Five Invision Community 5 features your team will love

[Matt]

There's a lot for your members to love with Invision Community 5, and we recently covered five of the best features. Today, I want to discuss five features your team will love.

One of the main concepts for Invision Community 5 was to reduce the complexity of power-user tools like theming and page building. These functions had been built around those with deep technical and coding knowledge, locking out many community teams. 

We also wanted to build new tools to help busy community teams organise, moderate and identify trusted members.

Did we achieve that? Let's look at five new features we think your team will love in Invision Community 5.

The new theme editor
I can't describe how much I love the new theme editor. It is everything we wanted for Invision Community 5 and more. Now, anyone can manage their theme without needing to be knowledgeable in HTML and CSS. 

There's so much to discuss, so it's best to head over to the news article we put together. From an easier way to select colours and drag-and-drop header arrangements to simpler ways to upload logos and preview your community on tablets and mobiles, the theme editor puts all the power and complexity of managing themes into the hands of your community team.

The editor, combined with the new views, such as the feed view for forums, article-like featured first post in topics, and the new sidebar view, Invision Community 5, really does take things to the next level.

 

The new page editor
We've taken the concepts of drag-and-drop widgets to a higher level with Invision Community 5.

You no longer need to create custom blocks using HTML and CSS to produce fantastic custom pages. With the new page editor, you can access a library of pre-built widgets with multiple view options, such as grids, rows, and carousels. Coupled with the power of Pages databases, you can quickly build custom pages to showcase the best content from your community.

Jimi, a valued customer, recently created a walkthrough video showcasing the new theme and page editors. It is a must-watch to experience the system's power.

 

Assign topics
Getting the right help to your members at the right time can take time and effort. Pairing a community question with the expertise of specific team members can require some manual overhead with external systems.

It can also be difficult to hold your team accountable, ensure they are answering questions in good time, and get an overview of their assignments.

These issues are fixed in Invision Community 5 with the topic assignments feature. You can assign a topic to a specific member of your team or a group of members. You also have complete oversight on the volume and time required to reply to your entire team.

It's a great feature that helps keep your community running smoothly.

 

Badge creator and icon picker
This feature is a dark horse. At first glance, it looks like a nice feature, but perhaps it is something that you may not use. However, I believe this is a feature your team will love. There are many areas where you may need custom graphics. We have rank badges, one-off celebration badges, custom reactions and more. In the past, you'd have been required to do this with apps like Illustrator or Photoshop and import them back in.

As part of our vision to bring power tools to everyone, we built a badge creator that allows you to combine over 1,700 icons and hundreds of emojis with badge backgrounds to quickly create custom badges and reaction icons. It really only takes a few minutes to create all the custom graphics your community needs.

In addition, there are now many areas, such as menu items, where you can use icons and emoji to enrich your user experience.

Who doesn't love the ability to create badges without needing a designer?

 

Community Experts
Community experts are vital to the well-being of any community. The Pareto principle holds true in your community. Twenty percent of your members create eighty percent of the interactions across your community, but featuring those members to newer users can be difficult. In the past, we've relied on metrics such as the date they joined and the number of posts they've made, but these celebrate longevity but not expertise.

Invision Community 5 uses a bespoke algorithm to identify and feature experts based on the speed, accuracy and helpfulness of their responses.

This not only celebrates those members with an exclusive badge and notification, but it also helps other users identify those community leaders who are more likely to help them and guide them through their journey with you.

We think your team will love that Invision Community 5 identifies these members for you and allows them to help lead your community.

 

I could have easily written about ten features your team will love, but these are my top five. Do you agree? Which features are you most looking forward to? Let us know in the comments.

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[AlexWebsites]

@Ehren the header layout picker is awesome. Would love to see a block for IPS advertisement so you can let’s say put an ad on desktop in the header or maybe just an html block. Just an idea for some additional custom header layouts.

[Clover13]

These are phenomenal enhancements to the suite!  Very well done and excellent presentation!