Dreadknux

It's really not, to be honest. Seriously, this weird "unmarked white space that exists but doesn't really unless you click it" idea is a nonsense - both in usability terms and in WYSIWYG standards. If your community members can't discern what a 'Title' field is, they're definitely not going to figure out whatever esoteric suggestion this is. 🙂
And I dare say that, if you know that your community mostly consists of people who are unable to operate forums, a small change to the post editor is really not going to move the needle for you one way or the other. I also don't know why you would decline to offer email support to people asking for help, but that is probably doing more harm to your cause than a blue arrow button ever could.
Agreed. It's a pretty bizarre argument; "these contextual buttons that add lines above and below a quote box are simply too complicated for the common user! What they really need is a Source button to click on so they can dig into the HTML code, scroll to the line they need on their tiny mobile screen and add extra p tags and div containers!" 😂

It's really not, to be honest. Seriously, this weird "unmarked white space that exists but doesn't really unless you click it" idea is a nonsense - both in usability terms and in WYSIWYG standards. If your community members can't discern what a 'Title' field is, they're definitely not going to figure out whatever esoteric suggestion this is. 🙂
And I dare say that, if you know that your community mostly consists of people who are unable to operate forums, a small change to the post editor is really not going to move the needle for you one way or the other. I also don't know why you would decline to offer email support to people asking for help, but that is probably doing more harm to your cause than a blue arrow button ever could.
Agreed. It's a pretty bizarre argument; "these contextual buttons that add lines above and below a quote box are simply too complicated for the common user! What they really need is a Source button to click on so they can dig into the HTML code, scroll to the line they need on their tiny mobile screen and add extra p tags and div containers!" 😂

It's really not, to be honest. Seriously, this weird "unmarked white space that exists but doesn't really unless you click it" idea is a nonsense - both in usability terms and in WYSIWYG standards. If your community members can't discern what a 'Title' field is, they're definitely not going to figure out whatever esoteric suggestion this is. 🙂
And I dare say that, if you know that your community mostly consists of people who are unable to operate forums, a small change to the post editor is really not going to move the needle for you one way or the other. I also don't know why you would decline to offer email support to people asking for help, but that is probably doing more harm to your cause than a blue arrow button ever could.
Agreed. It's a pretty bizarre argument; "these contextual buttons that add lines above and below a quote box are simply too complicated for the common user! What they really need is a Source button to click on so they can dig into the HTML code, scroll to the line they need on their tiny mobile screen and add extra p tags and div containers!" 😂

Whaaaaaat Matt F coming in with the clutch MVP post of the thread!? That's awesome news, thanks for sharing/teasing!
Respectfully, I do not think your suggestion would really solve anything and in fact would make UX worse. Having extra space above/below the box area that is clickable-to-enable-text-input but is otherwise redundant will be super confusing to users, and would make the post editor not WYSIWYG compliant. Users need to see that what they're typing in the editor (and especially how it is presented in the editor) will be 100% accurate to how the post will appear on publish.
I would recommend waiting for V5 to come out and trying out the icon. While every user's experience will of course be different and there will likely be room for improvement in the UI, in my view I really do not think any user (no matter their level of experience) will miss these two clear icons sitting in the box area:

If a user is so inexperienced that you think they will not know what those buttons do, I will imagine the first thing said user would do is experiment and click those buttons to see what function they served. And there, problem solved.
My only suggestion regarding this topic is that, perhaps the arrow buttons should be permanently visible on the box in the post editor (at present in the V5 alpha those blue icons only appear if you hover your mouse over the box - and that's a scenario where I do believe that inexperienced users may have difficulty, as they may not think to hover over the box in order to reveal a solution they're looking for).

It's really not, to be honest. Seriously, this weird "unmarked white space that exists but doesn't really unless you click it" idea is a nonsense - both in usability terms and in WYSIWYG standards. If your community members can't discern what a 'Title' field is, they're definitely not going to figure out whatever esoteric suggestion this is. 🙂
And I dare say that, if you know that your community mostly consists of people who are unable to operate forums, a small change to the post editor is really not going to move the needle for you one way or the other. I also don't know why you would decline to offer email support to people asking for help, but that is probably doing more harm to your cause than a blue arrow button ever could.
Agreed. It's a pretty bizarre argument; "these contextual buttons that add lines above and below a quote box are simply too complicated for the common user! What they really need is a Source button to click on so they can dig into the HTML code, scroll to the line they need on their tiny mobile screen and add extra p tags and div containers!" 😂

It's really not, to be honest. Seriously, this weird "unmarked white space that exists but doesn't really unless you click it" idea is a nonsense - both in usability terms and in WYSIWYG standards. If your community members can't discern what a 'Title' field is, they're definitely not going to figure out whatever esoteric suggestion this is. 🙂
And I dare say that, if you know that your community mostly consists of people who are unable to operate forums, a small change to the post editor is really not going to move the needle for you one way or the other. I also don't know why you would decline to offer email support to people asking for help, but that is probably doing more harm to your cause than a blue arrow button ever could.
Agreed. It's a pretty bizarre argument; "these contextual buttons that add lines above and below a quote box are simply too complicated for the common user! What they really need is a Source button to click on so they can dig into the HTML code, scroll to the line they need on their tiny mobile screen and add extra p tags and div containers!" 😂

It's really not, to be honest. Seriously, this weird "unmarked white space that exists but doesn't really unless you click it" idea is a nonsense - both in usability terms and in WYSIWYG standards. If your community members can't discern what a 'Title' field is, they're definitely not going to figure out whatever esoteric suggestion this is. 🙂
And I dare say that, if you know that your community mostly consists of people who are unable to operate forums, a small change to the post editor is really not going to move the needle for you one way or the other. I also don't know why you would decline to offer email support to people asking for help, but that is probably doing more harm to your cause than a blue arrow button ever could.
Agreed. It's a pretty bizarre argument; "these contextual buttons that add lines above and below a quote box are simply too complicated for the common user! What they really need is a Source button to click on so they can dig into the HTML code, scroll to the line they need on their tiny mobile screen and add extra p tags and div containers!" 😂

It's really not, to be honest. Seriously, this weird "unmarked white space that exists but doesn't really unless you click it" idea is a nonsense - both in usability terms and in WYSIWYG standards. If your community members can't discern what a 'Title' field is, they're definitely not going to figure out whatever esoteric suggestion this is. 🙂
And I dare say that, if you know that your community mostly consists of people who are unable to operate forums, a small change to the post editor is really not going to move the needle for you one way or the other. I also don't know why you would decline to offer email support to people asking for help, but that is probably doing more harm to your cause than a blue arrow button ever could.
Agreed. It's a pretty bizarre argument; "these contextual buttons that add lines above and below a quote box are simply too complicated for the common user! What they really need is a Source button to click on so they can dig into the HTML code, scroll to the line they need on their tiny mobile screen and add extra p tags and div containers!" 😂

It's really not, to be honest. Seriously, this weird "unmarked white space that exists but doesn't really unless you click it" idea is a nonsense - both in usability terms and in WYSIWYG standards. If your community members can't discern what a 'Title' field is, they're definitely not going to figure out whatever esoteric suggestion this is. 🙂
And I dare say that, if you know that your community mostly consists of people who are unable to operate forums, a small change to the post editor is really not going to move the needle for you one way or the other. I also don't know why you would decline to offer email support to people asking for help, but that is probably doing more harm to your cause than a blue arrow button ever could.
Agreed. It's a pretty bizarre argument; "these contextual buttons that add lines above and below a quote box are simply too complicated for the common user! What they really need is a Source button to click on so they can dig into the HTML code, scroll to the line they need on their tiny mobile screen and add extra p tags and div containers!" 😂

It's really not, to be honest. Seriously, this weird "unmarked white space that exists but doesn't really unless you click it" idea is a nonsense - both in usability terms and in WYSIWYG standards. If your community members can't discern what a 'Title' field is, they're definitely not going to figure out whatever esoteric suggestion this is. 🙂
And I dare say that, if you know that your community mostly consists of people who are unable to operate forums, a small change to the post editor is really not going to move the needle for you one way or the other. I also don't know why you would decline to offer email support to people asking for help, but that is probably doing more harm to your cause than a blue arrow button ever could.
Agreed. It's a pretty bizarre argument; "these contextual buttons that add lines above and below a quote box are simply too complicated for the common user! What they really need is a Source button to click on so they can dig into the HTML code, scroll to the line they need on their tiny mobile screen and add extra p tags and div containers!" 😂

It's really not, to be honest. Seriously, this weird "unmarked white space that exists but doesn't really unless you click it" idea is a nonsense - both in usability terms and in WYSIWYG standards. If your community members can't discern what a 'Title' field is, they're definitely not going to figure out whatever esoteric suggestion this is. 🙂
And I dare say that, if you know that your community mostly consists of people who are unable to operate forums, a small change to the post editor is really not going to move the needle for you one way or the other. I also don't know why you would decline to offer email support to people asking for help, but that is probably doing more harm to your cause than a blue arrow button ever could.
Agreed. It's a pretty bizarre argument; "these contextual buttons that add lines above and below a quote box are simply too complicated for the common user! What they really need is a Source button to click on so they can dig into the HTML code, scroll to the line they need on their tiny mobile screen and add extra p tags and div containers!" 😂

It's really not, to be honest. Seriously, this weird "unmarked white space that exists but doesn't really unless you click it" idea is a nonsense - both in usability terms and in WYSIWYG standards. If your community members can't discern what a 'Title' field is, they're definitely not going to figure out whatever esoteric suggestion this is. 🙂
And I dare say that, if you know that your community mostly consists of people who are unable to operate forums, a small change to the post editor is really not going to move the needle for you one way or the other. I also don't know why you would decline to offer email support to people asking for help, but that is probably doing more harm to your cause than a blue arrow button ever could.
Agreed. It's a pretty bizarre argument; "these contextual buttons that add lines above and below a quote box are simply too complicated for the common user! What they really need is a Source button to click on so they can dig into the HTML code, scroll to the line they need on their tiny mobile screen and add extra p tags and div containers!" 😂

Whaaaaaat Matt F coming in with the clutch MVP post of the thread!? That's awesome news, thanks for sharing/teasing!
Respectfully, I do not think your suggestion would really solve anything and in fact would make UX worse. Having extra space above/below the box area that is clickable-to-enable-text-input but is otherwise redundant will be super confusing to users, and would make the post editor not WYSIWYG compliant. Users need to see that what they're typing in the editor (and especially how it is presented in the editor) will be 100% accurate to how the post will appear on publish.
I would recommend waiting for V5 to come out and trying out the icon. While every user's experience will of course be different and there will likely be room for improvement in the UI, in my view I really do not think any user (no matter their level of experience) will miss these two clear icons sitting in the box area:

If a user is so inexperienced that you think they will not know what those buttons do, I will imagine the first thing said user would do is experiment and click those buttons to see what function they served. And there, problem solved.
My only suggestion regarding this topic is that, perhaps the arrow buttons should be permanently visible on the box in the post editor (at present in the V5 alpha those blue icons only appear if you hover your mouse over the box - and that's a scenario where I do believe that inexperienced users may have difficulty, as they may not think to hover over the box in order to reveal a solution they're looking for).

Whaaaaaat Matt F coming in with the clutch MVP post of the thread!? That's awesome news, thanks for sharing/teasing!
Respectfully, I do not think your suggestion would really solve anything and in fact would make UX worse. Having extra space above/below the box area that is clickable-to-enable-text-input but is otherwise redundant will be super confusing to users, and would make the post editor not WYSIWYG compliant. Users need to see that what they're typing in the editor (and especially how it is presented in the editor) will be 100% accurate to how the post will appear on publish.
I would recommend waiting for V5 to come out and trying out the icon. While every user's experience will of course be different and there will likely be room for improvement in the UI, in my view I really do not think any user (no matter their level of experience) will miss these two clear icons sitting in the box area:

If a user is so inexperienced that you think they will not know what those buttons do, I will imagine the first thing said user would do is experiment and click those buttons to see what function they served. And there, problem solved.
My only suggestion regarding this topic is that, perhaps the arrow buttons should be permanently visible on the box in the post editor (at present in the V5 alpha those blue icons only appear if you hover your mouse over the box - and that's a scenario where I do believe that inexperienced users may have difficulty, as they may not think to hover over the box in order to reveal a solution they're looking for).

With v5, you can probably save a lot of hassle and just use the backticks to generate inline code. Either way, applications have a framework to add new editor functionality, including buttons.
  CleanShot 2024-05-21 at 10.29.11.mp4  
 

This is one of the more exciting features about IC5, and as a sort-of-power user the sticky toolbar and mobile considerations in particular are a godsend. Thanks for all your hard work, Matt!
I had a few questions about the new post editor;
1. Can we remove certain options from the post editor (for instance, I don't necessarily like the idea of my community's users being able to change the font size/style of their content, so being able to enable/disable certain toolbar buttons would be great for me)?
2. The boxes are great, but from a design perspective the box header area ("How to write JavaScript", for example) doesn't seem to stand out from the rest of the box content (and the padding seems a bit too much for my liking). Is there a chance of having a box header bgcolor implemented that's maybe a little darker/lighter than the box content background to make it pop (I can always use custom CSS to fix this myself but figured I'd ask if it was something that could be done out of the box)?
3. Will you be publishing a full FAQ/guide on what kind of markup code will be supported on this? One of the least desirable aspects of Invision V4 has been a lack of official documentation/glossaries regarding IPS template code and what is actually there for designers to use (making a custom theme has often been a matter of either accidentally finding out there is a 'native' CSS class for what I want a particular div to do, or creating new CSS classes myself and duplicating styles in ignorance), and it'd be a shame for me to ask end-users to guess what kind of markdown code works via trial and error. 😄
4. I like the idea that text colours change dynamically with light/dark theme - but is that only relating to the default IC5 theme, or will that also be the case for custom themes as well? I remember @Ehren's amazing walkthrough of the new theme editor a few months ago, and what seemed space-age to me was that changing a primary/secondary colour for a theme would also dynamically alter a container/button's text colour. Will post editor text colours work in the same way, or will I need to consider custom CSS classes to make a 'yellow' text colour readable on a similar-coloured post area background?
Thanks again!

We're discussing this internally still but there should be a way to restrict buttons by user and editor location in the final release
 
That would be managed by the theme's CSS. We ended up keeping the background color the same once because a slightly darker/lighter color tended to look off in at least a few box color and dark/light mode combinations
 
Probably not, but only because markdown code itself is not technically supported, rather we've included markdown style shortcuts. For example, if I pasted in "**some bold text**", it won't get converted to bold, it's only going to be converted after being typed out
 
Yes! It uses color-mix and other CSS tricks to consistently adapt to the different theme colors.

Haha, I had meant to tag @Matt Finger but when I was typing my original post the mention function was going screwy! Thanks Matt (the other one)!

Invision Community 5 has a brand new editing experience powered by a lightweight, fast React text editor built for mobile and modern browsers.
The venerable CKEditor v4 at the core of our current editor is starting to show its age, so we wanted a clean slate with Invision Community v5 with an editor that was optimized for mobile use, easily extensible and had a feature set that would take us into the next era of Invision Community and beyond.
The obvious choice was to consider the latest version of CKEditor, but it didn't fit our needs as it wasn't easily extensible, external plug-ins would no longer be possible, and its large footprint would affect page speed scores and be painful to use with a mobile connection.
After a long search, we settled on Tiptap as the base for our editor. Written in React, loaded in chunks when needed for optimal performance and with many APIs and extensibility options, it was the perfect fit.

Aside from the technical improvements, the editor offers new tools and a great base for writing our own plugins. I'll walk you through the main features throughout this blog. If you want a more technical deep dive, then please see my development blog.
The Toolbar
The toolbar has been redesigned to put the most commonly used styles first, with the least used styles and functions into an ellipses menu. The new paragraph menu contains the header styles, as well as the code block. The plus menu adds lists, boxes and quotes. The benefit of this new compact menu is that it displays just the same on mobile. Currently, there are different editor styles for desktops, tablets and mobiles with some style buttons removed to save space. With Invision Community 5, this is no longer the case. Even the smallest display gets all the functionality.
mobile-toolbar.mp4
 
 
Emojis & Icons
Emojis have become a great way to embellish writing and express emotion. The new emoji picker has been modernized with larger emojis and tooltips to showcase the emoji shortcodes.
The Icons tab, new for Invision Community 5, allows you to add Font Awesome Icons directly to your content.

Lastly, both the emoji selector and the shortcode suggestion dropdown support arrow-key navigation, so you don't have to move your hands from the keyboard to the mouse.
Content Boxes
The feature I'm personally most excited about is boxes.
The concept started as an abstraction of spoilers because sometimes you just want "a box" - a section that stands out from the rest of the content, something we do manually in our documentation and guides on this site. Each box has a tile and the following options:
Expandable - You can mark a box as "expandable" which is functionally the same as a spoiler. One improvement is that expandable boxes use native HTML details and summary elements instead of plain Javascript animated divs. Colors - You can optionally keep it grey on grey like spoilers, but I think that's so boring! The colors automatically adjust to the theme colors, so it will look great in dark and light mode. Float (left/right/none) - You can make the box align to the left or right of other content just like you can for images Width - When the box is floated, you can set the width to big, medium or small. Boxes.mp4
Link Expansion
Invision Community has long expanded some links, such as YouTube, offering more context or even a mini-player where appropriate.
With Invision Community 5, we've added support for embedding dynamic link previews using site metadata. This is a preview of a topic on our forum.

For those unaware, the Open Graph (OG) Protocol is essentially a way webpages can specify a title, image, and description to be dynamically embedded on another platform. This is the underlying technology when you see the link preview in Meta, X, Slack, or iMessage.
Code Blocks and Inline Code
The new editor adds inline, syntax-highlighted code blocks and inline code. Both formats can be applied via the toolbar, or optionally, you can wrap text in a single backtick (`) to convert it to an inline code block or triple backticks (```) to convert it to a code block.

The code blocks also support numerous languages for syntax highlighting, including a new custom highlighter for the Invision HTML Template Syntax (Invision Community theme creators and application developers, you're welcome!)
Semantic Headings and Relative Sizes
Invision Community 5 adds a block selector with headings 1 through 6 in the new editor. It's possibly the most common request I hear so that people can use consistent styling rather than just big bold text in a paragraph tag. Semantic headings are also ideal for SEO and accessibility.
In addition to the block selector, you can create headings with the corresponding markdown shortcut. Consecutive pound signs (#) at the start of a line followed by a space (the number of pounds corresponds to the "level" of the heading). For example ### creates a Heading 3 (<h3/>) creates the heading for you.
Using clear header tags means screen readers and search engines can better understand your content as using absolute font sizes, such as 16px, can make it unclear what type of element is actually being used. Is it a heading or just a paragraph with large bold text?
Furthermore, you may want different sizes depending on the content and device type. Mobile devices may benefit from a large base font size. So we added percent-based font sizes which change the font size based on whatever the default would be for that block.
text-menus.mp4
Further UX Improvements
The new editor in Invision Community 5 has several tangible improvements, including a mobile-first design.
In the current editor, some functionality was hidden behind modals and double clicks, which are either not obvious on mobile devices or not possible at all. The new editor no longer relies on modals and instead uses buttons and dropdown menus that work perfectly with mobile and other touch-based devices.
New Line Arrows
For block content, such as boxes, images and quotes, we've added the ability to create a new line before or after the block with the click of a button. This was an issue of frustration for mobile and touch devices where it was not always clear where the cursor was and a finger is a much less accurate aiming device!

Sticky Toolbar
Anyone who has authored a long piece of content knows the pain of scrolling up and down to get the toolbar in view. To make writing longer content less stressful, we've made the toolbar sticky so that it will always be fixed at the top of the editor after scrolling down.
sticky-toolbar.mp4
Markdown Style Shortcuts
One common request is to support markdown in the editor. While we opted not to include full markdown support, the new editor recognizes many markdown-style formatting shortcuts.
markdown.mp4
Colors
A common challenge with rich text editors on sites with multiple themes is colors often need to consistently look right across all themes. This is even more important with Invision Community 5, as it has a native dark mode feature. For this reason, we opted to offer a reduced set of color options that all adapt dynamically to the theme. I mentioned this about box colors above, but this is also true of the font color. The difference in shade is slight, but it's very noticeable without it. Toggling between light and dark mode will never produce unreadable text.
colors.mp4
We can't wait for you to try the new editor; it has already been very popular with our small testing group. Which feature are you most looking forward to trying?

View full blog entry

I've suggested some improvements to Gallery in terms of usergroup posting access and connectivity with CMS Pages (and custom fields) before, but I wanted to add another one to the mix that I think would be really useful for communities that want to leverage Gallery as a media resource and avoid duplication of images/uploads.
Could we see an option to place an uploaded image into more than one Gallery album? For example, say I set up two gallery categories:
"Character Artwork", and "Game Artwork"  and I upload an image of a game character into an album called 'George' in "Character Artwork"... but I'd also like the image to be visible in another album called 'George and the Great Chase' in "Game Artwork" as it is related.
At present, my only option here is to upload the same image twice - once in Character Artwork > George and another time in Game Artwork > George and the Great Chase.
If we had the ability (at a usergroup permissions level) to place the uploaded image into multiple albums, (or edit existing images to place them in multiple albums after upload) that would be a great QOL feature for communities wanting to set up a shared media space.

I've suggested some improvements to Gallery in terms of usergroup posting access and connectivity with CMS Pages (and custom fields) before, but I wanted to add another one to the mix that I think would be really useful for communities that want to leverage Gallery as a media resource and avoid duplication of images/uploads.
Could we see an option to place an uploaded image into more than one Gallery album? For example, say I set up two gallery categories:
"Character Artwork", and "Game Artwork"  and I upload an image of a game character into an album called 'George' in "Character Artwork"... but I'd also like the image to be visible in another album called 'George and the Great Chase' in "Game Artwork" as it is related.
At present, my only option here is to upload the same image twice - once in Character Artwork > George and another time in Game Artwork > George and the Great Chase.
If we had the ability (at a usergroup permissions level) to place the uploaded image into multiple albums, (or edit existing images to place them in multiple albums after upload) that would be a great QOL feature for communities wanting to set up a shared media space.

I think I made a feature topic about Our Picks before, but I had this brainwave and wanted to share another idea.
It would be great to allow community members to 'suggest' content for promotion onto the Our Picks (or Featured, or whatever it's going to be called in V5) page. They could click a button saying "I loved this! Suggest for Promotion" or something, and a dialog could appear with a text field asking why they liked it and why they want it to be shown on the front page (so others may see it). These submissions could be collected into the ModCP and mods/admins could consider them for inclusion - if so, they can tweak a suggested headline and body copy much like they can with the current promote system.
They could also choose/create a Category for the Featured content to sit within (this is related to a past feature idea I had in the last topic I made - Our Picks should have the functionality for 'categories' so that mods/admins can promote content to certain 'buckets' that can be used as a filter when displaying on a custom homepage).
Reason why I think this might be good, is for large communities with a lot of content. Sometimes it can be difficult for just mods/admins to find and promote good content they see, if there are a lot of clubs/forums/pages etc to work through. And it would allow users to feel like they are helping to contribute to a community that they love.

Just a quick idea that popped into my head this morning - a lot of my community users rely on making new topics for everything. Whenever a new piece of news drops, or the release day of a particular product, that sort of thing. It tends to clutter my forum, and I'm thinking of ways of how to change the culture a little bit so people use the Calendar a lot more for release reminders (this was one of the reasons given when users are asked why they make potentially redundant topics; that they use the threads as a means to remind themselves that something has been released).
With that in mind, I think it would be useful if there was a functionality to assign one (or more) Events to a Topic (or Page), at the post editor level as a new field (it can work a little like database relationship, only you search for items within a different IPS app?). The resulting calendar entry could appear as an ipsBox widget above or below the first post content area, in a scrollable box similar to that of the Our Picks horizontal widget.
I think you could also do the same thing with other apps/nodes across the IPS suite (maybe have a widget listing galleries that a topic author might think is related to the subject they want to talk about? Or assign a database Page to a Topic in a forum designed for user collaboration over updates to that Page, like Wikipedia's 'talk' function?). But Calendar is what popped into my head, so Calendar is the ask. 🙂 The other apps would be cool too though.

Just a quick idea that popped into my head this morning - a lot of my community users rely on making new topics for everything. Whenever a new piece of news drops, or the release day of a particular product, that sort of thing. It tends to clutter my forum, and I'm thinking of ways of how to change the culture a little bit so people use the Calendar a lot more for release reminders (this was one of the reasons given when users are asked why they make potentially redundant topics; that they use the threads as a means to remind themselves that something has been released).
With that in mind, I think it would be useful if there was a functionality to assign one (or more) Events to a Topic (or Page), at the post editor level as a new field (it can work a little like database relationship, only you search for items within a different IPS app?). The resulting calendar entry could appear as an ipsBox widget above or below the first post content area, in a scrollable box similar to that of the Our Picks horizontal widget.
I think you could also do the same thing with other apps/nodes across the IPS suite (maybe have a widget listing galleries that a topic author might think is related to the subject they want to talk about? Or assign a database Page to a Topic in a forum designed for user collaboration over updates to that Page, like Wikipedia's 'talk' function?). But Calendar is what popped into my head, so Calendar is the ask. 🙂 The other apps would be cool too though.

Thanks for the suggestion. This has already been addressed in v5, but I’ll keep this in mind for v4 🙂  It’s bugged me in the past too.