Marc

Notifications are a great way for your users to be notified when things happen around your community. This may be that a user has been quoted, someone has mentioned them in a post, someone has commented on a photo and more. Notification Icon Settings by default When a member signs up to your community, they will have default settings for notifications based on what you set up within your admin cp. If you visit Notifications you will be presented with the following screen. Notification Defaults From here you can set default notifications when a member signs up by editing each type and setting as appropriate, along with what type of notification they will receive and whether or not they can edit the setting themselves on the front end. Default Settings Clicking on the "Prune Settings" button at the top, you will also be given the ability to set limitations as to how long these will be stored, along with being able to automatically remove follows after a set period. This may be important in large communities to ensure there are not large volumes of un-required notifications being sent out. Prune Settings Members and settings On the front end, your members will see notifications based on the criteria either by default, or in which they have set up for themselves. Clicking on the notification icon will show the notification list as below. Notification Sent to a User From here you can view all of your notifications, change your notification settings, and subscribe to then using the RSS feed should you wish to do so. Notification Management Selecting notification settings will allow the member to set up their own options for what they are notified for. Any items which are not allowed to be changed will be greyed out. You can change any item by clicking and editing accordingly. User Notification Settings If you need to check what settings a member has set up already, you can do this by editing their account in the AdminCP, and clicking any of the notification types. Group Settings This is useful if a member is querying about receiving notification emails. Browser Notifications Browser notifications are items which will show within the browser, upon certain actions on the site. These show items such as when you receive a personal message, or if another comment has been to a topic you are currently reading, without you having changed page, or even on some occasions (such as notification sounds), when you are even on the same tab. Browser Notification When someone first logs onto your site, they will likely be asked by their browser if they would like to allow browser notifications. Without allowing these, no browser notifications will show Example on Chrome If a user disallows browser notifications, they will be shown that this is disabled within their notification area on the site. From here, they can click to enable them if they wish to do so. Option to Activate

The search facilities within your community, allow your members to find specific content that they are looking for on the site, using words and other known criteria. How to use A simple search can be achieved by typing into the bar on the top right of the site. When selecting the box, you will see there are options appear which will allow you to change what criteria you are using. Options for search Selecting search icon (magnifying glass) with no search criteria entered, will take you to the advanced search screen so you can select to filter by other criteria, such as by author, searching through tags, and many other criteria including custom fields you have set in your applications. Advanced Search Administrator Options Basic Settings You can find all of the admin settings related to search within the following location System -> Content Discovery -> Search From here you can change the type of search and the way in which searches are processed by the system. By default search is set to MySQL. You should leave your system set to this default unless you are comfortable in setting up advanced server functionality on your hosting. For most people MySQL search will be sufficient. MySQL Search Options In the top right, you will also see a button to rebuild your search index. This can be used if you find any issues with search, you change any settings which require a rebuild, or any other reason you may wish to rebuild the indexing of the search itself. Elastic Search When switching to elasticsearch you will need to enter the details relating to your elastic search server. If your hosting company has set this up for you, then you will need to obtain the address for this, along with the index name that has been used. These will then need to be entered this into the fields provided. Elasticsearch Settings Additional options such as time decay and author boost settings can also be set when using elastic search. These should be left at their default settings, if you are unaware of what to set these too, or you are informed of what values to use by your elasticsearch service provider.

In addition to the standard search functionality of the site, there will often be content in which you wish to be able to search on a constant basis, without the need to have to create an advanced search for content items. An example of this would be 'Unread content' or 'Content I have started'. For this, we have Activity Streams. These provide you with the ability to set up lists of content based on a criteria that has been given, either by yourself, or user defined. All Activity Stream The 'All Activity' stream which is available in the activity menu by default, will give you a rundown of all activity on your site. Unlike other streams on your site, this will notify you of any new items since viewing the page. You can view this in either a condensed view (one line per item) or the default expanded view you see in the screenshot below. Live All Activity Screen If you wish to switch off some items from showing within 'All Activity' such as when members register, these can be switched off from the following location in the ACP System -> Content Discovery -> Streams -> Activity Stream Settings Activity Stream Settings User Defined Streams New Streams Within the default menu structure, under the 'Activity' menu item, you will see a 'My Activity Streams' option. Here you will see any admin defined activity streams, and also the ability to create your own stream (on a per user basis). Default Stream Menu When selecting to create new stream, you will be presented with the filters you wish to use for your new stream. Here I have created a new stream for a news forum on the site. Note you can select the cog icon at the side of any content type to select specific items under that content type. In this instance, a specific forum. New Stream Creation Any new streams that are created, are then shown under the 'My Activity Streams' menu, beneath the default set of streams. User Defined Streams Editing Existing Streams When viewing any existing streams, you will see a set of filters at the top of the page, in which you can change to your liking. Changing these will change the data shown in real time. Often there are times where you will wish to save a small change to an existing stream, rather than creating one from scratch. After making an edit to any of the filters, you will see a save button, which will then allow you to create a new stream from your changes. Save From an Existing Stream Admin Defined Streams Creation In the activity menu, you will see there are some streams in which are defined by default within the system. These items can be changed or added to within the following location in the ACP System -> Content Discovery -> Streams -> Activity Stream Settings You can filter by all areas of the site when creating a new stream in this area, or edit an existing stream. New Stream Creation Default Stream You will see at the bottom of each stream, there is a 'Default' selection box. Only one item can be select, which by default is the 'Unread' stream. If you change the default, it will change 'unread' link on the front end of your site to point to that new stream. In the image below, I have changed this to statues Default Stream

Share Icons You can place links to share content to other social media such as Facebook and twitter. You will see these links below any content on the site. Here is an example from a topic. Share icons Share Permissions If you visit Sharing you will see all of the sharing sites that you can currently use. You can disable any of these completely at any time. Simply click the "Enabled" button and this will change to "Disabled" Shares Available If you click on the pencil icon at the side of any of these, you will be presented with options for which user groups can use any individual share link, along with any other options which may be relevant to that share link. Below is an example of the options for Twitter. Edit Share Option Social Sign In You can enable social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and more as an option for your visitors to register or login on your Community. Existing members can choose to link their accounts to one or more social media platforms to enable a more integrated experience. Setting up social media integration varies by network. Facebook Twitter Microsoft LinkedIn Another Community Instance Wordpress External Database

There are several methods of adding advertisements on your Community both in HTML and as image-based ads. They are placed automatically in areas of your choosing. Create Ads Advertisements can be placed on you site in either image or plain HTML in Advertisements in the AdminCP. You can add a new advertisement by clicking on the "Create new" button shown in the image above. Once you have done this you will be presented with the various options for creating an image. You can either enter HTML code or you can click "Upload Images" in order to upload an ad image. In the example below, you will see you can chose to enter separate HTML code to appear on secure pages. Once you have added your image or advertisement code, you can then choose the location and permissions for your advert to be shown. You can select more than one location for an ad to show and criteria for when and how long to show the ad. When using Google Adsense adverts you may notice that page navigation no longer works as expected. This is caused by Google requiring that adverts are not loaded using AJAX. To resolve this issue you can disable AJAX pagination using the built in theme settings. Ajax Pagination Should you wish to disable an advert at any time, you can do this by clicking the "Enabled" text in the list, which will then change to "Disabled" Disable/Enable Manual Ad Placement You can put advertisements in several pre-defined locations but it is also possible to create additional locations which you can insert by modifying the HTML code for your community or use in the Pages application. First, create your advertisement as normal. For the "Show the advertisement" setting, select "Define your own location" and enter a key into the box (it can be whatever you like). You can then later use the same key for other advertisements that you want to show in this location. Now you will need to insert a special tag in the HTML code where you want the advertisement to show. The code to insert is: {advertisement="KEY"} Replace "KEY" with whatever key you used. In your theme Go to Themes and click the "Edit HTML and CSS" button for your default theme. The specific template you need to edit and where to make the change depends on where you want the advertisement to show. For this example, if you wanted the advertisement to show in the profile under the header, go to the core -> front -> profile -> profileHeader template and insert the code at the very bottom. Since each theme has its own HTML templates, you will now need to repeat this for each theme. In pages or blocks The tag can be inserted in a page, block or template within the Pages application. Simply insert the tag wherever you want the advertisement to show. Control when Ads Show Using the responsive CSS classes available in IPS4, it is possible to set your ads up so that different content displays depending on the device size. This only applies to ads you create yourself. If you use an ad service (such as Google Adsense), you should find out how that service supports responsive ads. For example: <div class='ipsResponsive_showDesktop ipsResponsive_showTablet ipsResponsive_block'> This ad shows on desktop and tablets, but *not* phones </div> <div class='ipsResponsive_showPhone ipsResponsive_block'> This ad shows on phones, but *not* desktop and tablets </div> Ads in email Introducts in version 4.4 of the Invision Community platform, is the ability to show your ads within your community emails, as well as on your site. Within the same email section, you will see an Email Advertisements tab, where you can ad advertisements which will only show within emails. Ads within Emails can be restricted to only show within specific email types. As you can see in the image below, I have changed this ad only to be sent when the email is from a Topic, such as a topic reply notification. Email Ads