Five Invision Community 5 features your members will love

[Matt]

As we move closer to releasing Invision Community 5, I wanted to review a few key features I believe your members will love after you upgrade to Invision Community 5.

The all-new editor
We have to start with the brand new editor, recoded and redesigned from the ground up. The new editor is not just faster and leaner, but also remarkably user-friendly, ensuring an upgraded experience for your members in Invision Community 5.

Your members will love the streamlined toolbar that no longer hides buttons on smaller devices. They'll also appreciate the new emoji and icon panel, which allows them to insert over 1,700 icons to enhance their posts.

Content boxes, resizing images, and media embeds via drag handles will also be well received.

Finally, small UI improvements, such as new line arrows on blocks that can be tapped or clicked to insert new lines accurately, will end fiddly cursor placement and settling for poor spacing.

The editor is the most important touch point within your community, so we wanted to ensure that Invision Community 5 does this perfectly.

 

New live community features
I can speak from experience that when I see other people typing, I'll stick around to see what they say. Likewise, if I post a topic and I see multiple people reading it, I'll keep tabs on it to see if any replies come in.

These are not just great engagement features but also an exciting experience. Invision Community 5 takes it further, blurring the lines between group chat and a traditional topic. Now, when a new reply or reaction is made, it will appear magically on your screen, keeping your members on site for longer.

Your members will love feeling like they are part of the live community and watching reactions and replies in real-time. They'll also appreciate seeing their notification bell numbers increase without having to refresh or move between pages.

 

Topic Summaries
Time is our most valuable resource. Your members use many apps and communities in a day, so when they make time to visit your community, we want to ensure that they get the most from your forum in the shortest amount of time possible.

Long topics are great but few have the time to read through dozens of pages. Topic summaries take the very best of a topic and remove the rest, allowing your members to optimize their time well while on your community, making their experience more efficient and productive.

They'll love keeping up to date with more topics without scrolling past gifs and side quests.

 

Dark mode and the new mobile experience
Late-night scrolling becomes much more comfortable with Invision Community 5's native dark mode. Your members will love being able to choose a mode or allow it to sync with their devices, giving them a uniform experience across the many apps they browse.

They'll also appreciate the new user experience, which includes improved performance, better accessibility for screen readers, and a vastly improved phone experience. We've made sure Invision Community 5 is mobile first.

 

The new tagging experience
Invision Community 5 reinvents tagging to make it more community-focused and increase content discovery across all apps. With its new tag pages, you can easily bring gallery photos, forum topics, events, and blog entries into a single page in Invision Community 5.

Your members will love following their favourite tags to get notifications on new content and discover more of your community they are interested in without having to browse many forums and different areas of your community.

 

These are just the top five features we think your members will love. Are you looking forward to these features or perhaps some of those not mentioned here? As always, let us know in the comments.

View full blog entry

[Kirill Gromov]

14 hours ago, Matt said:

Topic Summaries

Only for cloud customers?

[Marco Junior]

These are really very inviting features.
However, you need to mention that these features are not available to all of us.
I came back to the community after years because of a specific feature & even without this feature I am here helping by reporting problems with a version still in the testing phase.

It is sad in a way to feel excluded, but it is a reality that customers (self-hosted) do not have all the features available, but we have a redesigned interface and an improved text editor.

Assigned topic (This is the feature I wanted most from this version) because of the type of community I manage, I made lovely promises to my support and development team, unfortunately we all ended up disappointed to know that these features will probably go to "Cloud" customers and as mentioned before, a non-profit community with experienced developers would not opt for the monthly cost of a cloud service, as the cost we would have would be too high.

Our infrastructure is of quality, I am sure it would not be a problem to run all these features.
But unfortunately these are the features that will give Invision more financial resources, because they would be released to the customers self-hosted
Isn't that right?

[Matt]

1 hour ago, Kirill Gromov said:

Only for cloud customers?

 

1 hour ago, Marco Junior said:

These are really very inviting features.
However, you need to mention that these features are not available to all of us.
I came back to the community after years because of a specific feature & even without this feature I am here helping by reporting problems with a version still in the testing phase.

It is sad in a way to feel excluded, but it is a reality that customers (self-hosted) do not have all the features available, but we have a redesigned interface and an improved text editor.

Assigned topic (This is the feature I wanted most from this version) because of the type of community I manage, I made lovely promises to my support and development team, unfortunately we all ended up disappointed to know that these features will probably go to "Cloud" customers and as mentioned before, a non-profit community with experienced developers would not opt for the monthly cost of a cloud service, as the cost we would have would be too high.

Our infrastructure is of quality, I am sure it would not be a problem to run all these features.
But unfortunately these are the features that will give Invision more financial resources, because they would be released to the customers self-hosted
Isn't that right?

Some of these features will be for specific packages. It's not as simple as "cloud" v "self-hosted". We have a total of 7 packages including the Classic self hosted option. Like all businesses, some features are limited to package levels and above.

We have not finalised our decisions yet, but when we do we will update the pricing page with "coming soon" as we have in the past.

[dmaidon1]

The editor is nowhere near the top for my users. Just way too many clicks to find the feature they want/need to use.

[Matt]

45 minutes ago, dmaidon1 said:

The editor is nowhere near the top for my users. Just way too many clicks to find the feature they want/need to use.

Phew, thankfully you're not our only customer. 😅

Joking aside, Ehren and Matt F are working on a few improvements to the menu system.

[Adriano Faria]

1 hour ago, dmaidon1 said:

Just way too many clicks to find the feature they want/need to use.

I only discover yesterday (after a couple of months using IPS5) where the CODE option is. I found it funny. It made no sense to me to hide it there. 👀

[Matt]

29 minutes ago, Adriano Faria said:

I only discover yesterday (after a couple of months using IPS5) where the CODE option is. I found it funny. It made no sense to me to hide it there. 👀

It's a paragraph level tool, so it does make some sense it being in there.

[Hatsu]

3 hours ago, Matt said:

Some of these features will be for specific packages. It's not as simple as "cloud" v "self-hosted". We have a total of 7 packages including the Classic self hosted option. Like all businesses, some features are limited to package levels and above.

We have not finalised our decisions yet, but when we do we will update the pricing page with "coming soon" as we have in the past.

Why is it so difficult to write in the respective paragraph describing the new feature in which packages this is available? I have no problem with that. I just want to skip parts which are not for me.

[teraßyte]

52 minutes ago, Matt said:

It's a paragraph level tool, so it does make some sense it being in there.

For developers maybe. It doesn't make much sense for normal users who used to have it as a top-level button in v4.

I've already had several clients ask me where to find it after they upgraded to the beta version. 🙄

[Matt]

We are working on a branch with some changes to the toolbar which should help. 

[AlexWebsites]

Looks great. I’m always going to be on self hosted with my licenses because of cost, so will work with what you give us. Live community features for self hosted would be nice. Anything to keep members engaged. 

Edited November 27 by AlexWebsites

[Marc]

18 hours ago, Hatsu said:

Why is it so difficult to write in the respective paragraph describing the new feature in which packages this is available? I have no problem with that. I just want to skip parts which are not for me.

It would be worth re-reading what you have quoted there. As Matt said, we have not finalised our decisions. Its not possible at all to write which features are available in which packages until we finalise the decisions themselves.