PrettyPixels

I don't remember reading anything about it. Today we need to use hooks to allow new videos to be embedded on the site. How IPS5 will handle that?

They could ignore what you put on the manual method for instructions, and leave it there. In which case you would have an item there to approve, which you would have to sort manually

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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?

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You could disallow any other payment method within those items. That way they would only be able to pay with account credit

I wrote a small plugin which selects account credit by default if the user has any available.  This doesn't require them to use it, but it encourages it since it is already selected when they get to checkout.  If this would be of any use to you I'd gladly share it.

I'd like to allow my members to sell things such as downloadable files, club memberships, etc. I realize this ability is built into Commerce. However, since many of the items are micro-transactions, I'm concerned about all the transaction fees eating into profits.
Is there a way to require users to use account credit for smaller transactions? That way, users would need to load their account with a larger amount that will justify the transaction costs.
I'm open to any other suggestions to minimize transaction as well. What has worked best for other communities?

Since I am using Pages databases a lot, I always run into the same problems. Here are two related to filters. (I could probably add more, but I was dealing with these recently.)
Checkbox as a filter.
This option is unfortunately missing. I often need to give optional filter choices, e.g. as here on Amazon:

With Pages, there is no option to do this. The Yes/No field isn’t optional. Using it would only ever allow one choice in the filter set (Yes or No). Filtering across all records without a choice for this field would become impossible. So it’s almost unusable. The Checkbox Set for some reason can be used as expected, but it only makes sense for multiple choices per field. For one field, it would still create the “select all/none” interface. 
Solution: Allow checkbox field to be a filter, where no selection doesn’t do anything and a selection show all records with this checkbox checked.
Pages relationship fields as filter.
I always struggle with this one as well. This field makes Pages database so powerful and gives us a competitive advantage over other software. 
Filters per radio, select box and so on are fine when there is a fixed set of options the admin can set up in advance. But what if that is not the case? What if the list of options needs to grow and needs their own database entries as well? For example, the publishers and authors of a book database. If they are set up as related databases, it’s impossible to filter the book records, because the relationship field cannot be used as a filter. But it is something users would expect. 
Solution: Allow the relationship field to be used as filter with one or multiple options. 

I agree, as well as some sort of direction or prompt to install PWA on the device.

We've built it internally for ourselves and have it kinda working. 
Our only challenge is that the way we are doing it (as @JP TTT mentions above) causes infrastructure resource issues due to the long polling that happens on such regular intervals, especially with people who have lots of unread notifications. 
(using JS to fetch the member notifications endpoint (/api/core/members/{id}/notifications) and extract the unread count from the fetched result and set it with setAppBadge PWAs function)
We'd LOVE to see this functionality rolled out natively as IMHO, Badge Counts / Notifications are one of the primary and best benefits of PWA Apps 🤓
(Especially now that Apple has finally come to the party recently - it's made companies like Basecamp go all-in on PWA)
It would very likely be one of the highest ROI features for Community Engagement available. 
Hopefully it's on the short term roadmap to really complete / round out the PWA capabilities of IPB. 

It's going to be interesting to see how IPS plans to expand its digital monetization
 

Finally, one of the most requested features for clubs in Invision Community is coming with our March 2024 release: Pages databases in Clubs.
You may be surprised to see a new feature being introduced for Invision Community 4 during our flow of news for Invision Community 5, but as we're committed to Invision Community 4, we wanted to continue to bring optimizations and improvements to the platform.
What is the benefit of this new feature?
Clubs enable communities to host multiple micro-communities with many benefits. Clubs allow more specialized and focused discussions on specific topics. This can lead to higher-quality content and a deeper exploration of niche subjects that may get overlooked when posted on a busy forum. Clubs also offer the ability to tailor the community experience based on the needs of that community. That customization is what this feature focuses on.
Pages is a powerful application that allows truly custom layouts for content areas. Simply by adjusting templates, you can create a news feed layout (it is what we use for this news blog area!) or something even more customized to your needs.
The March 2024 release allows you to create Pages database categories directly inside clubs, including custom fields and templates.
How does it work?
Setting up your Pages database to allow clubs to use categories is simple. Simply allow categories to be created within clubs when creating or editing a database.

Once that is done, club owners can add a Pages database category to their club in the same way they can add topics, galleries, etc.

Once the Pages database category has been added, you can then add content as you would any other club area with the added features of Pages, including custom templates and custom fields.
This example club uses a custom Pages database listing template to show the articles in a custom format along with custom field data.

Likewise, viewing an article in this example club showcases the use of custom templates to present the content differently from the standard topic templates Invision Community uses elsewhere.

Allowing Pages database categories inside clubs brings the opportunity for more complex custom areas making use of multiple custom fields along with truly custom layouts using templates. This is a great way to bring additional areas, such as news articles, into your club areas to compliment discussions.
We hope you enjoy this feature, and if you have any comments, please leave them below!

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I host a forum for an online game community, for which I use the events feature to invite people to in-game events. I would like to be able to create venues corresponding the in-game locations, but venues require a mailing address. Currently we must work around this by requiring event hosts to specify venues in the event description.
I see a few potential directions here:
Add a Yes/No question for "Venue Has Address" which toggles the Address field. Add a Yes/No question for "Venue Has Mailing Address". When Yes, the Address field is shown as today. When No, a simple text field is displayed allowing the user to provide custom input. The ability to specify our own fields. For instance, I may want to specify a specific tavern in a specific city. In real life, this would simply be the name of the tavern and a mailing address we can punch into maps. But in a fictional world, all that may be needed here is the name of the tavern and the name of the city. In practice this could look like option 2, but having the flexibility to provide that additional information is useful.

Here's another good example from a random site that shows different payment options in case IPS needs inspiration on this commonly-accepted practice:

It's not something we've planned for an initial release, but it's quite easy to achieve with the new CSS framework and is possibly something we can implement in the future.
With that said, browsers are very capable of scaling font sizes these days and since the entire UI is built using em's for sizing, the whole interface scales neatly. The color scheme also passes all contrast tests so far, and can be customized further using the Theme Editor if necessary 🙂

I love the new accessibility features! As someone who works with accessibility for a living, I'd also really like to see the ability for users to scale text and make it higher-contrast for older or visually impaired members.
Is this something you'd consider adding?

Brilliant work ! Loving the progress.
 
Can we also round up an applause for the frequently in depth updates Invision is bringing? Something that doesn’t need to go unnoticed. It’s one thing to keep working on v5, but keeping us informed with a top notch video, is equally as important!
 
Well done team!

Improvements are nice, but my main concern is maintaining existing projects. I would want to know everything that is not possible anymore and learn if there are alternative ways. This includes hacky solutions like putting a MySQL query in a theme template and things like that. I have lots of customized installations and I don’t want them to be stuck with 4.x.

Already available as part of the group settings:

I watched the video and it's great to see that gallery video transcoding will be a cloud only feature...

 
That's sarcasm...I hope they at least did something with the titles for SEO.
It really would nice if you allowed self hosting customers to use AWS libraries on their own. Or give a developer the ability to create these features and support with a plugin or app. That goes for all the "cloud only" features. Your cloud pricing is just not comperable to self-hosting, especially multiple licences. 
 

Hi,
My name is David. I run a side business called Mountain Interactive and frequently browse forum pages around Invision community. I've used Discord mainly for my community with over 34k+ Members. I am more attracted to running a website (forum) instead for communication as it is a more safer and enjoyable way, discord feels too corporate and doesn't give you enough room for customization. Now, I used to use Xenforo and left because they made an error while cloud hosting my site and I lost pretty much all my site data and subscribers which is really important when you're making $20,000 a month and need to ensure that your billing is working as normal every single day. They offered me $500 credit and told me that's all they could do 💀.  

Now, with that out of the way. I love Invision community for a lot of reasons but I do highly recommend you guys do not choose to go full corporate robot mode. A lot of things I like about Xenforo were that they had such a big addon community and it felt more sociable aside from how IPS Boards feel. My biggest recommendation and advice is to keep a balance between serving those corporate communities and also little guys like us, who love add-ons, and configuring our websites to the fullest potential possible.  I'm super excited to see Invision Community 5, It's been really hard to push my community from Discord to a forum software because anyone who like me, was born in 2004 and later isn't very familiar with forums. 

Thank you for your hard work!

Sincerely,
David

We will have to go to tons of differents platerform for keep our products purchase up to date.
Gonna be a pain to handle. Not gonna lie. 

A detriment to the devs will be the loss of all the reviews their plugin/apps have generated. It would be a nice gesture on IPS' behalf if there was a way to salvage them.

Not a bad idea, but I'd really like each project be domain-specific. So for instance one club would be for one game with its own domain (or sub domain) and another club would be for another game, also with its own domain (or sub domain.) I don't think that is possible to do with clubs.
Goofy I know but... having clean domains for each of the games we support is really important to us.

To be clear, as I was one who brought up the security concerns in this topic, I absolutely was not referring to any known instances or developer here, but merely the potential for it to occur and increasingly so when IPS becomes 100% hands off with third party applications.  Apologies if it came across that way.  I've seen enough security exploits in my own career (not anything IPS or IPS third party related) to warrant the concern.  Again not a reflection of any developer here or the quality of their code, I'm simply proactively thinking about the possibility and considerations regarding preventative measures.  If anyone feels such a security concern is  completely unnecessary or overkill, I would appreciate your particular insight as to why.  I certainly don't know the underpinnings of IPS code, so perhaps there is a reason a client doesn't need to have an elevated concern over it.
I'd still like to know what IPS corporate customers do, if it's anything like the corporations I've worked with (unrelated to my IPS projects), there is full fledged InfoSec and AppSec scanning of all application code before any deployment with Production (real user/member) data.  Generally for a hobby site, I'm not very concerned with data loss (with regular backups available to restore as needed), but I am concerned about data breaches involving PII.