encourage you to evaluate Pages and simply host your entire ecosystem within IPS.  Pages is perfect for news and articles, and with a couple of good templates by third party developers, you can have a very robust news system that compliments your forum. You can even feed articles into your forums. 

My entire Resources section is built on Pages: 

https://www.invisioneer.org/resources/

It also means, more importantly, no maintenance of bridging or SSO.  It means one unified login, one unified set of notifications, one unified activity stream, etc.  WordPress is an unrivalled ecosystem, but if all you need it for is news, you may want to think about the native solution within IPS.  

As Marc mentioned, there is no downloadable trial.  However, if you are self hosted, you can opt in to the new license terms (which you must agree to eventually anyways) and grab all the apps including Pages immediately.  

[Dreadknux]

I can recommend the use of Pages as a news/blog application as well. I had a Wordpress blog for many years (since around 2008) running alongside an Invision Community for forums, and started studying bringing it all into the same platform in my existing IPS install.

It does take some knowledge of HTML coding/site design right now, as the Pages application out of the box in V4 is very generic and standard, with no real templates to help set a news portal up (hopefully this changes in V5). But if you know what you're doing and are happy to tinker with custom form fields and templates, you can make something very cool and native-looking.

I'll share my results as an example:

Homepage (with widgets for pulling latest news records and pinned/featured news records):
https://www.sonicstadium.org

News Story:
https://www.sonicstadium.org/news/games/sega-teases-eggmobile-in-new-picture-of-frozen-base-zone-from-sonic-superstars-r1639/

Sync'd Forum Topic (an option in IPS is to automatically create a forum topic when a Pages record is posted, meaning you can sync Page comments and Forum Discussion about the same topic together):
https://www.sonicstadium.org/forums/topic/33334-sega-teases-eggmobile-in-new-picture-of-frozen-base-zone-from-sonic-superstars/

I'm currently in the process of migrating all of my legacy Wordpress content over to this unified IPS platform, and while I really did like Wordpress and how it worked with images/media/post editing, having a single platform and leveraging my existing forum community for news comments etc has been incredibly valuable to me.

You can try the free demo on the IPS site as Mark said, but if you're an existing customer and you don't mind changing your client terms and conditions to meet the new self-hosted pricing structure, you will get all of the IPS apps right away - so if you want more time to play with it you can have 'free' access to Pages immediately to explore your options.