christopher-w

Scope perhaps for a new offering? I've always thought downloads was too restrictive. If it was expanded to include services then perhaps one of the many experienced pros on here could offer service and maintenance contracts, which might incorporate initial setup of Cloudfront, Cloudflare, Caching, S3 etc. I appreciate these services can be requested elsewhere, but nothing quite like seeing them as a confidence inspiring, formal, client rated, offering.
edit: added confidence inspiring.

I know you are looking for changes to be made to core, but in the meantime have you looked at CSS grid template areas? I appreciate that in most cases you'll have to target entities using CSS :nth-child(), or nth child range, which is a pain, but you can come up with some very cool layouts (also see point 2 below *)
https://css-tricks.com/simple-named-grid-areas/
Two things I'd like to see in Pages:
1/ Repeating fields - see ACF Pro for how this might work.
2/ Entity CSS class names. Same goes for custom blocks, forums, in fact anything that has a config section in the ACP should have the ability to assign a class names string to the entity being edited/configured. Would make client side positioning* so much easier. I appreciate we can create and assign our own pages templates, but the lack of literal class name assignments seems a bit of an oversight to me.

Bit of a fiddle but this will give you what you need in a roundabout way.
You can use it to inject code or IPS blocks and templates anywhere on the site and it's controller and url sensitive too. It's not been updated for a while as the author was/is? ill, but the support forum has an entry stating it appears to be 4.6 compatible.
Nice site by the way. Very cool.
Chris
 

I can do all of these things myself, being a website developer for the last 20 years has stood me in good stead when it comes to this type of exercise.  However, I am not aiming this at the developers like myself who can create new templates and add scripts, CSS, etc, but for those who don't know how to do these kind of things.  Being more versatile, initially in layouts, would be a huge boon to people who don't want a rigid 1, 2, 3 column layout that is inflexible.  I imagine a lot more people would feel comfortable using pages if it were more user friendly.
I love dabbling and fiddling with templates and code, it's in my blood lol.  But those souls who haven't a clue are left out in cold and prevented from using a very powerful application.
My example of Divi is what I would like to see Pages become, initially in terms of layout options; it could then progress to being a more useable and powerful application with additional modules (or blocks) being created, not just by IPS, but also third parties.
Your other mentions of options 1 and 2 above are another area that would prove very useful for those of us who do like to get our hands dirty and fiddle with code and CSS.  Anything that can extend the usability of the application for both novices and coders would be a boon.
Thanks for taking the time to comment Chris, always appreciated 🙂
 

I know you are looking for changes to be made to core, but in the meantime have you looked at CSS grid template areas? I appreciate that in most cases you'll have to target entities using CSS :nth-child(), or nth child range, which is a pain, but you can come up with some very cool layouts (also see point 2 below *)
https://css-tricks.com/simple-named-grid-areas/
Two things I'd like to see in Pages:
1/ Repeating fields - see ACF Pro for how this might work.
2/ Entity CSS class names. Same goes for custom blocks, forums, in fact anything that has a config section in the ACP should have the ability to assign a class names string to the entity being edited/configured. Would make client side positioning* so much easier. I appreciate we can create and assign our own pages templates, but the lack of literal class name assignments seems a bit of an oversight to me.

Yes, custom.css is the place to go:
:root{ --container--width:1600px; } I hope you enjoy your new software 🙂

Thanks, that appears to have solved it for now.

You should try to disable this in settings:

Very, very impressed with achievements. 
Two things I love.
1/ The ability to reward activity by location. This will allow me to award, for example, VFX Expert status to members who post best answer n times in a VFX Q/A forum.
2/ And the following I can see being incredibly popular. My wife was thrilled with it.

 
One small request for future updates:
Please would you consider grouping achievements by named group (same way as you do with custom block authoring) and rendering them to the front end in separate containers identifiable by user nominated class or group name. This will allow us to, optionally, visually separate loyalty type rewards (for example logs in 10 times) from proficiency awards such as receiving an expert award in a video editing Q/A forum.
Either way, very happy with what I have seen so far. Installed on a test server without a hitch and so far I have only seen one small issue with VideoBox custom fields which has been reported to the author.
 

Very, very impressed with achievements. 
Two things I love.
1/ The ability to reward activity by location. This will allow me to award, for example, VFX Expert status to members who post best answer n times in a VFX Q/A forum.
2/ And the following I can see being incredibly popular. My wife was thrilled with it.

 
One small request for future updates:
Please would you consider grouping achievements by named group (same way as you do with custom block authoring) and rendering them to the front end in separate containers identifiable by user nominated class or group name. This will allow us to, optionally, visually separate loyalty type rewards (for example logs in 10 times) from proficiency awards such as receiving an expert award in a video editing Q/A forum.
Either way, very happy with what I have seen so far. Installed on a test server without a hitch and so far I have only seen one small issue with VideoBox custom fields which has been reported to the author.
 

That's a genius approach. When your spouse is good you can be like "I recognize your achievement." I'm sure that will go over well for all!

Very, very impressed with achievements. 
Two things I love.
1/ The ability to reward activity by location. This will allow me to award, for example, VFX Expert status to members who post best answer n times in a VFX Q/A forum.
2/ And the following I can see being incredibly popular. My wife was thrilled with it.

 
One small request for future updates:
Please would you consider grouping achievements by named group (same way as you do with custom block authoring) and rendering them to the front end in separate containers identifiable by user nominated class or group name. This will allow us to, optionally, visually separate loyalty type rewards (for example logs in 10 times) from proficiency awards such as receiving an expert award in a video editing Q/A forum.
Either way, very happy with what I have seen so far. Installed on a test server without a hitch and so far I have only seen one small issue with VideoBox custom fields which has been reported to the author.
 

Very, very impressed with achievements. 
Two things I love.
1/ The ability to reward activity by location. This will allow me to award, for example, VFX Expert status to members who post best answer n times in a VFX Q/A forum.
2/ And the following I can see being incredibly popular. My wife was thrilled with it.

 
One small request for future updates:
Please would you consider grouping achievements by named group (same way as you do with custom block authoring) and rendering them to the front end in separate containers identifiable by user nominated class or group name. This will allow us to, optionally, visually separate loyalty type rewards (for example logs in 10 times) from proficiency awards such as receiving an expert award in a video editing Q/A forum.
Either way, very happy with what I have seen so far. Installed on a test server without a hitch and so far I have only seen one small issue with VideoBox custom fields which has been reported to the author.
 

Hey team, it's been 84 years (if you know you know), but...
We're excited to announce that Invision Community 4.6.0 Beta 1 is officially live! 🎉 
@Matt has a blog post on the way detailing all of the amazing additions, including how many commits and lines of code that were changed. A lot. The answer is a lot. 
Just to refresh your memories, some of the biggest changes/additions include:
Achievements (Points!) Web app and Push notifications Anonymous Posting when posting as a member Highlight Topics with replies from specific Groups Spam Improvements (And more!) It's available per request for Cloud customers or, if you're self-hosted, by manually downloading it.
Self-hosted: please make the necessary backups before upgrading. Because this is a Beta, please understand there is an inherent risk when upgrading.
The more information/feedback we get, the better we can optimize and improve things 🙂
If you find something and would like to submit a bug, please do so here.
Looking forward to hearing what you think! Sound off in the replies below. 

I was convinced to release a version for IPS 4.5 because not everyone will update immediately... so that's it. It should be available later this week. 👍

Hi @Michael R I'm always happy to help out with anything to do with CSS - I've spent hundreds of hours tracking down codes to make changes with CSS across a number of platforms, so if you need help with anything PM me with the changes you want, with links, so I can take a look and advise you.  If you will pardon the analogy, my custom CSS file is like a christmas tree lol.  But it's fun tracking things down and making changes.
With regards to not being able to find specific movies, that's down to TMDB which is a different database to IMDB.  TMDB allows you to add movies once you've registered with them - if you do this yourself then those movies will become available for you to add to your own database.  You can add the movie title, poster images, actors, directors, crew, YT trailers, and general images and whole bunch of other data.  It's fun to be able to do that too, because you get to add what's important for you.
Always happy to help 🙂
 

Hey Dave, I've recently set up Google Maps both in the ACP and separately (async load with init callback) in my evolving jobs app. I know you are making a bigger point here. which I agree with, but in the meantime if I can be of any help, drop me a line.

I can second this - most of the changes on my own site are just down to CSS changes in the custom.css file.  Once you know which descriptors affect which elements you can nail things down pretty much the way you visualise it in your mind.  It's well worth looking into - a good place to start is: https://www.w3schools.com/css/
@christopher-w those are some really nice layouts you have there.  I know your site has been a WIP for a long time, but the dividends are paying off for taking your time; I look forward to seeing the finished works when you publish them 🙂
 

There is a filter by tags app in the marketplace and it works well - but if you have lots of tags it can dominate the page.
The alternative is to use an enhanced dropdown with multiselect set to true. This will enable you to search for tags (hidden inside the select component = neat and tidy) and display multiple selections.  I've not tested huge numbers with the dropdown yet, but we've had 5000+ rows in our jobs app, so no reason why a similar number of much simpler tag elements can't be hidden inside a filterable dropdown. Below is how it works on our content selector - it's perfect for mobile.

You are clearly a very visual person - same as your site. I think learning CSS basics would pay huge dividends for you. It's the easiest and fastest way to give a site a new look, and with the latest CSS tools, it can transform the user experience.
Again using CSS Grid. You can automatically clamp the row height to that of its smallest or largest item.  There's no reason why you can't do this with other CSS methods, but grid is much cleaner and quicker. Some folks use active client size resizing with JS, but in my view it makes for a sluggish page, especially on slower machines.
I'll post more images as we tidy up the design over the next few weeks.
 

It's actually very easy to reconfigure Our Picks - starting with a custom block as @Nathan Explosion suggested.
You just need to take a deep breath @breatheheavy 😉 and get to grips with the default block code and reconfigure it to suit.  A few days learning CSS, in particular flex, grid and selectors, pays considerable dividends on the front end. 
Background.
We've used promoted items as the basis of our (still! in development ) homepage. The user can reconfigure the view from a simple list, to a grouped view as required - preferences are stored in cookies. A filter (buttons on desktop and dropdown on mobile) allows individual content types to to selected. It's not finished yet (currently considering  implementing Google street view for the jobs section) and for the home page we hope to end up with something close to the Apple News mobile view. Anyway, a few in dev screen grabs below. It's almost exclusively CSS grid based which allows items to easily span multiple columns. So for example you could get featured promoted items to span x columns simply by applying a class at the item level and adding the appropriate css. You can see span (row and column) working in the group and mobile screen shots below.
The grouping feature we provided requires individual items to be wrapped in a container on page load (jQuery wrapall). It could be done in the custom block but I am a better JS coder than I am PHP. Morphing animations between configurations (not shown here obviously) are provided by the excellent Greensock Flip plugin.
This is the home page as it stands. Note filter and grouping options. Global menu location and styling still in flux.
 

 
 
This shows same filtered on Classifieds. Same approach will be used for clubs and blogs home pages.

 
 
This shows filtering and grouping. Rode Podcaster is shown as primary item in this case as it's first in the selection. That's a simple css choice. It could also be selected if the underlying content was featured, pinned etc.

 
 
Here's the mobile view showing selected topics. Getting closer to the Apple News style as mentioned earlier. Note the HBO topic spans to 100% given it's also a featured item.

 
I'd say we are about 3/4 through development, although not all the remaining 25% is a go live requirement. Note btw, none of the above items are finished in terms of final appearance, line clamping, call to action etc.
I'll upload our jobs page in a week or so if anybody is interested. It sits on Datatables which we've tested with 5000 rows sitting in the browser -> offers user configurable real time searching 🙂  and filtering, as well as sorting and row and column level grouping - all of it exposed in a rich event driven CSOM.  We currently show all currently selected jobs (and soon to be directories of film studios etc) on a custom MapBox implementation but it's running out of steam, hence the likely and very reluctant £££ move back to Google Maps.
If any of the above is useful I'm happy to share techniques when I have time.
 

If a guide is out of date, just hit the report button and let us know. Someone will update it soon after we're aware. (Google and Facebook especially change their interfaces very often).

Hey Dave, I've recently set up Google Maps both in the ACP and separately (async load with init callback) in my evolving jobs app. I know you are making a bigger point here. which I agree with, but in the meantime if I can be of any help, drop me a line.

Thanks Dave, it's been a while since we first discussed this when I was in St Ives.
We haven't been working non stop though - it comes and goes. We go through cycles of love/hate with the suite. Every now and again we come up against a silly gotcha which takes all the enthusiasm out of the project. And then after a couple of months or so, refreshed, we try again. And on it goes. 
But anyway, we are getting closer, albeit increasingly using less and less of the Invision UI. We are also starting to write our first plugins which seem easy to put together, hopefully leading to less reliance on the marketplace. 
Thanks for your support. I am equally impressed with what you've done with Star Trek, which looks to be unique 🙂.

Ahhh, that explains the clarity in your comments here. 🙂 Good luck.
Edit: ^ becoming a writer
 

Blimey, that's a lot of detail, @christopher-w. Thank you for taking the time to write it.
I wasn't using Isotope specifically for styling but for filtering. In my case, it was a list of "recommended reading", each item having several attributes. A reader would therefore be able to display only those books exhibiting whichever attributes they were interested in. The prototype worked but I came back a couple of years later and the JS was no longer being called for whatever reason.
I bought a GSAP subscription a couple of years ago and made a couple of practice tweens. Unfortunately (well, fortunately, I suppose), I've accidentally ended up becoming a writer, which means that the evenings and weekends for tinkering have been in short supply since.
That's very decent of you, and I'm grateful for your offer but I fear it would soon be a one-man show. I'm afraid I don't have any spare time for the foreseeable future. If you don't think it would bother you, I'd certainly be willing to catch up with you down the line to see whether there's anything useful we could demonstrate for other people's benefit. I'd have to work out what I'm doing on my own site first, though!
Ah, sorry. That's my fault.
That said, Jordan, I'm not a programmer either but have become fairly proficient in some areas. If you'd like to give the basics a try to see how you get on, I thoroughly recommend Jonas Schmedtmann's "Build Responsive Real World Websites with HTML5 and CSS3" course on Udemy. (As is normal, the full price is expensive but they're having one of their periodic sales during the next few hours.)