Darek_Hugo

Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention! I can confirm this should be further reviewed and I have logged an internal bug report for our development team to investigate and address as necessary, in a future maintenance release.
 

Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention! I can confirm this should be further reviewed and I have logged an internal bug report for our development team to investigate and address as necessary, in a future maintenance release.
 

Welcome to the second video of our sneak peak series! Today we'll be taking a closer look at the new Invision Community interface, including dark mode, accessibility improvements, performance improvements and the mobile layout! Before we begin, I should mention that this is a pre-alpha version of Invision Community 5, so some areas of the design may change before the official release.
 
New traditional header design
In our previous video, we showcased our new, optional side panel which formats your navigation into a vertical list. For those who prefer a traditional, horizontal header, here it is!

A much more compact header compared to version 4, the new design condenses the navigation bar into a single row, moving all sub-navigation items into dropdown menus. A new, optional area below the text logo allows you to add your website slogan or announce events such as anniversaries or holidays, and our new search modal provides convenient access to the advanced search filters from any page on your community.

 
Accessible interface
The main content area has been designed with accessibility as a priority. High contrast text colours and larger font-sizes help to make reading more comfortable and clickable table rows (which can be enabled or disabled via the Theme Editor) allow you to navigate between pages more easily. A visible focus ring significantly improves navigation for visitors who find it more comfortable to browse with their keyboard TAB key, instead of using their mouse (ie. visitors with conditions such as Parkinson's disease, or those who have temporarily lost function due to a broken arm).
 
Focus.mp4
Elements are highlighted while navigating with the keyboard
 
Dark mode
Dark mode has become increasingly popular over the past few years - so it's no surprise that Version 5 has been designed from scratch with both light and dark mode in mind. With version 4, it was necessary to manage two themes in order to provide a light and dark colour scheme. In version 5 though, all of that is handled by a single theme.
By default, your members will be able to choose their own color scheme preference: either light, dark, or system. System assigns a color scheme based on your system preferences - so if your device automatically switches to dark mode at night, your community will too! With that said, as an administrator, you also have the option to restrict your site to a single color scheme - so if you ONLY want to offer a dark theme, that's easily achieved.

 
 
Performance
Despite all of these new inclusions, the version 5 UI has been coded with significant reductions in both CSS and Javascript. We'll dive deeper into code reductions in a future blog entry, however two great examples are:
- Grids: which have had a 100% removal of Javascript and are powered by only a few lines of CSS, resulting in a faster rendering time, especially for users on slow connections.
- And carousels: which have had a 95% reduction in Javascript and now rely on native browser scrolling, for a much smoother experience on both desktop and mobile!
Additionally we've removed a number of helper libraries that are no longer needed with modern browsers saving even more.
 
Mobile UI
With an incredible amount of mobile visitors accessing the web, we’ve placed a huge priority on redesigning the interface to ensure it lives up to todays standards.
A new navigation bar at the bottom of the page provides convenient access to your activity feed, notifications, messages, a search panel, and navigation links. A conscious effort was made to ensure that this information was available within a single tap, and we found that a bottom bar like this was easier to interact with compared to icons in the header.

The mobile navigation bar from Invision Community 5
 
A goal of the mobile UI was to display elements that were previously only available on larger devices, while still maintaining a clean interface. For example, to improve navigation, we've added a scrollable breadcrumb list to the top and bottom of the page. To improve guest participation, we added Sign In and Sign Up links to the bottom navigation bar. These links were previously hidden within the hamburger menu, so we feel like this will really benefit those looking to improve registrations. And as demonstrated in last weeks video, profile information is now available within posts, comments and reviews on small devices.
We’re really excited for you to literally have a hands on experience with the new mobile interface of Invision Community 5, and we're interested to hear your feedback in the comments!

View full blog entry

As you may know, Invision Community 5 is currently in development, and progress has been great, with many areas starting to come together.
Almost all of the significant code restructuring has been completed, with much progress on the UI and the new theme bearing fruit. A fair few new features are complete, but some aren't quite ready to show, as they need a little love from Ehren.
I wanted to share a little teaser of Invision Community 5; how many new things or changes can you spot?
The small print
Please remember that the features, functionality and UI shown in this little teaser are pre-beta, so they are subject to change. The features and functionality shown here aren't all that has been completed; many new features are 'code-complete' but waiting for some UI polish before we're ready to share more. Essentially, what you're seeing is a work in progress.
We don't have a release timeframe in mind yet, but we'll let you know when we do!

@Matt As you know, a lot of people use mobile devices, and I hope that V5 will bring many conveniences and improvements in terms of forum usability. It seems to me that the majority of users visit the forum from their smartphones rather than from a computer.

Design
I echo the comments regarding general end-user design and navigation/travel. I like the idea that V5 will be 'mobile first' as V4 is a little bit unwieldy. In particular, browsing a member's profile page is an absolute nightmare on mobile and I think design cues from social media platforms (or sites like Deviantart's user profiles) would be a good source of inspiration in terms of a do-over so everything flows better.
Tabs also need to be designed better for mobile - no more dropdown menus, make it sleek and more like a scrolling mobile navbar instead. 🙂 
App Integration
Broadly speaking, and at risk of sounding like a broken record, a better integration and cohesion of apps (on the end-user side, not necessarily the dev side) would be most welcome. I've already raised a few ideas, at the (much higher) risk of being annoying about it! 😄 
Theme Development
As someone who isn't necessarily a coder but likes to play around with theme templates, it would be fantastic if V5 had a fully-fleshed out documentation this time around. I'm talking about a complete encyclopedia/wiki of every kind of IPS code that can be used/referenced in templates, what they do, and all of the possible variables that can be used.
For example, I had to spend an unreasonable amount of time to trial and error myself, without much in the way of online documentation, the below code to tell IPS to simply display a record image in an Activity Stream entry if one existed and the entry happened to be a Pages Database entry. I was lucky I figured that out, but in other areas, trying to do things myself has not been so successful.
{{if $indexData['index_class']::$title == 'content_record_comments_title_1' || $indexData['index_class']::$title == 'content_record_comments_title_4'}} {{if $itemData['record_image']}} <img src="{file="$itemData['record_image']" extension="cms_Records"}"> {{endif}} {{endif}} I know documenting all the possible little things is really long and laborious work, but it could help unlock the potential of so many more amazing communities if theme designers knew of absolutely all of the tools they have at their disposal.
That's all I have in my head right now, but generally speaking I'm excited for what you guys have planned and can't wait to learn more.
Yeah agreed, an option where you can just upload an image directly to a topic (rather than having to rely on anything already existing in a topic post) would be ideal. Something that works a bit like a 'Record Image' does in Pages, only for Forum Topics. You could even template it and have it set as a 'header image/background' for a topic?

IPS has a larger development team and is more familiar with the codebase so they will invariably release a new product or feature that will widely be used by the vast majority of their customers, but occasionally a developer might create a better version that "some" customers may prefer to purchase.  
An open marketplace should encourage innovation by all developers including IPS.
This would also better address continuity of service. 
Products are often supported for finite periods of time by both IPS and marketplace developers and once a product is no longer supported it leaves customers in a precarious position. 
Having the ability to have more than one version of a product in the marketplace gives everyone the option to be able to migrate to a competing product if the need suddenly arrises or a competitor offers a far superior product from other marketplace developers or IPS themselves.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Code clean up ✅
Import over FQN ✅
Better use of traits ✅
Search code clean up ✅
Happy PHPStorm without hacks/class_alias ✅
More recent PHP versions needed ✅
Better use of newer PHP functions ✅
More to follow, but I think you’ll be content with the changes to be announced.

Hi all,
Next week we plan on releasing a few blogs outlining what development looks like for Invision Community v5.
I was curious as to what changes you'd like to see, and what changes do you think are coming?

Average out of the box is fine, we'll take that. It passes all core web vitals tests and gets a solid average score on mobile.
We continue to improve the mobile experience with v5.

Hi! It would be nice if the V5 version supported the graphic format - SVG everywhere. It's a vector format that looks good virtually anywhere and doesn't lose quality! Currently, it is missing from logos, custom forum icons, favicon and many other places. It's about handling .svg graphics as well as svg code.

Hi Guys. I've tested a few different forum topics for mobile friendliness, and it turns out that many self-hosted forums don't meet the mobile-friendly requirements. It seems that Google is blocking many necessary resources (CSS Framework and JS Libraries) so such a topic is devoid of a stylesheet and does not meet the criteria for "Core Web Vitals" and has a low "Page Experience" value.
If we look for an indexed topic and check its cache version, we'll see that it doesn't have a stylesheet. Not in all cases, but in many.
I hope that v5 will be better optimized and will not load so much unnecessary code that the Googlebot is unable to handle.


BTW: In 2024, Google is expected to introduce a INP.

Let me introduce the feedback and the new 'MyClassifieds' area.
Here are some screenshots of the work in progress:
User block:

MyClassifieds page (very early stage)

Add feedback modal when seller confirm a deal

I'm interested. Send me an offer 😉

I'm working on a fix.
I'll try to upload a new release today.
Thank you for your patience.

Indeed we are! We have plans to change how we package up JS to make it smaller and faster.

@Hugo_S4 I would suggest that you contact @ASTRAPI, he's the server expert.

I'm sorry for the delay. I'll be caught up with personal messages soon.

This will be available with 1.3
I've just released 1.2.9 which fixes this issue. Thanks for letting me know.

This isn’t currently an option. I’m not against it and it could probably be achieved with a cookie but it would be very open to abuse. 

What's New in Version 2.0.2:
Script optimization. @Hugo_S4 just applied a tip provided by @Daniel F that will ensure the reply will always be the second post, by adding 1 second more to it.
 

Works perfectly. Thank you for your help 

Thanks. Installed. I'll check and let you know if it's ok 

I was also surprised how I saw it. If it happens again, I will write to you. Regards Darek