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Invision Community Blog

Managing successful online communities

Drum roll please… announcing Achievements!

One of the overarching goals for any community leader is to shine a bright light on your members. Their contributions should be publicly recognized. Now with Invision Community’s new Achievements system... you can! Achievements is Invision Community’s native gamification system baked into our latest update, 4.6.  We’ve dreamed up innovative actions for community leaders to publicly rec…
Jordan Invision

Jordan Invision

125

Web push notifications, native sharing & offline support

As we approach the release of Invision Community 4.6, I wanted to take you through some improvements for using Invision Community on a mobile device. Web push notifications For some time, we've used the local browser notification API to show users notifications. There's a big drawback though: users had to have the site open in a tab for these to work. This is particularly problematic for…
Rikki

Rikki

41

No-code automation with Zapier

Cloud and Enterprise Community customers can create automated workflows between Invision Community and over 3,000 other apps including Google Documents, MailChimp, Facebook and Twitter with just a few clicks. If you haven’t integrated your Invision Community with Zapier yet, you’re leaving organic growth on the table! It’s been a wild year, so we’d like to refresh your memory …
Jordan Invision

Jordan Invision

52

Health Dashboard

The support tool has served us well for many years. You can identify, at a glance, potential issues with your community both presently and down the road, right from the comfort of your AdminCP, and you can often resolve those issues with just a few clicks. But what if we could do better? What if we could make this useful administrative area of the software even more useful? The next vers…
bfarber

bfarber

16

Highlight Topics With Replies From Groups

Wouldn't it be great to know if a staff member had replied to a topic before you clicked to open it? When you're scanning a list of topics, knowing which have had a reply by a member of the community team can help decide which to read. Currently, you need to open the topic and scan the posts to see if there's a reply from the team. Happily, in our next release, we've made it clear which …
Matt

Matt

12

Solved Content Improvements

For a long time, Invision Community has supported a Question and Answer mode within the Forums application which allows a reply to be flagged as the "best answer" to the question posed. With the release of 4.5, we also introduced a way to allow topics to be marked as "solved" which introduces similar functionality without transforming the look and feel or other behavior of the forum itself. B…
bfarber

bfarber

10

Anonymous Posting

For a very long time Invision Community has allowed community owners to choose how open or private their communities should be. Communities could optionally allow guests to post without registering, they could allow the use of pseudonyms or they could require the use of real names. This covers a diverse range of communities but feedback from our clients made us realize that some use cases hav…
Andy Millne

Andy Millne

31

4.5: Sign in with Apple

Since the feature was announced at last year’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) we have received lots of requests to implement Sign in with Apple in Invision Community. We’re pleased to announce that as of 4.5 this is now available. You will need a paid Apple developer account to use it but once enabled users will be able to sign in using their Apple ID and all the convenience that brin…
Andy Millne

Andy Millne

26

4.5: One More Thing...

Almost ten years ago we launched the Marketplace; a place to connect Invision Community owners with talented developers creating new functionality. Over the decade, the Marketplace has grown to hold thousands of applications, large and small. For many Invision Community owners, the Marketplace has become an essential resource. Our aim was always to have the Marketplace available inside y…
Stuart Silvester

Stuart Silvester

70

4.5: Two feature additions

As the deadline slowly comes down, two last feature additions race towards the descending door and slide in underneath with seconds to spare.  If you've never seen "Raiders of the Lost Ark", then you probably think this is a weird way to start a blog. As we wrap up development for Invision Community 4.5, we squeezed in two extra features that I want to talk about today. Per Topic Po…
Matt

Matt

18

4.5: Commerce Trials

One of the most popular requests we get for Commerce is for a free trial period for subscriptions. We've heard from many clients that wish to allow their members a free, or reduced cost trial period before auto-renewing the full price. I'm pleased to say that we've now added this functionality into Invision Community 4.5. Let us take a look at how it works. Initial Terms In …
Mark

Mark

17

4.5: Everything else

We have announced a lot of new things coming soon with Invision Community 4.5. Most of these are pretty big new features worth a blog on their own. However, we've made a lot of smaller changes that may not deserve their own blog but still have a significant impact. Let's run through some of those. Performance Improvements For every major release, we take some time to run through t…
Matt

Matt

40

4.5: Language System Updates

Ever since Invision Community 4.0, there has been a huge focus on making communities multi-lingual by providing translation features inside the AdminCP. We have received a lot of feedback on our multi-lingual and translation tools over the past year, and we're happy to announce these new features coming to Invision Community 4.5. Pages Phrase Tools If you have the Pages application, you…
Ryan Ashbrook

Ryan Ashbrook

21

4.5: Introducing our updated default theme

If you've been around Invision Community for a while, you'll know our frontend default theme hasn't significantly evolved since the early days of 4.0. Indeed, the last significant refresh came with 4.2. With the upcoming release of 4.5, we wanted to revisit the default theme and give it a facelift for 2020, as well as make incremental improvements to the underlying codebase as a stepping ston…
Rikki

Rikki

73

4.5: Improvements for theme designers

If you've been around Invision Community for a while, you'll know our frontend default theme hasn't significantly evolved since the early days of 4.0. Indeed, the last significant refresh came with 4.2. With the upcoming release of 4.5, we wanted to revisit the default theme and give it a facelift for 2020, as well as make incremental improvements to the underlying codebase as a stepping ston…
Rikki

Rikki

37

4.5: Page Builder Widgets

Invision Community introduced drag and drop widgets many years ago. These widgets allowed anyone to add blocks to existing views, and to build up entirely new pages. These widgets were great for quickly adding content to a page, but they weren't incredibly customizable.  For Invision Community 4.5, we've added three new Page Builder widgets which allow you a little more control. For…
Matt

Matt

42

4.5: Private staff notes

Managing a community as a team makes internal communication an essential part of its successful management. There are times where you want to leave notes for other staff on specific topics that you're watching. Perhaps a member is close to breaking the rules, or it might be that you want to keep the topic focused and on point so wish to split off-topic posts into a different area. Whatev…
Matt

Matt

27

4.5: New Post-Installation Onboarding

Installing Invision Community for the first time is a fun and exciting process. After all, you're about to launch a new community that is going to thrive and attract members from all over, and you want to make sure you set it up just right to facilitate a painless experience for your visitors. If you're new to Invision Community, however, it can be a little daunting when you think about "ok w…
bfarber

bfarber

12

4.5: Forum View Updates

Invision Community has had different view modes for a good number of years. Forum grid view was added to create some visual interest when listing forums, and we've had expanded and condensed view modes in streams since they were introduced. We've taken both of these views a step further in Invision Community 4.5 Forum Grid View To create even more visual interest, the grid view no…
Matt

Matt

21

4.5: Zapier Brings Integration with Over 2,000 Web Apps

Zapier is a service that allows you to connect over 2,000 web apps. In Invision Community 4.5 we are launching a beta service of Zapier integration for Invision Community in the Cloud. What does Zapier do? Zapier acts as a bridge between Invision Community and other apps, such as Google Docs, Twitter, Facebook, Slack, Trello, Facebook Ads, ActiveCampaign, Zendesk, Asana, Salesforce, Hubs…
Mark

Mark

62

4.5: Topic view summary and more

A topic is more than a collection of posts; it's a living entity that ebbs and flows over time. Evergreen topics can see month-long gaps between posts and longer topics spanning numerous pages can end up hard to navigate through to find useful content. With this in mind, we've added numerous improvements to the topic view to bring context and summaries key areas within the topic. …
Matt

Matt

41

4.5: ACP Dark Mode

A short while ago we revealed the new look Admin CP for Invision Community 4.5. The focus was on increasing the workspace, brightening and modernising the look. However, for some this new look was perhaps a little too bright, especially when setting your OS to use dark mode. Rather than cause an increase in sales for sunglasses, we went ahead and implemented a dark mode for the Admin CP.…
Ehren

Ehren

23

4.5: Marking as solved

Invision Community has had a question and answer mode for a good few years now. This mode transforms a forum into a formalized way to handle your member's questions. Members can upvote answers, and the topic starter and your community management team can mark a reply as the "best answer". This is great when you want to add rigour to specific forums which encourage your members to find so…
Matt

Matt

20

4.5: Notification Improvements

Notifications are a crucial feature in enticing members back to your community to read updates and post their replies. It makes sense that there should be as little friction as possible when setting up notifications. We want to encourage members to enable notifications relevant to them. The current notifications form in Invision Community is functional but overwhelming and confusing for …
Matt

Matt

31

4.5: Identify Statistical Trends

One of the benefits of using Invision Community as your community platform is that you control and own your data. There are several ways to review this data. One of which is via the Admin Control Panel which offers a suite of statistic views which helps to convert the raw data into something easily understood. However, it's not always easy to determine trends and community sentiment from…
Matt

Matt

10

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