Invision Community 5 has a brand new editing experience powered by a lightweight, fast React text editor built for mobile and modern browsers.

The venerable CKEditor v4 at the core of our current editor is starting to show its age, so we wanted a clean slate with Invision Community v5 with an editor that was optimized for mobile use, easily extensible and had a feature set that would take us into the next era of Invision Community and beyond.

The obvious choice was to consider the latest version of CKEditor, but it didn't fit our needs as it wasn't easily extensible, external plug-ins would no longer be possible, and its large footprint would affect page speed scores and be painful to use with a mobile connection.

After a long search, we settled on Tiptap as the base for our editor. Written in React, loaded in chunks when needed for optimal performance and with many APIs and extensibility options, it was the perfect fit.

Aside from the technical improvements, the editor offers new tools and a great base for writing our own plugins. I'll walk you through the main features throughout this blog. If you want a more technical deep dive, then please see my development blog.

The Toolbar

The toolbar has been redesigned to put the most commonly used styles first, with the least used styles and functions into an ellipses menu. The new paragraph menu contains the header styles, as well as the code block. The plus menu adds lists, boxes and quotes. The benefit of this new compact menu is that it displays just the same on mobile. Currently, there are different editor styles for desktops, tablets and mobiles with some style buttons removed to save space. With Invision Community 5, this is no longer the case. Even the smallest display gets all the functionality.

 

 

Emojis & Icons

Emojis have become a great way to embellish writing and express emotion. The new emoji picker has been modernized with larger emojis and tooltips to showcase the emoji shortcodes.

The Icons tab, new for Invision Community 5, allows you to add Font Awesome Icons directly to your content.

Lastly, both the emoji selector and the shortcode suggestion dropdown support arrow-key navigation, so you don't have to move your hands from the keyboard to the mouse.

Content Boxes

The feature I'm personally most excited about is boxes.

The concept started as an abstraction of spoilers because sometimes you just want "a box" - a section that stands out from the rest of the content, something we do manually in our documentation and guides on this site. Each box has a tile and the following options:

• Expandable - You can mark a box as "expandable" which is functionally the same as a spoiler. One improvement is that expandable boxes use native HTML details and summary elements instead of plain Javascript animated divs.
• Colors - You can optionally keep it grey on grey like spoilers, but I think that's so boring! The colors automatically adjust to the theme colors, so it will look great in dark and light mode.
• Float (left/right/none) - You can make the box align to the left or right of other content just like you can for images
• Width - When the box is floated, you can set the width to big, medium or small.

Link Expansion

Invision Community has long expanded some links, such as YouTube, offering more context or even a mini-player where appropriate.

With Invision Community 5, we've added support for embedding dynamic link previews using site metadata. This is a preview of a topic on our forum.

For those unaware, the Open Graph (OG) Protocol is essentially a way webpages can specify a title, image, and description to be dynamically embedded on another platform. This is the underlying technology when you see the link preview in Meta, X, Slack, or iMessage.

Code Blocks and Inline Code

The new editor adds inline, syntax-highlighted code blocks and inline code. Both formats can be applied via the toolbar, or optionally, you can wrap text in a single backtick (`) to convert it to an inline code block or triple backticks (```) to convert it to a code block.

The code blocks also support numerous languages for syntax highlighting, including a new custom highlighter for the Invision HTML Template Syntax (Invision Community theme creators and application developers, you're welcome!)

Semantic Headings and Relative Sizes

Invision Community 5 adds a block selector with headings 1 through 6 in the new editor. It's possibly the most common request I hear so that people can use consistent styling rather than just big bold text in a paragraph tag. Semantic headings are also ideal for SEO and accessibility.

In addition to the block selector, you can create headings with the corresponding markdown shortcut. Consecutive pound signs (#) at the start of a line followed by a space (the number of pounds corresponds to the "level" of the heading). For example ### creates a Heading 3 (<h3/>) creates the heading for you.

Using clear header tags means screen readers and search engines can better understand your content as using absolute font sizes, such as 16px, can make it unclear what type of element is actually being used. Is it a heading or just a paragraph with large bold text?

Furthermore, you may want different sizes depending on the content and device type. Mobile devices may benefit from a large base font size. So we added percent-based font sizes which change the font size based on whatever the default would be for that block.

Further UX Improvements

The new editor in Invision Community 5 has several tangible improvements, including a mobile-first design.

In the current editor, some functionality was hidden behind modals and double clicks, which are either not obvious on mobile devices or not possible at all. The new editor no longer relies on modals and instead uses buttons and dropdown menus that work perfectly with mobile and other touch-based devices.

New Line Arrows

For block content, such as boxes, images and quotes, we've added the ability to create a new line before or after the block with the click of a button. This was an issue of frustration for mobile and touch devices where it was not always clear where the cursor was and a finger is a much less accurate aiming device!

Sticky Toolbar

Anyone who has authored a long piece of content knows the pain of scrolling up and down to get the toolbar in view. To make writing longer content less stressful, we've made the toolbar sticky so that it will always be fixed at the top of the editor after scrolling down.

Markdown Style Shortcuts

One common request is to support markdown in the editor. While we opted not to include full markdown support, the new editor recognizes many markdown-style formatting shortcuts.

Colors

A common challenge with rich text editors on sites with multiple themes is colors often need to consistently look right across all themes. This is even more important with Invision Community 5, as it has a native dark mode feature. For this reason, we opted to offer a reduced set of color options that all adapt dynamically to the theme. I mentioned this about box colors above, but this is also true of the font color. The difference in shade is slight, but it's very noticeable without it. Toggling between light and dark mode will never produce unreadable text.

We can't wait for you to try the new editor; it has already been very popular with our small testing group. Which feature are you most looking forward to trying?

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Sticky Toolbar - excellent.

+1 for tables.

Will previous use of CKE spoiler code auto-update on upgrade to expandables or will previous posts remain legacy "spoiler"?

There are also various buttons I want my mods and admins to have access to but not general members, so restriction by group would be useful.

There's obviously a lot of work going into version 5.

 

 

Source editing definitely a must for admins. Somethings we cannot embed without this functionality.

Source mode isn't possible in v5 due to how modern editors manage text. It's not like the old days where it markup was thrown around it and called it good.

What do you need to do that requires source mode? With the new editor in v5 you can add new functionality (and button based styles) still.

 

Love it! Although I am concerned my members will write their entire posts in H1 😄

Why would anyone do that?

 

What do you need to do that requires source mode?

Very useful for copying entire formatted messages (bold, links, lists...), when pasting rich text is forbidden for members (and only admins are allowed to see the HTML source of the message).

 

Is there a way to create HTML anchor links? 

Not to contradict Marc, but there will be a global Table of Contents widget for which you can apply anchors to headings and box titles (stay tuned for more page builder updates 🙂)

 

Will it be possible to create custom HTML buttons the way I currently can, for example like this?

Yes, in fact in a few minutes I was able to create a plugin for KBD elements

We're still getting docs together so please be patient but the development of supported buttons and content types is much more streamlined than in cke4.

No disrespect, but you've made several leaps of assumption. 😂

Our alpha testers are customers, some self-hosted, some with the cloud platform from all walks of life. They are not picked because they are tech savvy or knowledgable. They are picked because they are articulate, but beyond that they have no special skills. They are your peers.

Apologies for digging up this thread.

Having read through all the responses, there are fully one third dealing with html/source abilities with the Editor. As such, it would seem that there is a pretty significant demand by admins for this ability. Count me among those who would love to have that ability in v5.

I don't use it to a great extent but it is important to me (and others it would seem) that I retain certain abilities to tailor content on sites.

There are just so many things that can be done that you can't include in a standard enhanced editor.

 

Source mode isn't possible in v5 due to how modern editors manage text. It's not like the old days where it markup was thrown around it and called it good.

Has this qualifier changed? I ask because there is a dev who has created the ability to utilize html in the editor.

Thank you for your time.

Edited Thursday at 04:04 PM3 days by My Sharona

It's just not possible due to how the editor sees everything as nodes.

The only way around it would be to effectively launch a text box and use that, but it would mean you would have to use a text box for future edits forever because the moment you turn load that content in the normal editor, it would remove everything it didn't have a node for breaking the content.

That's not a great experience imo.

 

Not to contradict Marc, but there will be a global Table of Contents widget for which you can apply anchors to headings and box titles (stay tuned for more page builder updates 🙂)

Is there documentation somewhere on how to get this to work? Perhaps I am having a blonde moment when it comes to this but, I have tried placing it upon a page but it doesn't show. I want to get a feel for how it works. Is this supposed to be the solution for anchor links? Outside of the page it links to?

This is what the block says:
You must exit the Page Editor to customize the Table Of Contents entries. A page with no Table of Contents entries will cause this widget to be hidden.

Elements in the page such as Headings, short Paragraphs and Content Box Titles can be added to the table and will have a menu available on hover. A default collection of Table of Contents entries will be generated from Headings on the page.

 

Is there documentation somewhere on how to get this to work?

You just drag it onto the page. It will try to create a TOC listing automatically and then you can edit the entries once you see them.

Most of the times I tried it, the initial scan just doesn’t work. The loading icon just keeps spinning forever.

 

Most of the times I tried it, the initial scan just doesn’t work. The loading icon just keeps spinning forever.

I'll create a bug for this. Just to be clear, by "initial scan", do you mean right after exiting the page editor or every time the page initially loads?