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Invision Community Blog

Managing successful online communities

4.4: Turbo charging loading speeds

It might seem a little odd starting a blog on increasing Invision Community's speed with the word "lazy",  but I'll explain why this is a good word for performance shortly. Earlier this year, Google announced that page speed is a ranking factor. Simply put, if your site is slow, it will be ranked lower in Google's search results. It is always a challenge making a large application l…
Matt

Matt

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4.4: Store Filters and other Commerce updates

Allowing your customers to find exactly what they need as fast as possible will no doubt increase sales. A good number of our customers use Commerce to sell physical items. Until now, it's always been a little tricky to set up the store to allow customers to drill down into specific items within the store. In Invision Community 4.4, the sidebar in the store now includes filter options to…
Mark

Mark

30

4.4: Increase visitor registrations with Post Before Registering

It's very easy to focus on a single metric to gauge the success of your community. It's very common for community owners to look at page hits and determine if their SEO and marketing efforts have paid off. Getting traffic to your site is only half the equation though. The most valuable metric is how many casual visitors you're converting to engaged members. Invision Community alread…
Mark

Mark

49

4.4: Application manifest and icon management

Who remembers the earlier days of the internet? Back when you popped your logo at the top left of your site and you were largely done? Invision Community has continually developed to account for all the new services that have been built during our 16 years. We now have social media sharing images, favicons and more to consider. Invision Community 4.4 also adds mobile application ico…
bfarber

bfarber

13

4.4: Animated GIFs

Communication has come a long way since those very early humans grunted at each other to determine if they wanted more mammoth for lunch. The course of human history has seen cave paintings, hieroglyphics, the written word, emoji and now GIFs. GIFs have been around since the dawn of the internet. Many websites proudly displayed a 'man at work' animated GIF when they were under constructi…
Matt

Matt

34

4.4: AdminCP Notifications

Do you recall that scene in Harry Potter where young Harry is sitting in his Uncle’s living room when hundreds of letters from Hogwarts burst through the fireplace, filling the room? Sometimes, when you log into the administrator’s control panel, it can feel a bit like that. As the administration control panel has evolved, there has been more of a need to display notifications, alerts an…
Mark

Mark

32

GDPR updates for Invision Community 4.3.3

Unless you've been living under a rock, or forgot to opt-in to the memo, GDPR is just around the corner. Last week we wrote a blog answering your questions on becoming GDPR compliant with Invision Community. We took away a few good points from that discussion and have the following updates coming up for Invision Community 4.3.3 due early next week. Downloading Personal Data <br> In…
Matt

Matt

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4.3: Engagement Improvements

As we come close to wrapping up development of Invision Community 4.3, we wanted to let you know of a few smaller improvements we've made to increase engagement to your community. Email <br> Despite fancy new things like social media and push notifications, trusty old email has been proven to be highly effective at getting repeat visitors to your website. It's one of the reasons Invisio…
Andy Millne

Andy Millne

40

4.3: Commerce Subscription Manager

We've recently spoken about how we've brought our Gallery and Blog apps up to date with interface overhauls to bring them inline with the high standards our customers expect. Keeping this in mind, we're thrilled to announce that we've taken Commerce right back to 2009. This needs an explanation. Way back in 2009, Obama was inaugurated as the 44th President. Minecraft was put into be…
Matt

Matt

62

4.3: Announcements

We have a very important announcement to make! There are times where you need to get the attention of your visitors. You might be closed on certain days of the year, performing server maintenance (if you are consider our Cloud Plans, they're excellent) or running a competition. Invision Community has always had an announcements feature baked in, but we felt it could be improved. Oka…
Stuart Silvester

Stuart Silvester

19

4.3: REST API Enhancements

"No man is an island" wrote John Donne. He wrote that a good 200 years before computers were invented, but it rings true for any well written framework like Invision Community. The included REST API allows developers to fetch data from Invision Community and also allows data to be added. This data can be used to power widgets on your website, or to be used within other applications you  …
bfarber

bfarber

13

4.3: Promote to Facebook Pages and Groups

Social media promotion should be a part of any marketing strategy. Curating interesting content from your community and sharing to social media channels like Facebook and Twitter is a great way to drive traffic to your site. Invision Community 4.2 introduced Social Media Promotions to allow this.  You hit the promote button, fill out the text to share with each service, click which photo…
Matt

Matt

20

4.3: AdminCP Member Profiles

Viewing and editing a member is probably one of the most frequently used features of the AdminCP. With the design unchanged for many years, and the tabbed interface starting to grow unwieldy, it was due for some love. We have not only dramatically improved the design but added many new features. New AdminCP Member Page Let's look at some of the improvements: Easy Toggl…
Mark

Mark

29

4.3: Videos

Videos are everywhere. We shoot them on our smart phones, share them to social media, messengers and more. Up until now, the only way to share a video to Invision Community was to use a service like YouTube or Vimeo. If you uploaded a video file it would be treated like an attachment, and if the user clicked the link it would download it to their computer. In Invision Community 4.3 we've…
Mark

Mark

45

4.3: Leverage your data with our statistic improvements

"The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data", the Economist wrote recently. Invision Community software stores a lot of important data that can be leveraged to analyze and improve upon the traffic and interactions with your site. While there are some various statistics tools in the AdminCP already, we spent some time with 4.3 enhancing and improving upon our existing r…
bfarber

bfarber

14

4.3: Modernizing our Gallery

A picture says a thousand words, they say. If getting those pictures online is troublesome, some of those words might be a little choice. Gallery has been an integral part of our community suite for just about as long as T1 Tech Mark Higgins can remember (and he has many years of memories). It has seen many interfaces changes as the years have rolled by. The most recent version received a fai…
bfarber

bfarber

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4.3: Paid club memberships, and other club improvements

We released news of Clubs just under a year ago for Invision Community 4.2 and it has been the best received feature to date. Clubs opens up new ways to run your community by allowing members to create sub-communities away from the central forum area. Since the feature was released, we've collated an immense amount of feedback on the feature. Here's what we're improving for Invision Comm…
Mark

Mark

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4.3: Usability improvements to make your day better

Often it's the smaller changes that can make a big improvement in the day to day use of your community. We have made quite a few updates that will make your community flow better for you and your members. Update files in Pages Media Manager Previously when you wanted to update a file in the Pages Media Manager you actually had to upload a new file and then change the references to that f…
Charles

Charles

10

4.3: Take payments with Apple Pay and more with Stripe and Commerce

Stripe is the most popular payment method in Commerce, allowing communities to take payments by card securely with easy setup. While there's no doubt that credit cards are still the most popular methods of making a payment, digital innovations such as Apple Pay are increasing in popularity. For 4.3 we've deepened our integration to support some of their latest features. Apple Pay & …
Mark

Mark

15

4.3: Scaleable search and interface improvements

Search. Let's be honest, it's not the most exciting feature in the world. You ask to find things, and it shows you what it found. Simple, right? It's a lot more complex than that. After numerous tests, a few surveys and many discussions with customers, we've decided that there is no "right" or "wrong" way to search. Invision Community is used on many diverse communities and each has its …
Mark

Mark

26

4.3: Welcome to the future, blog!

Good news! We've taken Invision Community's Blog app by the scruff of the neck and dragged it into 2018! There has been a growing trend for imagery to play a very important part of a blog entry. This update reflects that. Introducing Grid View <br> We have added a new view that shows your blog entries as cards with space for a cover photo. We've very visual creatures, and a go…
Matt

Matt

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4.3: Sign in from other sites using OAuth

The best way to convert guests into members is to make the onboarding process as simple as possible. Over the years, we've added special log in methods for Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Microsoft. We've carefully hand coded these integrations to allow guests to sign up with just a few clicks using services they're already a member of. These services used to use proprietary methods to li…
Mark

Mark

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4.3: Express yourself with Emoji

Emoji: built in to Invision Community 4.3! ? Invision Community has a long history. We remember the early days of forums, back when graphical "emoticons" or "smilies" were added. We have always shipped our products with a basic set of emoticons with the ability to add your own images and has supported emoji from mobile devices. Emoji has become a standard across mobile and desktop d…
Mark

Mark

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4.3: Automatic Community Moderation

One huge benefit of running your own Invision Community is the moderation tools. Out of the box, Invision Community allows you to turn members into moderators. Better still, you can define what these moderators have permission to do. Part of this moderation suite is the report system. The report system allows your members to flag posts that need a moderator's attention. There comes …
Matt

Matt

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Invision Community 4.3

We are happy to announce the new Invision Community 4.3 is available! Some highlights in Invision Community 4.3 include... Improved Search We now support Elasticsearch for scalable and accurate searching that MySQL alone cannot provided. There are also enhancements to the overall search interfaces based on your feedback.   Emoji Express yourself with nativ…
Charles

Charles

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