Invision Community 5: Badge creation and icon customization

[Ehren]

 

Invision Community offers fantastic ways of customizing the user experience for your members, and today, we’re excited to introduce some new and really simple ways of customizing Invision Community 5 even further using our new icon tools.

 

Icon Picker

Lets begin with our brand new icon picker. Containing both Font Awesome icons and emojis, the new picker allows you to easily search and assign icons to specific areas throughout your site. Lets take a look at some examples!

 

Navigation icons

Adding icons to the navigation list has been a highly requested feature, so we're happy to announce that you can now use this new picker to do exactly that, for both the horizontal and vertical navigation panels, without needing to modify your theme.

 

Forum icons

Uploading forum icons is a great way to personalize individual areas of your community. In the past, these icons have typically been images, uploaded via the admin panel. In addition to the upload form, the icon picker now makes it a breeze to assign icons to forums - and if a Font Awesome icon is chosen, it'll even inherit the featured forum color.

 

Forum Feature Color

We have brought the existing forum feature color to feed view allowing for a flash of color and personalization that helps associate a color with a specific forum. The feature color pairs really well with the card image to lift the forum display.

 

Icon creator for badges, ranks and reactions

Creating unique badges, ranks and reactions is a great way to boost activity within your community by encouraging members to share more engaging and frequent content - but designing these icons from scratch using a graphics program often comes with hurdles of its own.

With our new icon creator, you can now design your own custom icons for badges, ranks and reactions straight from your Admin panel, using a combination of colors, icons and shapes.

 

 

We think this new icon creator will make the rank, badges and reactions features even more accessible for everyone, allowing you to create a user experience that is uniquely yours. With Invision Community 5, bringing in customization and personalization moves beyond adding new themes.

We're excited to see how you can take advantage of these new tools, and we look forward hearing your feedback in the comments below!

 

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[Cedric V]

AGAIN some next level stuff! All these updates so far are all one by one amazing! Meanwhile all updates on a community software I won't disclose, have been nothing BUT disappointing. 

Love the work you all are putting into this. Great work, as always.

 

 

[Ehren]

Lots of credit goes to @Matt Finger for this weeks update. He did a great job 👏

[Cedric V]

1 minute ago, Ehren said:

Lots of credit goes to @Matt Finger for this weeks update. He did a great job 👏

Thanks @Matt Finger 🙌 

 

I've seen some great icon customization add ons, but never have I seen the ability to create your own INSIDE the AdminCP. So that is really convenient and next level. Really looking forward to play with that. 🙂 

[Kirill Gromov]

Cool feature, but it seems to me that a large number of icons will interfere with the perception of content in the community.

[Matt]

10 minutes ago, Kirill Gromov said:

Cool feature, but it seems to me that a large number of icons will interfere with the perception of content in the community.

As always, if you feel they are not a good fit for your community, you do not need to use them.

[Robert Angle]

Amazing.

Now the question remains... will there be anything left for theme creators? lol. 

[Chris59]

This was indeed cool feature .

just one question? . will there an option for people like me who have font awesome pro licens??  so we are able to use pro icons?

I will sure use it 🙂 Thanks alot for this feature, hat off 

[Matt]

25 minutes ago, Robert Angle said:

Amazing.

Now the question remains... will there be anything left for theme creators? lol. 

I have Adobe Illustrator, it doesn't mean I can produce good quality graphics 🙂 Tools are only part of the end result. Or goal was to put more power into Invision Community owner's hands, but that doesn't remove the need for professional themes and graphic sets.

2 minutes ago, Chris59 said:

This was indeed cool feature .

just one question? . will there an option for people like me who have font awesome pro licens??  so we are able to use pro icons?

I will sure use it 🙂 Thanks alot for this feature, hat off 

It's not on our roadmap at this point, it'd be tricky given how we load the icons.

[David N.]

Incredible!! This is great, only problem is that I can see myself spending way too much time toying with the custom icon making features instead of getting some work done. 🤣

@Ehren I see a couple of .mov videos in your original post. These are automatically embedded in Safari, but not in Chrome. If you want them embedded in Chrome as well, you can just change the file extension from .mov to mp4 and ... voilà. 😃

For example your icon-creator.mov does not embed in Chrome, but this icon-creator.mp4 does: 

[Marc]

40 minutes ago, David N. said:

Incredible!! This is great, only problem is that I can see myself spending way too much time toying with the custom icon making features instead of getting some work done. 

Ive done this on just a test site 😄

[Ehren]

Thanks for the tip @David N.. All sorted! 🙂 

[David N.]

Just now, Ehren said:

Thanks for the tip @David N.. All sorted! 🙂 

Great! You're welcome! 🙂 

[Chris59]

Was look around more closely . I know it's an early stage but I wonder if there will be a slider for the size of icon . especially when you want to use them as badges for ranks as example 😇

[Matt Finger]

1 hour ago, Chris59 said:

Was look around more closely . I know it's an early stage but I wonder if there will be a slider for the size of icon . especially when you want to use them as badges for ranks as example 😇

No plans for a size option because the generated icons are in fact dimensionless SVGs, meaning they are rendered at whatever size is specified in your community theme's CSS.

[MythonPonty]

 I am really flashed... Wow. Thanks for this great extension.

[Chris59]

What you guys have done for the upcoming v5 is outstanding really , can't wait to play around with it ..

I lift my hat for you all and say Thank you 🥳🤩

[Square Wheels]

I've viewed the linked topic a couple of times.  It continues to display in my unread topics.

[Marc]

11 minutes ago, Square Wheels said:

I've viewed the linked topic a couple of times.  It continues to display in my unread topics.

I'll pass that on, cheers

[DawPi]

2 hours ago, Square Wheels said:

I've viewed the linked topic a couple of times.  It continues to display in my unread topics.

Not this topic but the blog entry with the same title. 

[Disruption]

Holy sh*t. This is amazing. Awesome job team. Especially @Matt Finger

[sonimik1]

I understand everything, although for me there is no such thing as impressive, but I want to say that it would be good at this point if they released at least an Alpha version for users like me, for example, which would be good to experience from now on. We are almost eating the Christmas pabo and there is still nothing

[Marc]

9 hours ago, sonimik1 said:

I understand everything, although for me there is no such thing as impressive, but I want to say that it would be good at this point if they released at least an Alpha version for users like me, for example, which would be good to experience from now on. We are almost eating the Christmas pabo and there is still nothing

The release estimate for anything at all was late 2023 to early 2024. So while I understand its "Still nothing" there. Its exactly what we expected 🙂 . I assure you, you should be eating your Christmas dinner before you get hold of one 😄

We 'may' have something people can see for themselves this year, but it certainly wont be something people can use on their own sites.

[David N.]

I just wanted to add that the video production starting @1:11 is on a whole 'nother level!! 😄

[sonimik1]

5 hours ago, Marc Stridgen said:

The release estimate for anything at all was late 2023 to early 2024. So while I understand its "Still nothing" there. Its exactly what we expected 🙂 . I assure you, you should be eating your Christmas dinner before you get hold of one 😄

We 'may' have something people can see for themselves this year, but it certainly wont be something people can use on their own sites.

How great and funny. What a pleasure to have chosen Invision for my community. I hope that within two weeks we will have something to try. My pleasure and thank you