IveLeft...

Twenty years ago today, Invision Community was founded and within months the first version of Invision Community was released. Little did we know, this would be the start of a remarkable journey spanning several decades.
Our first version appeared shortly after we founded the company. It might be hard to imagine a time before social media and YouTube, but when we started out, the web looked very different.

The first version of Invision Community was called Invision Board, reflecting the popular term for forums back in the early 2000s. It was full featured and you may recognise some elements that persist today.
Like today, it even had a separate control panel where you could create new areas of discussion and customise the theme.

Twenty years is a long time and we've continued to adapt with the ever-changing needs of community managers. We've seen the rise of social media impact how people consume content and found ways to compliment Twitter and Facebook by offering a place for long-form permanent discussion.
Several elements remain from those early days but the concepts behind the theme have change significantly. New workflows, UI elements and views have helped the platform stay fresh and we've certainly innovated a few features that have since become industry standard over that time.
I can't express how proud I am of what we've built together. From those humble beginnings working until 2am to growing a creative and talented team around our passion for community.
I'm still as excited today as I was back in 2002. This year will see us build and release new tools to help guide and inform community managers. Our community platform continues to go from strength to strength.
Of course, the platform is only one part of Invision Community. Over the last twenty years I've been grateful to get to know many of you and watch your lives unfold.
This is as pure as community can get and I'm privileged to be part of it.

We have a few other surprises to celebrate our twentieth anniversary. We can't wait to share them!

I'd love to hear your memories of Invision Community! When did you first use our products and what was your community for? Please let me know in the comments below.

IPS Community Suite 4.1.16 is nearing the end of development so I wanted to go over some of the new features in this upcoming release. Some are big and some are small but we always enjoy making any sort of enhancements to the Suite.
We expect 4.1.16 to go to public beta next week. If you are interested in using a public beta please check out our beta forum (clients only) with more info. We welcome as much testing as possible and our betas are considered safe to use on a live site. We do offer support for betas so, if you are technically minded, consider giving them a try.
Commerce: New Ticket Listing
We have redesigned the ticket listing view in Commerce to be much more user friendly and better use screen space. You can also now group by department which is great for organization.

 
Much like Activity Streams on the front end you can create custom views for tickets based on how you work.

The new My History view allows staff to quickly see their latest replies and actions along with some basic stats.

There are many other smaller improvement in Commerce in 4.1.16 as well. We think you will enjoy all the updates.
Security Questions
To enhance the security of your member accounts we now have a new security questions feature where you can allow your members to put in their own, personal security questions. The member will then be prompted to answer those questions for account actions you define.

Account Change Emails
Members will now receive confirmation emails when they change their email address...

and their password...

Topics per Page
You can now define the number of topics per page in forum view.

Remove all Followers
Moderators can now remove all followers from any item that allows follows. This is useful if you are archiving an old item or otherwise do not want people getting notified of new activity on an item.

Automatic Following
Your members can already choose to automatically follow content they start or reply to but now you can define this as the default behavior for all members. Your members can of course override this to their own preference.

Embed Failure Message
To answer the constant question "why didn't my media embed?" we now show you why. Regular members will just see a message indicating the Suite tried to embed but was not able to. Admins will get more information on what failed.

Suspended Member Page
When you banned/suspended a member previously they simply saw a generic permission denied message. We now show a more friendly page saying they were suspended and why.

The member can click to get the full information from the Warning System as well.

Contact Us
The contact us page now has configuration options to control where messages are sent. You can do email and even Commerce support departments now.

Announcements
Global announcements can now be restricted by member group.

And some technical stuff...
In addition to the new feature additions we have also fixed dozens of issues reported by clients. There was a particular focus on Commerce, Pages, and IPS Connect. Some other items of note:
Performance improvements in: profile view, sitemap generator, posting replies, and Activity Streams We now try to more reliably detect the AWS S3 endpoint for those using S3 file storage Tasks view will now show the last time a task ran More efficient license key checking to keep the keys from being checked too often which can slow your site down If group promotion based on date is enable the system will now auto-promote even if a member does not login If you move your site to a new URL you no longer have to update a constant if using the image proxy You can now press ctrl/cmd+enter in any editor window to submit the reply (yay!) In Commerce ticket view there are keyboard shortcuts to perform common actions (such as press 'r' to open reply box or 'n' for note) There is now logic to prevent double-posting when the initial post encounters an error on submit If your datastore (cache system) is not working properly the AdminCP will now show you a warning telling you that it needs attention.    

We were recently asked if it's possible to color code tags - the customer in question used tags as statuses on topics, and so wanted 'resolved' to be green, and so on. Despite being a great idea, this isn't something that is currently possible 'out of the box' - although we'll add it to our internal feature idea list to follow up on later!
But just because it isn't built in, that doesn't mean it isn't possible! In fact, with a little CSS, this is quite easy to achieve now.
 
Writing a CSS selector
We can do this by writing a CSS selector that matches the tag URL for the tag we want to style - a handy way to use CSS that can be applied to lots of other ideas within the suite!
Lets say we have a tag called 'resolved', and we want to make it green. Add the following CSS to your custom.css file:
.ipsTags a[href*="/tags/resolved/"] { background: SeaGreen; } html[dir="ltr"] .ipsTags a[href*="/tags/resolved/"]:before { border-color: transparent SeaGreen transparent transparent; } The first style is the main part of the tag element; the second matches the :before pseudo-selector which we use to make the 'point' of the tag.
Another tag we'll style is called 'needs help'. In this case, there's spaces in the name, which are represented by the + symbol in the URL (since it's URL-encoded). We'll make it purple this time:
.ipsTags a[href*="/tags/needs+help/"] { background: Purple; } html[dir="ltr"] .ipsTags a[href*="/tags/needs+help/"]:before { border-color: transparent Purple transparent transparent; }  
 
Supporting prefixes
This little CSS snippet won't change prefixes, however - they'll still be shown in the default color (specified by your theme settings). If you want to change prefixes too, you need to adjust the CSS as follows - replace the previous CSS with this version:
.ipsTags a[href*="/tags/needs+help/"], a.ipsTag_prefix[href*="?tags=needs+help"] { background: Purple; } html[dir="ltr"] .ipsTags a[href*="/tags/needs+help/"]:before, html[dir="ltr"] a.ipsTag_prefix[href*="?tags=needs+help"]:before { border-color: transparent Purple transparent transparent; } (Note: Notice the slightly different string we're matching in the href attribute; once you upgrade to 4.1.14, this won't be necessary - both selectors can use the same href format, e.g. /tags/needs+help/. Prior to 4.1.14, tags and prefixes used slightly different URL formats.)
That's it - now everything looks correct!
 

Topic View
 
 

Forum View
 

An enterprise customer recently asked us how to have a different feed block for each of their forums. Their goal was to have each forum show a 'popular topics' block containing topics only from that particular forum. Unfortunately this isn't possible using the standard block manager right now, since each view is treated as one configuration. That means that any blocks added to forum view will show for all forums.
However, as usual in IPS4, some of the more advanced power under the hood does allow you to achieve the same goal - in this case, by using HTML Logic. This technique uses a similar idea to the one I outlined in the Dynamic-ish Forum Feeds blog in May.
 
Creating conditional blocks
The way we would implement this functionality is by creating a custom block that is simply a wrapper for other blocks. This wrapper block will contain HTML Logic that determines which feed block to show, based on some information about the current page.
The first step would be to create standard feed blocks for each of the forums to which this should apply. In our example we're creating 'popular topics' blocks, but it could be anything you wish - the principle will remain the same. Another idea would be to create a 'Topics from other forums' block for each of your forums, whereby in the block configuration, you set it to include topics from all forums except the one in which it will be displayed - a good way of cross-promoting your topics.
In order to include the blocks later, set the template key of each to be forum_x, where x is the ID of the forum in which you will display the block.
 
Once we've created a block for each forum, the next step is to create our wrapper block, which should be a custom block set to use Manual HTML, with the following code:
{{if request.app == 'forums' && request.module == 'forums'}} {{$id = \IPS\Request::i()->id;}} {block="forum_{$id}"} {{endif}} What's happening here is we're checking the app and module from the page URL are both 'forums', which indicates we're in forum view. We then use the {block} tag to insert the appropriate block based on the ID parameter from the URL.
To use this block, simply save it, then using the Block Manager on the front-end, drag it into the desired location in your forum view.
I hope this quick suggestion gives you some ideas for other ways to create blocks that show contextually depending on what the user is viewing. If you have ideas for interesting ways to use this technique, share them in the comments!

In IPS4, it's easy to add custom icons to your forums, simply by uploading them on the Edit Forum screen in the AdminCP. But if you want to replace all of your forum icons, uploading the same icon for each forum can be a bit tedious.
It's easy to use some custom CSS to replace all of the icons - lets see how.
First, you'll want to upload the image(s) you want to use to the Resources section of your theme so that it can be used in your CSS. To start with, we'll use the same image for both read and unread status, but we'll cover using a different icon for both too.
 
The basics
Here's the basic CSS to replace the icon for all forums with your custom image:
body[data-pageapp="forums"] .cForumRow .ipsItemStatus.ipsItemStatus_large { width: 50px; height: 50px; border-radius: 0; background-color: transparent; background-image: url('{resource="mushroom.png" app="core" location="front"}'); background-size: 50px 50px; } body[data-pageapp="forums"] .cForumRow .ipsItemStatus.ipsItemStatus_large > i { display: none; } What we're doing here is specifically targeting the item status icons in the forums app, using the body[data-pageapp="forums"] selector. Within this style, we're setting the size of the icon - I've chosen 50px here which is about right in most cases, although you can change this if desired. Next we reset the border radius and background color so the icon looks right. And finally, we set the background image to our icon by using the {resource} tag and the background size to the same dimensions we just set the element to.
The next style hides the FontAwesome icon that IPS4 inserts by default, so that our icon can be seen.
 
Using a different 'read' icon
By default, your icon will be faded out for 'read' icons, but it's easy to use a completely different icon if you wish. Simply add:
body[data-pageapp="forums"] .cForumRow .ipsItemStatus.ipsItemStatus_large.ipsItemStatus_read { background-image: url('{resource="mushroom_faded.png" app="core" location="front"}'); } All we're doing here is using a more specific selector with .ipsItemStatus_read so that only the 'read' state is targeted. In the style, we specify the background image - we don't need to set and reset the other rules again because the styles we wrote in the first step are inherited.
 
Using different icons for redirect or Q&A forums
If you want to add icons specifically for redirect or Q&A forums, you can do that by targeting unique classes that are added to the icons for those kinds of forums. Those classes are .cForumIcon_redirect and .cForumIcon_answers, respectively. So, to use a custom icon for a Q&A forum, you would add another style like so:
body[data-pageapp="forums"] .cForumRow .cForumIcon_answers.ipsItemStatus.ipsItemStatus_large { background-image: url('{resource="question.png" app="core" location="front"}'); } Notice we've added .cForumIcon_answers to our selector.