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Stormlilly

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  1. Like
    Stormlilly reacted to Andy Millne for a blog entry, 4.3: Engagement Improvements   
    As we come close to wrapping up development of Invision Community 4.3, we wanted to let you know of a few smaller improvements we've made to increase engagement to your community.
    Email
    Despite fancy new things like social media and push notifications, trusty old email has been proven to be highly effective at getting repeat visitors to your website.
    It's one of the reasons Invision Community has built in email support for notifications that can be sent instantly, or via daily or weekly digests.
    Email should form a part of every community marketing strategy but curating content and building newsletters can often be a labor intensive task.
    With Invision Community 4.3 we have added some additional automated email tools to help your users discover more of your carefully crafted content.
    Highlight the best content from throughout your community
    In 4.2 we introduced the concept of curated content with promotions and “Our Picks”. With 4.3 we’ve taken this a step further and these promoted items will now appear directly in your content related emails. 
    This allows for your audience to be enticed back to your community with items that they may not have read but holds interest.

    Capture return visits with interesting content
    Social media links in email footers
    If you look closely in the image above you will also see that you can now optionally include links to all of your social media sites within the footer of all of your outgoing emails.
    Both of these new features are enabled by default but can be disabled in the email settings section of your admin control panel.
    Email may be as old as the web itself, but it is a very powerful medium to get your audience coming back for more.
    Respond to Reviews
    We added the ability to leave a review to Pages articles, download files, calendar events and in other areas early on in Invision Community 4. The concept was to allow your members to engage in new ways with your content. Reviews on Commerce store items and purchasable downloadable goods is a great way to inspire others to purchase.
    New to Invision Community 4.3 is the ability for the content creator (be that a download file, store owner, etc) to respond to a review. This is a great way to address reviews that may be considered unfair or extreme.

    Matt is talking to himself again
    One more thing...
    Not content with resurrecting the Subscriptions manager from 2009, we've brought back a small detail from previous versions of Invision Community. The famous "this person is typing a reply" indicator in the online list.

     
    We can't wait to release this latest update. With new ways to monetise your community, new ways to engage your audience and better promotion tools, we're excited to see how it's going to benefit your community.
     
  2. Like
    Stormlilly reacted to Ryan Ashbrook for a blog entry, New: Complete Your Profile   
    Completing long and complex forms online is tedious. It can be off putting having to fill in a lot of information before you can join a site or service. You may find that potential members never bother to convert from a visitor.
    How to convert guests into regular members is an often asked question. The simple answer is to lower the barrier to entry. Invision Community 4 already allows you to register with Facebook, Twitter, and other networks with ease.
    "Complete My Profile" is a system that will lower the barrier of conversion. Guests only have to complete a very basic form to gain membership. Members are then asked to complete any custom profile fields you require.
    You can also set up steps that group items together to encourage existing members to add more information to their public profile.
    Members with a complete profile and user photo provide others with much more engagement and personality.
    Registering
    If we look at registering first. Clicking "Sign Up" will only show a simple modal form with as few fields as possible.

     
    If you have required steps, and after any member validation flow, the complete your profile wizard is shown.

     
    This enforces required fields and the member cannot skip them or view other pages until completed.
    Of course, you may have steps that are not set to required. These are available too, but are skippable. Members can complete skipped steps later.

     
    A dismissible progress bar shows to members that have uncompleted steps. Once dismissed, it no longer displays in the header of the site.

     
    This same progress bar is always shown in the members' settings overview panel, in the user control panel. This will prompt members with incomplete steps.

     
    If you set up a new required step, members have to complete the step before being able to browse again. This will ensure that all regular members have completed profiles.
    Admin Control Panel
    You will create new steps in the Admin Control Panel. Each step can contain multiple elements of a single group. This step can be set to required to enforce completion or suggested to allow it to be skipped.

     
    The basic profile group contains things like user photo, birthday and cover photo. Choose any of these for this step.

     
    The custom profile field group contains any fields you have set up already.

     
    You can switch off this system if you feel it does not fit your needs. When disabled, you get the normal registration form.

     
    Reducing the complexity of membership can only help convert more guests into contributing members. Enforcing required steps ensures that you capture data across your membership.
    We hope you enjoy this feature and you see an increase in guest conversion with Invision Community 4.2.
     
  3. Like
    Stormlilly reacted to Charles for a blog entry, New: SEO Improvements   
    This entry is about our IPS Community Suite 4.2 release.
    Improving your SEO can be a complex undertaking with many different approaches but there are things that everyone knows are good practice and also more modern approaches to SEO that have changed since we first started developing IPS Community Suite. So it was time for a review and update.
    Unfortunately no pretty screenshots on this one as this is all behind the scenes stuff but still quite useful to know . Also, some of this may sound a bit technical and dry but feel free to search some of these technologies if you are curious.
    Move from HTML structured data to JSON-LD and enhance our existing markup with sensible additions. Calendar, blog, forum and pages (articles) data marked up for rich snippets. General review of our schema.org markup and enhance where appropriate. Use sitelinks search and other sensible markup such as the website and logo markup. Allow administrators to specify social profile links in the AdminCP which we then show links to in the footer and also make available in schema.org markup. Fix many duplicate page title issues. Review and ensure nofollow/noindex tags are used in appropriate areas. Add item tags as HTML meta tags Adding <link rel="next" value="next page url"> helps search engines know next/previous page.  
    Nothing like a bulleted list of items to get you excited! But really these should be welcome improvements to all.
     
  4. Like
    Stormlilly reacted to Rikki for a blog entry, New in 4.1.12: Improvements to Activity Streams and Search   
    We are currently beta testing our next release, 4.1.12, which contains hundreds of bug fixes, dozens of improvements, as well as a handful of new features. In this post, I want to cover some improvements we've made to two key areas: activity streams and search.
    Activity Streams
    The first improvement we made is to change how the expanded/condensed toggles are displayed to improve their clarity. From studying the feedback from administrators and users, we discovered that many people did not realize the view could be changed. To improve this, the toggles now explicitly say 'Condensed' and 'Expanded', making it much clearer how the view can be toggled to your own preference.

    More clearly marked expand and condense options for Activity Streams
    Next, a common point of feedback about Activity Streams is that clicking a result and then hitting the Back button in the browser means you are put back at the first batch of results, losing your place in the stream. In 4.1.12 we improved this so that clicking Back will load the last batch of results you were viewing, enabling you to continue browsing from whence you left off.
    Finally, in the Content Types menu we added an Apply button. We discovered that users were not always sure how to save the selection of content types they had made (which automatically happened when that menu was closed). To alleviate this, the new Apply button will save the selection and close the menu, updating the stream results in real-time as expected. You can still simply click out of the menu to apply changes as well.

    The new Apply button in the Content Types menu
    Search
    While overall improvements to search (specifically the algorithms to match and return the results) are a matter of ongoing research and refinement which we will improve in the 4.2 series and beyond, 4.1.12 sees one small improvement to the options available to users. While you have always been able to search within a particular forum, category etc. while browsing that area, you were not able to retroactively filter into particular areas after performing a more general search. IPS Community Suite 4.1.12 adds this ability to the interface, allowing you to get more specific results from a particular area of the community.
    Version 4.1.12 is currently in beta testing and should be released in the next two weeks.
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