Invision Community 5: Tagging Reinvented

Invision Community v5 takes a fresh approach to tagging and content discovery. It overhauls the concept to bring content across different sections together with a beautiful new tag page.

Tagging is a powerful concept but underused with Invision Community 4 due to overly complex interfaces in different areas of the suite, a confusing open tagging model option and no real benefit in content discovery beyond a simple list of content items.

A driving force behind Invision Community 5 is the question of how we can help time-pressured community members find the content that most interests them.

Invision Community has robust taxonomy through forum and category structures, but what about content in less visible areas such as Blogs, galleries or Events? How can we bring those together to homogenise the type of content and focus on the content itself?

Taxonomy via tagging across all applications in the community suite is the answer. However, we needed to re-approach how tagging was implemented in the Invision Community to bring our new vision to life.

Out with the old
The current tagging system is implemented loosely, allowing open tagging, which is more akin to hashtags than high-level taxonomy. Allowing forums, albums, and blog categories to define their own tags turns tagging into more of a status label, which does nothing to help bring disparate content together.

In with the new
With a new focus on taxonomy and content discovery, we set about rebuilding tagging for Invision Community 5. The UI to tag items is the same, but now each defined, globally available tag has its own page with cover image and ability to feature items within that tag page.

A uniform approach to different content items in the UI breaks down the barrier between content types and focuses solely on the content.

Tags featured on its page are automatically displayed on the community Featured Content page.

Finally, tags can now be followed, allowing your community to get a daily or weekly digest of all new tagged items, bringing people back to read more of the content they love.

Let’s take a closer look
In Invision Community 5, all tags are defined in the Admin Control Panel. The ability to use open tagging and per-node tags has been removed, but don’t worry—the upgrade system will offer conversion for those tags.

Once defined, the tags are available for all content types and feature on a dedicated new tag page. This page features cover photos and more information on the tag via a description.

Content from across your suite will be displayed on this page. If a single piece of content has multiple tags, it will appear on every relevant tag page making it easy to have content in multiple areas.

If you want to permanently or temporarily feature individual content, perhaps your latest news or product release, you can do so right from the tag page. Featured content will show on the community’s Featured Content Page.

Blurring the lines

Now that we have an attractive and focused page for each tag, we can start to blur the lines between applications and, indeed, forums and categories, offering a new way to organise content.

For some communities, the need for multiple forums to categorise content is diminished, and instead, tagging can be used to separate and find content from across the community.

Tags can be featured in the menu system, offering new ways into your community for new visitors, regular community members, and even those who visit daily.

Invision Community 5 is fearless in challenging past decisions or streamlining features to make them stronger and more focused. Our new approach to tagging takes a vague and underutilised concept and pushes it front and centre in any content strategy.

How will you use it in your community?