Mike G.

I woke up to over 100 notifications today.

How's your Thursday going?

 

It is no longer flawless. 

Well, it appears that after 4 minutes, it's entirely flawless so we may as well just release final?

We don't talk about the other four.

Who is ready for an alpha site to play with?

I mean, that's a work of beauty. I recently did something similar by collecting all the cables, small electronics (USB hubs, etc) and put them in a single plastic crate. Now I know where to go when I need something, and if it's not there, I can buy a new one. 😆
@Esther E. has been busy listening to your feedback, and she's implemented two changes (I'll update the blog shortly).
The first, is that we're going to convert all your open tags over on upgrade, be that 10 or 10,000. You can then decide if you want to delete any from the AdminCP post conversion.
The second is a bulk tag add/remove tool via multi-moderation.

... I see what you mean. Thanks for this 😁

Yes, all these, regardless of how many, will be converted.

To be clear, all "closed" tags created are converted. These are the tags you set up as an admin.
The 25 number is based on the top "open tags" that members have created.

We picked a number, if people need more then we can convert more. What we don't want to do though is set people up to fail by converting over hundreds of tags because it's likely you'll never get round to setting them up and managing them properly.

perhaps the link could be a unique referral code so that if somebody clicks through and makes a purchase we get credits towards licence/cloud hosting fees ?

25 tags. Or maybe a few more, depending on your setup.
As of now, the upgrader will give you a choice to either delete all global tags OR to convert the top 25 tags (by usage) to the new system. 
If you have node-specific tags (for example, for a single forum), you can choose to drop them or convert them. 

Dude, it's already done.
(No, it's not, but if I say it's done then I just make myself more awesome.)

It would be nice if tag pages could be indexable for Google and Co. Or if we had the option to choose whether they are indexable or not.

1) The top three items are from the normal "Featured Content". Oh, actually, we haven't spoken about that much have we. So we merged "featured" and "Our picks" into one thing. The old "feature" didn't really do much apart from allow you to filter in a widget and show a featured block above the content. This new page is much simplified.

You can still feature replies and show the post at the top of the topic as you can now. I should probably do a blog on all the other stuff we did but haven't spoken about. 🫠

2) Right now, all tags but I think it would be nice to have a toggle in the AdminCP form to determine this.
3) Yeah, nice idea. We'd need to be careful with Pages collisions.
3) Um. We can add a bunch of hook points ads can use on that page.
Absolutely. It offers another way to categorise content across all apps within the suite which was the primary point - we wanted a way to bring all that content into one place and have it all look universal.

It will require some thought and it works best with fewer tags, not more. If you have 100+ tags then it's not as effective. Ideally you want broad tags rather than narrow tags.
It uses the standard autocomplete form widget which will offer a search box if there's more than N items (can't recall offhand what that is)
I think we will need to add some bulk tag management in some form. Right @Esther E.? 😅
It still lives in another branch. I'll be updating the alpha site soon.

I expected some improvements, but I was cautiously optimistic about how much of an improvement it could be.
This massively exceeds my expectations and it's that bridge that will really help unify everything - which has been my biggest challenge to figure out. 
Thank you. 
P.S. Even more impressive is how the team is able to not talk about it in advance.

Me, having used the alpha V5 site for a while, upon seeing the topic be about tags...

Me, after having read Matt's post...

This sounds really cool - a fantastic way to revitalise both the tagging system and content discovery across the platform. In my community, I did try to let users tag things themselves, but they often didn't bother and it was usually left to mods/staff - so I am not mourning the lack of open tags going forward...
But this new cross-functional tagging system, coupled with the Featured Content page, sounds like it will be a godsend for my community. Oftentimes community members will post news in the forum before our 'official news staff' get round to writing about it, so being able to tag the forum post as 'news' and guaranteeing it will sit in the same "news" space as our 'official' news articles is something I've been dreaming about!
The only piece of the puzzle missing for me in that regard is how well this feature will pair with the CMS/Pages "Copy to Database" system, which my 'official news team' uses a lot (both in terms of avoiding duplicate records appearing in the tag page, making sure linked Page/Topics are unified in search results, and ensuring Topic OPs are kept visible when converted while still prioritising any Page content as the 'canonical content').
I had a couple questions regarding the tag pages and featured content section:
What determines the posts that appear at the very top of the Featured Content page (the top three items)? Is it the most recent 'Featured' posts across any/all tags? Can we decide which tags can be included on the Featured Content page, or is it automated? Regarding the URL, are we able to set alternative FURLs for certain tag pages (for example, I might want the news tag page to be our site's actual news homepage, so it would be better to have the URL for this as www.site.com/news rather than www.site.com/tags/news)? I hate to ask this but needs must... what are the opportunities for ad placements on the Featured Content/tags page? Will there be ad blocks we can use for the post grid, or will be only be able to place ads above/below certain sections/areas? Thanks so much for another amazing feature update. Really surprised me with this one. 🙂
BTW, it looks like I'll be setting a calendar alert for the 21st June then... 😉

If anyone thought the alpha folks were keeping their lips shut about this I can state unequivocally we have not.
IPS kept this way close to the vest and none of us in the preview even knew this was what the tags changes were going to be, we just knew that tags were going to "change". This is not in the alpha yet, nor was it even hinted at.
I can state with some vague authority that this, treating tags as pseudo-content items to up discoverability and presentation of content has to be one of the best ideas I've seen in the CMS/Forums/Community space in years.
If you were waiting for something to differentiate V5 from just being V4 re-engineered, this is it.

Thanks for the communication. Every bit helps as we inch closer to a large upgrade. 

As we find ourselves with our toes over the precipice of June; signalling the half way point of the year, I thought it's a good time for an update.

Apologies southern hemisphere.
Invision Community 5 has been in alpha testing for a while, and a small group have found a good number of bugs, and offered their thoughts and suggestions, some of which we've implemented. During this time we've wrapped up the new editor, a boat load of UI improvements and more.
We are now ready for the next stage, which is to give our alpha testers their own Cloud v5 to test with. This opens up testing for the Admin CP, and all areas without using developer mode. v5 has a lot of changes to how CSS, JS and resources are managed. They are now built when we build the apps, and should never need rebuilding. We also store compiled templates now, so lots of slow eval() calls are no longer needed. In brief testing locally, it has made the entire platform super-fast.
We are choosing to use a Cloud v5 to test with, rather than a traditional download for two reasons. The first is that using our hosting platform means we don't have to chase down issues with PHP, MySQL and unix versions which can be time consuming in the early stages. The second is that we're still writing the new build code, so we can't actually produce a versioned zip just yet. 😂
But fear not, downloadable versions will be coming at some point.
We're aiming to have this alpha demo system ready next week, so if you want to help alpha test, drop a comment below. I want to keep the first round (1-2 weeks) fairly small or it becomes overwhelming sifting through the feedback and bugs but please do register your interest.
In terms of functionality, we're wrapping up the tagging changes; I'd expect a blog on that next week. The final parts of the Pages app are coming together. We even tested an upgrade of this site to v5 to see how the Pages built pages looked, and much to all of our relief, it looks great with just a few CSS classes needing updating.
It's been a long journey - and a little longer than we'd first hoped but we're getting closer to betas when the fun really starts.
We're really proud of v5 and we hope you like what we've created.
 

This issue was resolved in our latest release of the platform. Please upgrade to resolve this, and if you see any further issues, please let us know.

This issue was resolved in our latest release of the platform. Please upgrade to resolve this, and if you see any further issues, please let us know.