Dreadknux

Sadly not a feature that I will be able to take advantage of, being self-hosted, but still a nice addition. I did notice a new icon in the userbar in this video though, right next to the profile picture. I'm guessing this is where users can quickly check the Activity Feed in V5? That'll be quite useful 🙂

These UI changes are looking really nice, fantastic work as always Ehren. Having you join the IPS design team is undoubtedly one of the most exciting things to happen and your work here is just proving that every day. Looking forward to seeing even more! I'm also now interested in seeing some of the improvements to the UX that complement the UI changes - in particular the mobile topic/posting experience, which in V4 is currently quite miserable now when you compare the ease of posting on social media apps. Just this morning I tried to post a topic about a news story I read earlier, and it was a constant battle of scrolling up/down just to reach post editor toolbar icons that had been moved off-screen as my post got longer (some elements, like the GIF implementation and URL insertion, are pretty clunky as well). Not knocking the V4 experience as I know it's a decade old at this point and originally designed to serve a desktop experience over mobile - but at the same time, I can see why many in my community prefer to post status updates when it's currently so difficult to quickly and easily post a topic or a post on the forum via their phones. 😅

Hey @Ehren sorry for the topic bump but I was rewatching this and something came to me when seeing these newly-designed widgets: Considering how great these particular 'scrollable column' widgets look both on desktop and mobile, is there scope to include these widget designs for custom content blocks in the V5 Block Manager (or as a built-in template to leverage in the AdminCP Block Editor)? I can just see myself using this particular widget design to list the latest records in a 'News' Pages CMS database, for example.

"Not to mention, there is a significant update to Pages underway." 👀 👀 👀 👀 "We also have a lot of less flashy updates, such as the new consolidated Feature/Our Picks feature, which is now a single feature." This is promising and definitely reduces a lot of duplication of features across the community. Will there be any further optimisation/features for Our Picks as well? Ability to filter entries by content type/node category, auto-feature of certain content nodes (ie. automatically Our Pick a 'News' Pages record), that sort of thing? It'd be great to use this as part of a more advanced homepage feature! Looking forward to hearing more. Hopefully there will be more to say about other apps as well (Gallery, Blogs, etc) but I'm happy with the chat about theming, Forums and Pages so far! Thanks for all the amazing updates! 😄

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.

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!

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: 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 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.

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!). 😄

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! 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.

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!

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!

Looking forward to it. Are you working with any other IPS third party devs on this project? I figure it would be better for multiple high-profile devs to club together and create something like this instead of having a number of competing listing sites work against each other. 🙂

Hm, I can see why IPS made this change but to be honest, asking clients to seek custom app/plugin development is going to be a lot more expensive than finding an app on a marketplace that many customers will be able to purchase. I guess it will make me a lot more hesitant to spend my money on third party apps.

I have a question: one of the things I'd really make use of is a means to track and analyse long-term user/visitor data for my IPS Suite in general as well as on a per-Pages database basis (say, for a news database). I have Google Analytics, sure, but it would be great to have something a bit more native as well. Is this part of this update, and if so is it available for Self-Hosted? I would expect a simple page that outlines historical 'News' Database records in a chart and list Views/Comments etc isn't something that requires any kind of cloud technology (the views/comments for each Pages record is counted on the platform already, this would just be compiling everything in a trackable way), so if something like this would be exclusive to cloud customers my follow-up question would be, would it be a time-limited exclusivity (i.e. cloud customers get the feature for a year or so to help get dev costs back more efficiently, then made available for self-hosted)? If so, I wouldn't mind that. I can wait for such a feature. 🙂

A great step forward for community managers looking to be more compliant, thanks for this. A quick question; if a user requests account deletion through these new features, can an administrator approve to delete all user PII but anonymise their content so that can be kept on the community? Or does a deletion approved in this way remove absolutely all content as well as PII?

Yeah just to clarify/reinforce Randy's point in case it helps other people as well... you need to enable Push Notifications for EACH device you have in order for it to work. You can't just set it once on a desktop/mobile browser and expect it to work once the PWA is set up. I realised this myself when I had enabled push notifications on my community within the iOS Safari app (before I PWA'd it), but didn't get anything come through when I set up the PWA after. It treats the PWA as its own, separate "browser", so you will need to log in on the specific app instance, go to Settings > Notifications and scroll down to the bell to ensure that your PWA is specifically set up for push. Then it works. 🙂 I'm guessing this is some quirk with iOS, but figured I'd share just in case anyone else is pulling their hair out at this.

Well in the UK it has been nothing but typical beautiful British weather: Honestly, it’s surprising to see summertime come around so fast over here. Thanks for the updates, Olivia, it’s appreciated!

This is unbelievably cool. Thank you Matt and IPS Team for this new feature (and thanks Apple In a way I guess). I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really sure what all the options in the Icons & Logos / Manifest were all about (and I don’t touch Android so it’s benefits would have been wasted on me) so I just left it all alone. This has given me an opportunity to look into this more and offer a way for our community to stay more connected. Having a Home Screen app definitely helps lessen the pressure when dealing with competition via other platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Thanks again!

Thanks for the updates - interesting revamp of the Gallery! Looking forward to seeing how that evolves. I am currently using a Pages database for a more editorialised media gallery setup (archival of official artworks, etc), and if I could replicate what I'm doing there with this I may just jump in and grab the revamped Gallery app. I had a question with that in mind; would it be possible (or can there be scope to add, in a future update) to connect or build a link/database relationship between Gallery albums and records in a Pages database? Either by allowing custom fields in gallery albums or some other method? That's one of the benefits for me to using a Pages-based media gallery right now (I have a DB Relationship custom field in the 'media gallery' database that, when linked to a Pages record in a separate database, will allow those albums and images to appear dynamically on the linked Pages record), but I would rather have the visual benefit of a proper gallery app that I can allow multiple users to contribute to, which can be linked directly to a Pages DB record.

Thanks for this informative video guys! I know a lot of the feedback you get from customers here (including myself sometimes!) is to have more of a view on what’s coming up with new features and roadmap items, so it is great to see that happening with these videos. Hope they become a regular feature! I love the new Events front page, would this replace the current Calendar view at all? Also, my community tends to use the Calendar feature as more of a release date/anniversaries feature for certain products (games, comics, etc) so would those sorts of calendar events still be able to be presented in that Events homepage style? Or is it more designed for actual events (in-person or zoom call style)? I think it would make certain upcoming game anniversaries (ie. X Years Since Pac-Man Released) and livestream events look really cool! I know other services like Twitch was mentioned in the Q&A (which is great because I’d love to see Twitch and YouTube Live be integrated into this), but would Discord also be a consideration? We have a Discord server and it would be awesome if we could integrate it with our IPB site so that any Events we post on the IPB would be automatically reflected in our Discord server (and maybe vice versa , but not necessarily). Thanks for putting this video together!