Dreadknux

Hi guys, not sure if this is already being worked on for V5 but I'm throwing it out there. Basically I'd love for there to be a way to set different navigation menus depending on the device a user is browsing the community on.

I ask this because on desktop, I might want to have three major menu items on display before having a "More" dropdown that houses all other sections of the community... but on mobile (where the user menu is vertical and offers more space) I would want to have all menu items lined up on the top level without any dropdown/nested menus.

It'd be great to allow for different menus per device/theme to account for this, or if that's too much maybe a setting that lets me manually set how many menu items are on display before the dynamic "More" dropdown appears on desktop.

Hello! Just copy-pasting a feature request I wanted to add; this was originally in another topic but I later discovered the OP author posted in the wrong forum. :S

------

I'd like to formally request some additional permission features for the Blog app as currently it's severely lacking.

I am already using Pages for a staff-operated news blog, but I want to offer my community the opportunity to create their own blogs using a simplistic and approachable format - so the Blog app is perfect for what I want here.

However, while I can create Blog categories from the AdminCP, it seems that I can't set Category permissions much like I can with Forums, Galleries etc (i.e. usergroup can "Create Blog" in this category, "Comment" on blogs in this category, etc).

I want to be able to only allow regular members to create a blog in a specific Blog Category area, while I want to reserve the ability to create blogs in some other Categories (i.e. "Staff Blogs") to only certain usergroups.

Hopefully this will be addressed, and the Blog app much more fleshed out in general, with the arrival of V5. 🙂

I'd like to add to this topic and formally request some additional permission features for the Blog app as currently it's severely lacking.

I am already using Pages for a staff-operated news blog, but I want to offer my community the opportunity to create their own blogs using a simplistic and approachable format - so the Blog app is perfect for what I want here.

However, while I can create Blog categories from the AdminCP, it seems that I can't set Category permissions much like I can with Forums, Galleries etc (i.e. usergroup can "Create Blog" in this category, "Comment" on blogs in this category, etc).

I want to be able to only allow regular members to create a blog in a specific Blog Category area, while I want to reserve the ability to create blogs in some other Categories (i.e. "Staff Blogs") to only certain usergroups.

Hopefully this will be addressed, and the Blog app much more fleshed out in general, with the arrival of V5. 🙂

EDIT: I just realised this isn't in the Feature Request forum, d'oh! That's what I get for finding this topic via Google Search. Would appreciate if this topic is moved (or I can create a new topic in the Feature Request forum)

How am I able to obtain the key from the Marketplace apps that I have purchased? I'd like to sign up for accounts on the developers' external websites for support and updates, but I do not see anywhere on my community's AdminCP or on this website's Client Area that shows me this information needed to prove my purchase with them.

At the very least, is it possible to consider the ability to re-organise Emoji groups in the drawer? I have some custom Emoji that I want to be the first thing users see in the drawer, but users have to scroll all the way down past the default ones just to find them and they get forgotten about as a result (I want to keep the default emoji, but bottom of the list - it doesn't make sense for these to be the first thing users see in a community emoji drawer if there are other categories/groups available, as users can easily access the same emoji using their mobile keyboard).

18 hours ago, Ehren said:

The header background in the intro was added via Custom CSS. I've been thinking of the best way to add an image feature for the header, but making a simple UI for something like that is ironically a very complex task since you also need to cater for the multiple header/nav bars as you mentioned. It's very simple to add using CSS, so at least there's a simple fallback if nothing else comes to mind before the release date 🙂

There are no plans for gradients, but since you seem pretty confident with CSS, you'll have no problems adding them using the code editor 🙂

Thanks Ehren - yeah it won't be an issue for me to just add this via custom CSS. 🙂 

With gradients I can definitely work those in manually, but would I be able to reference any CSS colour swatch variables from the settings, or will I need to set those colours myself (i.e. "--lightmode-basecontrast1" or something)? It's no problem either way, just curious - but it would definitely save some effort if there's some dynamic colour swatch CSS variables out of the box 😄

Thanks again for the fantastic effort!

18 minutes ago, Matt said:

We have an internal wiki that is quite basic, but we'll eventually get an improved version out to the public (this is a little out of date but you get the idea).

That's very encouraging to see, thanks Matt (and thanks for giving us a tiny peek at V5 wiki pages too? 🤔😛)

🤯 🤯 🤯

I thought this was going to be something along the lines of Wordpress' theme editor (which is okay, but... I really did have to hack a lot of CSS in there when I was using it), something nice for newbies to play around with... but after watching that video I think it honestly touches 99% of all the colour scheme-related theme tweaks I've ever needed to work with! What an amazing feature! Fantastic work Ehren and team!

I've made some 17 colour variants of the same core custom theme on my community (+ dynamic dark modes for each), and although I took advantage of loads of CSS tricks (variables out the wazoo) it was a significant amount of effort - I can imagine that time being cut down so dramatically with this Theme Editor. Even the content box colours, wtf. 😄 The swatches are a really really nice touch as well, thank you for that thoughtful inclusion!

The only thing I didn't see that was teased in the intro was the use of background image in the header... I wonder how that works (will there be opacity options so that any image you add doesn't complicate the nav links etc)..? 

Also, is there scope in a future release/update to support gradients for some of the colour options? I tend to use gradients for the content box headers rather than block colours, but if not it's definitely something I can just work in using the Custom CSS as I have been doing before.

I love it, I love this. Great stuff! 👏

PS. I had a feeling this was going to be a good update when it didn't arrive on Wednesday like the last two blogs! 😆

EDIT: 

Quote

A list of CSS properties in a guide is a great idea!

I second this! One of the biggest issues in custom theming V4 is the lack of documentation/guides on what existing structural properties exist in the codebase... meaning that I ended up adding custom CSS to achieve things (like grids etc) that most likely already exist out of the box. I just know that, for as much as I've tried my best, there are elements of my custom code which is just wasteful because of it.

I can recommend the use of Pages as a news/blog application as well. I had a Wordpress blog for many years (since around 2008) running alongside an Invision Community for forums, and started studying bringing it all into the same platform in my existing IPS install.

It does take some knowledge of HTML coding/site design right now, as the Pages application out of the box in V4 is very generic and standard, with no real templates to help set a news portal up (hopefully this changes in V5). But if you know what you're doing and are happy to tinker with custom form fields and templates, you can make something very cool and native-looking.

I'll share my results as an example:

Homepage (with widgets for pulling latest news records and pinned/featured news records):
https://www.sonicstadium.org

News Story:
https://www.sonicstadium.org/news/games/sega-teases-eggmobile-in-new-picture-of-frozen-base-zone-from-sonic-superstars-r1639/

Sync'd Forum Topic (an option in IPS is to automatically create a forum topic when a Pages record is posted, meaning you can sync Page comments and Forum Discussion about the same topic together):
https://www.sonicstadium.org/forums/topic/33334-sega-teases-eggmobile-in-new-picture-of-frozen-base-zone-from-sonic-superstars/

I'm currently in the process of migrating all of my legacy Wordpress content over to this unified IPS platform, and while I really did like Wordpress and how it worked with images/media/post editing, having a single platform and leveraging my existing forum community for news comments etc has been incredibly valuable to me.

You can try the free demo on the IPS site as Mark said, but if you're an existing customer and you don't mind changing your client terms and conditions to meet the new self-hosted pricing structure, you will get all of the IPS apps right away - so if you want more time to play with it you can have 'free' access to Pages immediately to explore your options.

2 hours ago, AlexWebsites said:

Looks great and I'm happy to see that JS is reduced with CSS on some of the scrollers. What about advertisements, same positions? That's crucial or the bill isn't getting paid...🤣

I suppose we can use Google Auto Ads and let Google dictate our fortunes/misfortunes..🤪

I have Google Adsense with the Auto Ads on and I don't think the bottom-positioned auto ads are going to play nicely with V5's new mobile navigation bar... it's annoying because I really want that bottom navigation bar!!! 😆 But I've never liked having auto ad banners appear at the top of a page either.

I suppose it'll all come out in the wash when it launches and I road test it for public deployment on my community.

On 10/12/2023 at 12:46 PM, The Old Man said:

A section for user customisation out of the box would be awesome, somewhere where we could add a background or form setting that each user could use to personalise the theme for themselves. e.g. users could choose a hero background image without having to select a whole theme just for the one they want, and the admin wouldn't have to add 10 themes with 10 different header images.

Actually this has made me think.

On my community, I have one 'core' custom theme and several 'child' themes where the only differences are in the colour scheming (header gradients, dark modes etc) and header images.

Jumping on this thought, it would be great to be able to offer user-selectable "alt" colour schemes/CSS as part of one theme, as opposed to having one key custom theme and ten children as mentioned above.

I'm thinking of a version of the Theme Select drop down where a user can select a "Colour Name" (i.e. "Sonic", "Tails", "Knuckles") and the theme's colours dynamically change to pre-set colours I define (i.e. blue colour version of the theme, orange colour version of the theme, red colour version of the theme). Colour schemes that I set as an admin, not a swatch that users can select for themselves.

Hopefully that either sounds like a doable thing to include in future post-V5.0 updates, or something that will be addressed in next week's theme blog (in which case ignore me!). 😄

44 minutes ago, Clover13 said:

To address this and in an effort to focus on funneling traffic to what I deem the most sought after areas of the site as a whole, I created my own "featured menu" of items that is effectively a content block at the top of the page such that it displays ATF on both desktop and mobile views (unlike a sidebar whereas the right sidebar displays at the end in mobile).  This is akin to the Popular menu being introduced in v5 at the top of the vertical sidebar menu.

Going into this deeper, the real challenge is members simply want different things and have different perspectives on what is popular to them.  Within a broader niche with subniches of interest for the member base, some may favor links and menu items others don't.  As such the most optimal solution is to really allow members to have their own customizable menu of Favorites that can be at the top (even above the site's Popular menu being worked on for v5).  So great idea to have a Popular section of site determined links, even better idea to allow members to Favorite links to establish their own.

Do you happen to have a link to your community so you can illustrate the solution you've described here? Sounds super interesting!

I do like what you're saying about user interests and responding to that via menu navigation, and the challenges surrounding that. I've been thinking about this in relation to my community's actual homepage. At present, I have custom blocks focusing on the three major pillars of my community (News, Wiki, Forum/Activity Feed) which is fine for what I need it to do but I'm keen to explore more of a curated activity feed tailored dynamically to user activity/interest, with maybe featured/pinned content 'anchored' to the feed to ensure many/all visitors see important items. I'll be interested to see what V5 may bring in terms of 'Our Picks'/'Activity Feed' enhancements in that area. 🙂

I love it! Thanks Matt!

This is probably going to be discussed in a later video/blog or something, but it'd be really cool if you could move the user icons into the sidebar nav as well (perhaps underneath/above the search bar). I imagine with one of the previous videos teasing a dynamic block template system where elements can be drag-dropped around, this might be doable, but figured I'd express my anticipation for that here while I'm still quite excited! 😄

I absolutely LOVE these new design ideas. Thanks a lot for all your hard work @Ehren and team! I've been playing around with the idea of a sidebar navigation purely because I can see my current topbar nav getting a bit chaotic once I start adding the other core IPS apps (and things in dropdown menus tend to be ignored/forgotten about). It's great to see this will be part of the core design as an option!

It'd be good to get an idea of just how customisable it is in terms of organising sections/content (although the part about placing 'sticky' nodes at the top gives me very exciting hints) and how it appears for mobile users, so I definitely can't wait to play around with it.

Being able to pin the OP to a topic is a brilliant feature as well. Can this be applied on a per-forum basis? I can see this being most useful in a 'News' forum scenario... I'm using Pages >< Forum integration a lot, so having a News forum design and News Pages database record design look more consistent with one another is something that really appeals to me (you guys just need to be able to fully integrate Page and Sync'd Topic Metrics and Reactions together and I'm fully sold!).

Also very intrigued with the new Forum View, I have been using the standard table format ever since I first picked up Invision some 15 years ago, and I'm feeling like it's getting a little stale..! 😆 Looking forward to trying this out.

One thing I'm very interested in knowing more about, design wise, is how sidebar content (the right hand sidebar, not the new nav menu on the left) will be displayed/respond to different device sizes. In the past all of that content just gets dumped underneath the main content, I wonder if that will be the case with V5?

I'm also interested in learning more about that "Feed" button that I've seen on the Mobile drawer in that video, when you're ready to start talking about it... 👀 

Well done guys, and can't wait to hear more!

30 minutes ago, opentype said:

I’m not a fan of minimizing the user info in the topic view though. The personal touch of clearly seeing who you are interacting with is getting more important these days, not less. If anything, this view should only be triggered if there is not enough space, not in full desktop view. As a typographer, the example screenshot is painful to look at.  3 posts with just one or two lines each that are waaaaaaaay too long for comfortable reading. This was always a problem with a default IPS installations but now it was made worse, not better. If the user info remains to the side, it also improves the readability of the post content. 

I imagine this would be a toggle in AdminCP to offer communities the option of displaying the minimized user info or not. Personally, I'd like to try it out, it seems interesting (and the minimized view here seems to keep the design consistent with the mobile view, which already displays user info above the post content in V4). But it'd be good to confirm if it's an option.

Okay thanks - consider this a feature suggestion then! 🙂

I'm looking into refreshing the Warning system on my community, and wanted to put this forward in case it wasn't a feature already:

It would be great to set an option to make the removal of multiple Warning Points an incremental thing. So if a user was handed 3 Warning Points, I'd like to set it so that every X days 1 Point would be removed until they had none left, as opposed to removing all 3 Warning Points at once.

Is that possible? Or does that already happen and I'm just not aware of it? 🙂 It'd be good to have the option!

Throwing my hat in here to support this feature request - there absolutely needs to be a more robust Ignore and Block functionality in V5. It's a critical tool to allow community members to keep themselves safe from other users they do not get along with.

There needs to be:

- A 'block' function on the member level, which works on a user's entire content and presence, in much the way the OP described;

- An 'Ignore Content' function that works on the Topics/Pages/Events/etc level, that works to prevent any posts/updates to content from appearing on user Activity Streams or Content Blocks of any kind (both custom made ones and global - there needs to be no additional lift for the end user for this to be effective - i.e. we can not expect a user to click 'Ignore Topic' and then also create a new Activity Stream with some 'avoid ignored content' filter).

If IPS is serious as they say they are about putting more focus in community-building in V5, then this is a must-have feature.

On 9/7/2023 at 6:48 AM, FZ said:

This is my second comment here - the first one is for some reason not approved for publication. 

Maybe I am missing something here, but I really just don't get how this is supposed to work. I have enabled it on my site, created an account on Hive and I can see posts there (although it won't accept my uploaded logo for the account). 

My question is this; how is this going to benefit my members? How do they know to go to Community Hive to find a feed of the community content and discover other communities? 

I did have this thought as well as I activated it, because I couldn't actually see the Community Hive button anywhere on the site once set up.

But the button does appear for Guest users. So I imagine Community Hive is more for targeting non-users of your community (visitors), as another means of staying updated on your site's content. But maybe I'm missing something here.

(By the way, I found that I couldn't upload my community avatar on the CH website on Chrome browser either, but it worked on Safari. Maybe try a different browser)

@Matt random question about the interface for Community Hive - will there be elements of this that will also make its way to Invision Community V5? The  'social media-style' "following" and "discover" feeds on the main homepage is something that I think could be used to re-imagine the Activity Feed a little, by giving users a UI that they are familiar with. Just curious.

1 minute ago, Matt said:

Yes, I see 'this is helpful' as being something outside of reactions. I may like/laugh/thanks at various posts but it does not mean that they fix the problem the topic poster had. "Helpful" is a clear signal that the post offered the topic starter a sensible answer. It's a useful tool for transactional type topics (I need an answer to _____ / I need _______ solving) and helps reduce the noise in a topic until the topic starter or moderator marks a specific post as the definitive answer.

Oh I see, so it's primary use is to be paired up with the 'Solutions' / 'Q&A Forum' side of the platform, right? Does that mean it won't be available for forums/content that aren't specifically 'Questions' focused? I can see something like this also doubling up as a great general-use "this content is useful" feedback feature for our community. 🙂 

I like it so far. The dynamic theme editor looks extremely cool, I particularly like the ability to move header/nav blocks around ad hoc.

Random Q: will there be an option for sticky header/navbar in V5 out of the box? Not a gamechanger, I'm happy to use CSS to do it myself, but I'm just curious because the ballache I have with doing that in V4 is in accounting for all the anchor links (making sure content doesn't sit behind the sticky header when they jump to content/next page). Figure that sort of thing would be better accounted for if designed in-house. 😄

I really like the 'Helpful' button there as well, very 'Reddit' - and it doesn't take away (read: sit included within) the existing Reactions feature as I hoped. Very promising so far!

Can't wait to see more!

37 minutes ago, Marc Stridgen said:

I'm really not the person to help with code. I can move to the developers section to grab the attention of someone who knows better than I

That would be great Marc, thanks - what I'm trying isn't getting me anywhere sadly.

I'm just not entirely sure why the formatting for a field appears by default even when there is no data in the field. It's not logical. @Marc Stridgen is there a possibility in a future update to allow for IPS code in the 'Topic Format' section of a custom field, in the form of...

{{if $formValue}}

... so that I can get around this? Alternatively, do you or any IPS staff have any ideas with what code to include in the cms > submit > topic template bit to only show fields if they have data? I'm guessing the below could work (with the 'if $field' statement) but as opentype said it's difficult for me to test directly with the way the topic sync feature works, so some steer/knowledge would be useful.

{{foreach $record->topicFields() as $id => $field}}
	{{if $field}}
		{$field|raw}
	{{endif}}
{{endforeach}}
<br>
<p><a href="{$record->url()}">{lang="content_view_record" sprintf="$record::database()->recordWord( 1 )"}</a></p>

Thank you!!

4 minutes ago, Meddysong said:

Anything in that formatting box will be included in your template irrespective of whether there's a value unless you wrap it in tags which mean "if the field has a value".

{{if $formValue}}
Anything in here will show if the field has a value, otherwise nothing appears.
{{endif}}

 

I thought it might be something to do with that. Sadly, I can't seem to use IF statements / IPS code in the 'Topic Format' field in ACP, as it simply outputs it as straight text. I did try including an IF in the cms > submit > topic template file in my theme, but I'm having trouble getting that to work properly either. Appreciate any other ideas?

Hi all, quick question on this fancy little 'Topic Format' feature I've only just noticed in Pages' custom fields section (very VERY handy by the way, thank you!). I have a custom field (with a custom Topic Format) that I want to display on a sync'd Topic if there is a value entered in the field. But the field formatting appears even when the field is empty, which is not desirable.

^ This is the code I have added for my Topic Format for the custom field (please excuse the messy hard-coded CSS, I'm testing this thing)

^ This is the resulting display on a sync'd Topic. Notice the "Original Post Content" box there with no text underneath it. That's an empty field, nothing has been entered in the custom field so that box shouldn't be appearing at all.

^ For comparison's sake, this is what the custom field is supposed to look like when it has been filled with content/a value.

Is this a bug, or am I missing some setting in the ACP like "allow for empty/no values" or something?

Fantastic updates guys, I am aware of many spam accounts on my community that come from one particular city/country so the geolocation feature will be super useful. Many thanks for this!