Joel R

Some questions and / or observations: - the Sidebar Menu offers a lot of links. The (regular) browse menu on mobile offers much less links. I'm guessing you have an option per link on whether to show on mobile? - Bottom mobile menu is nice. This is a well established design theory by Luke Wrobleski from Google product design, but I actually thought many mobile apps were moving away from the bottom menu because it overlaps with some built in browser or phone options. Thoughts? I don't think there's one right answer, just more interested in your perspective. - traditional view of menu only offers single row. I already do this on my primary community today (not because of any special study on design theory, but for simplicity!) but would be interested in your perspective in why you're imposing this approach. The current Menu structure already encapsulates this and more. Why change it? - performance improvements. You removed JavaScript and a lot of CSS. But then we also need splashy grid pictures of our latest trip to Australia and croc suit for the new Forum Feed / Big Grid view!

Welcome to the support forums of Invision Community! Just wait until you discover the Block Manager ... 😃

If you only need an extension for articles and news, I strongly encourage you to evaluate Pages and simply host your entire ecosystem within IPS. Pages is perfect for news and articles, and with a couple of good templates by third party developers, you can have a very robust news system that compliments your forum. You can even feed articles into your forums. My entire Resources section is built on Pages: https://www.invisioneer.org/resources/ It also means, more importantly, no maintenance of bridging or SSO. It means one unified login, one unified set of notifications, one unified activity stream, etc. WordPress is an unrivalled ecosystem, but if all you need it for is news, you may want to think about the native solution within IPS. As Marc mentioned, there is no downloadable trial. However, if you are self hosted, you can opt in to the new license terms (which you must agree to eventually anyways) and grab all the apps including Pages immediately.

This is not something available in vanilla IPS. You likely have a custom plugin for group mentions.

Questions: Search modal - Does this entirely replace the Advanced Search? I like the new search. Modern users are accustomed to simpler search bars with contextual filters, not full page searches with 20 options. Forum Icons - The little houses. Are those icons or uploaded photos? In generla, support for FA6? Website Slogan - I'm guessing this is static? Like, can we have rotating messages "G'Day Mates" and five seconds later "Where's your croc suite?" Visible Focus Rings - This came out from nowhere, would love to understand the company's perspective behind this feature. I'm scratching my head because it's not applicable at all for mobile or tablet. This benefits power users on desktop and ... maybe developers? Mobile Bottom Navigation - Customizable per group or hardcoded?

Such a great idea! So happy to see others have the same lightbulb go off of crafting smarter menus of links. The hard thing now is how do we customize and craft those menus for different member journeys?? 🤔

Just because you change group permissions on applications (like blogs, calendar, gallery, etc) does not mean you hide or change permissions on blocks such as Popular Contributors, Members, etc. These are universal blocks to the entire suite. You could simply remove those blocks. If your goal is to show a totally empty page whose only content is your sign up information, then building a Page (using the pages application) is the way to go. You can custom build any Page you want.

Surprise leaks from the second teaser video: Change in topic layout Online indicator Did you catch anything else? Continued in-depth commentary on the second teaser video on Invisioneer.org and what it all means for clients: https://www.invisioneer.org/forums/topic/218-deep-dive-version-5-teaser-ii/

Surprise leaks from the video: Change in location to Mark site read Easier access to Subscriptions Iconography for +Create and Report Not yet identified features related to Helpful Check out my in-depth commentary (with screenshots!) on Invisioneer.org, where I break down what clients can expect not just in the upcoming release but potentially as a larger theme on v5 (hint: start making suggestions about Subscriptions!): https://www.invisioneer.org/forums/topic/217-deep-dive-a-very-brief-look-at-invision-community-5/

A broader thought: I know many of us focus a lot of time and attention to our homepage, which we think is the front door to our community. The reality is much more nuanced. The way that Google crawls our sites and shows sub-pages in search results means guests enter our communities directly into specific topics, not the homepage! In other words, every public page that Google crawls can potentially be the front door! On my bigger community, my homepage index barely makes the Top 10 most visited pages of my community. If you run a publicly-available site, you should spotcheck multiple pages as a guest, because all of those pages are potentially your chance for first impression.

For the guest block widget, I recommend dragging it to the top of every major page of your community: on your forum index, on your topic listing, in the topic, at the top of gallery, at the top of your activity streams. Everywhere! The reason why is that guests will be presented with your customized message on all of those pages! The guest sign up widget should contain your call to action and incorporates your log in options. Once you drag the widget to any page, edit the widget. You only need to edit the widget once, and it displays the same message on all pages to which it's added.

Are you looking to add the same set of tags all at once to, say, multiple topics? Tagging @Adriano Faria or @Makoto. I believe there might be a third party solution in the Marketplace about mass tagging multiple topics as a moderator permission

Some thoughts: 1. This is only an observation. I find it interesting that IPS approaches time spent on a community from a position of scarcity. To be clear, this makes sense - we have busy lives and many sites that we visit, so we need to optimize the time spent on the community to make it impactful. Get me to what I want in the most efficient manner. On the other hand, I encourage IPS to also approach it from a position of (maybe just a little) greed. Yes, get me to what I want to read or reply as quickly as possible, but also encourage and push and motivate me to also get involved or read something extra. Help me go down a rabbit hole. That's the only way to grow my involvement in the site. Not asking IPS to adopt a full blown social media orientation where attention is the only point, but adding attention hooks and pushing engagement can only help our communities. 2. The prototype of the topic as stated above is highly limiting. It matches a support topic. But it doesn't match topics where the discussion and commentary are the point. For example, this topic! This topic doesn't have a "right answer" that anyone can Mark as Solved. The breadth of conversations by clients and the diverse things we care about - developer updates, the edit button, content denseness, polite fanboy applause - is the point and the noise at the same time. Going to be curious how IPS innovates on these social and conversational topics. 3. I wonder how we can cut down on the noise and distraction of a question by helping users ask a better question to begin with?

Talking more to myself: So, the Sidebar Menu gives more space. And more space means more opportunity to share links. And more opportunity to share links means we can customize the menu experience for different journeys of users: the new you, the returning you, the future you. For the new you, I can see the first 3 menu links be things like "best of", "top guides," or "must read" types of links. Essentially, items to help a new user get oriented. For the returning you, I can see the first 3 menu links be things like "what's new", "my content" and trending content. Essentially, items to help the returning user catch up and jump back into the latest conversations. It's hard to do that kind of personalization with the horizontal style, but I can see the Sidebar Menu empower community admins to create "personalized" menus in a way that most admins haven't done (or thought about!) before. This is some food for thought that I think all IPS admins should consider as a takeaway when we re-envision our communities on 5. This is all assuming IPS keeps group permissions on menu items as is.

One of the more unexpected and interesting new design choices is the highlight of nodes in the menu, not just the apps (eg. popular forum boards). Would love to hear more from IPS on best practices and what inspired this. Community owners can already do this manually. The current Menu Manager allows us to insert a link to, well, any URL. I doubt most of us actually utilize it to highlight our popular nodes though! I'm starting to realize that the vertical menu gives more space for menu options versus the horizontal menu, so owners can add options like popular forum boards that we couldn't before. There's some interesting experimentation and innovation community owners can do with the new vertical menu.

I want to add that for a new lifecycle, this theme looks amazing. I remember the 4.0 Social Suite (raise your hand if you used 4.0!), and while no one doubts that 5.0 is its successor, this theme looks and feels so much more polished out the gate and it will only get better on this cycle.

Some questions: 1. Sidebar Layout - how does this interplay with our existing Sidebar of the blocks? Or do you foresee a left-hand sidebar (with Menu options) versus a right-hand sidebar (with Blocks). If we utilize the Sidebar Menu, does this replace the normal Navigation Menu? How does the Sidebar Menu interact with extremely long main pages? As an extreme example, you have 3 items in the Sidebar Menu but 100 boards or 100 posts so the Sidebar drags on and on but it's empty. 2. Feed view - I like. A lot. My personal thoughts is that this works extremely well for a well-focused board, but not for overbuilt forums with 100 boards. The user avatar is a bit confusing. Is it the avatar of the person of the last reply, or the avatar of the topic starter? How do you signify that I (as first person) have participated in the topic? How does this display when it's not text, such as a quote, code, or an GIF? Do you incorporate any iconography for elements like featured, pinned, promoted, answered, staff, etc.? 3. Compact View - I think this is one of the more elegant solutions to showing a user postbit for a mobile world. How does this interplay with the hovercard? Any consideration given to users with (and this is a real thing on my primary community) 100,000 content items + 10,000 reputation + a really long email? This design looks fine when you have 5 badges and 5 points and a short email.

To unpack your post which has a lot of good points, are you asking about: 1. Showing / hiding elements for user expertise, authority, and trust? And / or 2. Content denseness on the view screen? These are both important topics for deeper conversation and consideration for each community. For some communities that are support oriented, showing reputation is important: getting an answer from an expert or an official company rep is important to validate the level of authority or expertise in the topic. For fan communities around interests and hobbies that are more social based, you may want to turn off the feature. For content denseness, I agree. Making sure that the screen above the fold packs as much information as possible. Lots of opportunity in UIX for designers and themers to explore.

I'd like to extend a public invitation to all IPS clients and the third-party community to celebrate the opening of the free listing of files on the Marketplace Directory of Invisioneer.org. https://www.invisioneer.org/marketplace/ What is the Marketplace Directory on Invisioneer.org? The Marketplace Directory is a free list of files by authors. Its goal is simple: a free, centralized list for you to browse third-party files. No files are sold or supported on the site itself. You will be redirected to the author's site for payment and support. You will find the Marketplace Directory to be immediately familiar: Same categories and structure as the IPS Marketplace Same IP.Downloads app as the IPS Marketplace Over 300+ files have already been listed in the Marketplace Directory, and we hope more will be listed as developers and themers update their files. Why visit Marketplace Directory? The Marketplace Directory will never be a perfect substitute for the IPS Marketplace, which had deep integration with the ACP and directly processed payments on behalf of clients. However, as soon as it became known that IPS was shutting down its Marketplace, it became clear that clients would confusingly need to go to multiple websites. Purchased 5 plugins from 5 different developers? You need to visit 5 different sites for support and payment. The Marketplace Directory doesn't totally solve the problem, but it's a step in the right direction. It consolidates files by authors who wish to list together, and makes file discovery and author tracking so much easier. There is power in collaboration, and the Marketplace Directory is a great example of the most trusted third-party developers coming together in the spirit of community. What is Invisioneer.org? Invisioneer.org is a broader project of mine to offer a suite of resources to help IPS owners and admins launch better communities - and to hopefully learn alongside you. It's my goal to build an "ecosystem of success" around IPS owners and admins as we compete and thrive together on the modern web: IPS helps you compete with community software Third-party developers help you compete with themes and extensions Invisioneer.org helps you compete with community strategy My goal behind Invisioneer.org is to help you compete - and win - with the "soft skills" of community management that are just as important as the technology: crafting a community strategy, leading with emotional intelligence, and leveraging best practices from disciplines like behavioral economics, psychology, sociology, and leading community consultancies. The Marketplace Directory is an important part of Invisioneer.org, and one component of the ecosystem of success for IPS clients to leverage. What do I do with my files? Purchases and renewals have stopped on the IPS Marketplace, and the Marketplace itself will shut down on October 30 2023 according to IPS. To continue receiving support and updates to your active Marketplace files, you will need to transfer your purchases' license keys directly to the author. To find the license keys for all purchases, go to My Purchases. Active authors have posted information on their file descriptions or in the support topic about their own support sites. If you purchased a file from a developer who doesn't have information yet, you will need to reach out to that author. Official IPS Blog: https://invisioncommunity.com/news/invision-community/marketplace-the-next-steps-r1286/

Hey, this is not the direct solution, but an alternative workaround. In IPS, you can create "friendly URLs" in the ACP. You can use this to add a menu item to the friendly URL. No translations needed. Just a thought.

Contact @Driven 2 Services who can provide emergency services.

Does IPS anticipate any feature updates any more for the v4 line, such as for Courses? Or will that be targeted for v5?

Hi @sefla 1. What version are you running today? 3.x or 4.x? 2. Are you looking for more hands-on server assistance, or are you capable of basic server troubleshooting? There are some excellent third party providers (paid) such as @ASTRAPI or @Driven 2 Services who can help with upgrade, or you can consider Cloud.

1. You could create a custom page with a custom database that compares the three subscription plans. I believe @opentype has a good template for this comparison page. (Behind the scenes, your database would be 3 records: one for each subscription, with different values for each custom field such as price, duration, benefits, etc.) 2. The other approach is articulating the "bundled" free subscription at time of registration. And then using the subscription page as designed. 3. Showing a free tier was provided as client feedback many times during the initial rollout of subscriptions.

This is a gentle way of IPS saying that you are using membergroups in an unusual and not recommended manner. Can you help explain why you need to group members in separate groups? 1. When users finish with a course, can you put them into 1 membergroup ("Finished students")? 2. Have you thought about using Clubs, which are ways of grouping users without using permissions?