christopher-w

When doing your refresh can you also take a look at the help files?  Some are way out of date and most don't give clear examples on how to implement some of the options available.  Not everyone is a PHP coder, but many don't mind getting their hands dirty now and then to make some positive changes to their sites.
An example would be (and this is just an example as it comes to mind) - how to implement Google Maps.  The instructions are out of date and it was a minefield navigating how to set it up - I gave up at the finish.  Another would be how to use custom fields and how to best use them, including any CSS examples that are needed to dress those fields so they look the part. Plain English examples are needed.
I'm sure that a lot of people would appreciate being able to make changes without any horror stories occurring.  As the suite evolves so should the help files and if you are including community enhancements that involve third parties, who are also evolving, then the help files should reflect this.  I believe this is just as important as a site refresh and apologies for hijacking the topic, but a refresh should be more than just some site cosmetics 🙂
 

Wow 🤯 I love this! This is actually pretty incredible. I'd love to be able to filter by tags. Thing is in my community, the tags are open - meaning anyone can apply up to 5 tags of their choosing (versus preset), so not sure how that'd function. 
I love where your head is at with this! 
Regarding the CSS stuff - I would like to dive further into that world and learn. Maybe the universe will hook me up with some 28 hour days soon 😂 
All good! Do your thing.
I love that the screen shot shows all the items being same height. That looks super slick. I'm curious how that uniformity was accomplished. 

Consider me a person interested, so there's at least one of us. Please don't rush on my or anybody's account but the idea of adding a degree of interactivity to a page by way of filting and sorting has my interest piqued.
Do I recall you were once working on something using Isotope? I had something interesting going on with that once though never got around to finishing it, and then came back to it a couple of years later only to find it no longer worked. Do you make use of Isotope anywhere on a live site?

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.
 

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.
 

😍
I managed to make them a bit more uniform by hiding the captions that are included when Promoting. 
However, I still tend to think when I view this my eyes go all over the place not knowing where to look first. On mobile (which most people use mobile to read my community) it's a lot easier to digest because it's all in one column. I'd love to mirror that magic on desktop as well. 
OP is a really powerful way to display content across the community. I can't believe I'm only just now realizing I should do it this way lol 🤦🏼‍♂️ 

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.
 

"Our Picks" is a widget/block so if you have Pages then create a custom block based on "Our Picks"
Then change the 'Content' - change the template settings to "Use as a base for..." and modify the html code. I suspect, but am probably wrong, that the first thing to do would be to drop the 'ipsCarousel' elements from the code to begin with.

We made such a directory with a Pages database and SuperDirectory
 

Agreed. I actually have it installed. But if memory serves, he had mentioned that it was simply not possible because of 'nodes'? I would pay for that ability right now, it would be very very useful to us.
NEVER MIND. I'M AN IDIOT. I was the one having the conversation with him. Seems like he might do it.
If there was a mic drop smilie, I would insert it, followed by taking a hammer to my own head. 🔨
 
**EDIT**
Oh, funny. Just went over there to post and saw that you were on the conversation too @Chris Anderson. I think I'll go take a long nap.

I'll regret this, but not much...plugin attached (xml file) and it will add a toggle to the comment form when reading a topic.
I'm off now to go wash the sugar taste out of my mouth.
Note: no support is provided for this plugin, as it is a 'proof of concept' for an application which is now available in the MarketPlace.
(NE) Kindness.xml

Thanks Adriano - class gave me what I needed.

var_dump on $item will provide:
protected '_data' => array (size=18) 'id' => int 1 'class' => string 'IPS\forums\Topic' (length=16) 'class_id' => int 96 'text' => string '{"internal":"In regard to money matters C\u00e6sar was entirely without principle. In his early years he borrowed vast sums on all sides, spent them recklessly, and seldom paid his debts save with further borrowed money. While still a young man he owed his creditors the sum of \u00a3280,000; and though most of this had now been paid off by means of the loot from the Gallic Wars, there had been times in his life when ruin stared him in the face. Most of his debts were incurred in the first place in buying fo'... (length=1089) 'short_link' => string 'http://localhost/45X/index.php?/topic/96-motivational-genus-porzana/' (length=68) 'media' => string '[]' (length=2) 'added' => int 1619437470 'scheduled' => int 1619437470 'sent' => int 1619437472 'added_by' => int 1 'schedule_auto' => int 0 'share_to' => string '["internal"]' (length=12) 'images' => string '[]' (length=2) 'returned' => string '{"internal":1619437472}' (length=23) 'failed' => int 0 'internal' => int 1 'form_data' => string '{"internal":{"title":""}}' (length=25) 'hide' => int 0 So $item->class will give you the class. For this example, IPS\forums\Topic.
Btw, I used this in promotePublicTableRow Core template. Not sure if $item in yours is the same.

Yes. But it has many bugs.
An app with branding and all the customizations is technically not feasible, I guess or requires tons of programmers. Right now: no customizations, no monetization, no branding. All IPS communities sit in one app like TapaTalk. To have an own app for your community only, you would have to go through Google and Apple approval process to add it to their stores. You, not IPS. It costs. 
Another question: why do you need mobile app? If it is because of push notifications, they are integrated in 4.6 without mobile app. Any other reason, you would like to have mobile app? 🙂
 

Sure. In categories where Allow Albums, but not Require Albums is set, users can upload to either an Album or not. Images that aren't added to an album display below a listing of all albums in the category. At one point, we has a category with over 400 albums and about ten thousand images outside of albums. Navigation became...awkward.
 
This is a suggestion we made to xenforo as well, but in essence:

With multiple categories, one could add a Category field above the Album field in the image above. Basically have a nice tidy form for each image being uploaded which you can select these options in.

Images are my community, so yes, yes I suppose you can say I have an image-heavy community.  
In the Cloudflare + Wasabi setup, I pay:
$20 for Cloudflare Business, which you don't need.  But why not, since I'm saving so much from AWS $6 for every terabyte on Wasabi.  
Real picture of Joel throwing his money around like he's the boss.  A $26 dollar boss.  Anything more and he's keeping.  

Hey team, I’d love for you to give a warm welcome to Invision Community’s new developer, @Matt Finger
You want some sweet sweet Achievements addons? Then be extra nice to him 😉  
So you can get to know Matt F better, I held a mini-interview with the 20-year-old developing prodigy. I said what I said. 
When he’s not coding, he’s cooking, fixing things (like cars, bikes, electronics, etc) and reading up on science, physics and philosophy. 
After asking him about his hobbies, I cut to the chase and asked him about his passion for coding and a few of his past experiences with it. He flexed his knowledge of philosophy right away. 

🤯🤯🤯

He continued: “That being said, we're faced with the question of, 'how to improve upon one's ability to reason?' We improve upon our ability to reason the same way we can get better at most things: do it over and over again while challenging yourself more and more each time. And in the case of our ability to reason, problem solving and solution finding is, in my experience, the best way to challenge our ability to reason, therefore making it most conducive to increasing said ability to reason, in turn allowing ourselves to achieve our true potential. And software development persistently presents new problems to solve and solutions to find a great way to flex our brains and get better at reasoning.”
“So to sum up, to me, developing is more than writing code, it's more than solving problems. It's a way to achieve my true potential as a human being.”
“Plus it's fun.”
Welcome to the fam, Matt F!
Please drop a line in the comments and spread the good vibes 😎 

In the early 80s I'd just left warring Sudan and found myself instead building my first PC in Hong Kong - 40 years ago no less. I'd upgraded the motherboard to include a NEC V20, replacing the 8088 and later on added a ripped off Mountain Race Card with a 286 and on board ramdisk - great for Flight Simulator. I went on to be an assembler programmer and a well known hacker (those days are behind me), so the experience wasn't wasted. Nor were the pubs outside my apartment in Wanchai ☺️.
I'm caught in a middle ground. I'm empathetic by nature and my first reaction is always to try and put myself in that person's shoes. The issue comes with how to show support. I often feel that an emoji is not enough, but on the other hand a reply often seems too much - or invasive. I suppose it comes down to having the choice and applying judgement to that choice - as best one can. But more often than not I don't respond at all (or write something and delete it, sometimes many times a day) and I don't think that's necessarily solved by more granular emoji choices, but it's definitely not solved by lack of choice.
But, thinking more on this, one of the barriers to offering more support, be that via emoji, gag video/animation, or heartfelt comment, is the often lack of feedback from those actions. It seems that a lot of folks want sympathy and support only from a subset of their audience (friends, sympathisers etc), not from their audience as a whole.
Which echoes the real world I guess, with the obvious difference being that it's very difficult to ignore anyone face to face, whereas in a forum, turning your back is as easy as ignoring a reaction or scrolling past a comment. For example this thread might have prompted 1000 physical responses in the form of reactions and comments, but it's a fraction of the total number of emotional responses experienced by folks reading it. Perhaps that's one of the metrics of an online community - how much of what is felt actually makes its way into the thread in the way of visible support and other appropriate behaviour.
 
Given the economic climate I would have liked to have seen some form of loyalty coupons over the past year, redeemable against licence renewals. The cash value isn't important, but the sentiment is. 
 
Whilst wholly supporting attempts to address the non communityness of the community here, there are times like today and yesterday and..., that  I wish the energies were instead directed into the platform.
 

 

In the early 80s I'd just left warring Sudan and found myself instead building my first PC in Hong Kong - 40 years ago no less. I'd upgraded the motherboard to include a NEC V20, replacing the 8088 and later on added a ripped off Mountain Race Card with a 286 and on board ramdisk - great for Flight Simulator. I went on to be an assembler programmer and a well known hacker (those days are behind me), so the experience wasn't wasted. Nor were the pubs outside my apartment in Wanchai ☺️.
I'm caught in a middle ground. I'm empathetic by nature and my first reaction is always to try and put myself in that person's shoes. The issue comes with how to show support. I often feel that an emoji is not enough, but on the other hand a reply often seems too much - or invasive. I suppose it comes down to having the choice and applying judgement to that choice - as best one can. But more often than not I don't respond at all (or write something and delete it, sometimes many times a day) and I don't think that's necessarily solved by more granular emoji choices, but it's definitely not solved by lack of choice.
But, thinking more on this, one of the barriers to offering more support, be that via emoji, gag video/animation, or heartfelt comment, is the often lack of feedback from those actions. It seems that a lot of folks want sympathy and support only from a subset of their audience (friends, sympathisers etc), not from their audience as a whole.
Which echoes the real world I guess, with the obvious difference being that it's very difficult to ignore anyone face to face, whereas in a forum, turning your back is as easy as ignoring a reaction or scrolling past a comment. For example this thread might have prompted 1000 physical responses in the form of reactions and comments, but it's a fraction of the total number of emotional responses experienced by folks reading it. Perhaps that's one of the metrics of an online community - how much of what is felt actually makes its way into the thread in the way of visible support and other appropriate behaviour.
 
Given the economic climate I would have liked to have seen some form of loyalty coupons over the past year, redeemable against licence renewals. The cash value isn't important, but the sentiment is. 
 
Whilst wholly supporting attempts to address the non communityness of the community here, there are times like today and yesterday and..., that  I wish the energies were instead directed into the platform.
 

 

I launched my first BBS in 1988 using the Wildcat BBS software. So I've actually been around forums for 33 years.  

Hi Jordan,
Thanks for your thoughts. Not having a go, but to be honest, personally I don't really want or expect to be challenged! To be fair, I've already answered this in previous responses and others have too. I don't feel that you have really answered some of my points that I clarified. 
Funnily enough, your stance on not backtracking isn't exactly coming across as being open to flexibility when it comes to the changes you're making to this community and the response did actually make me want to reach for a confused reaction! If ever there was a reason to use it, I feel it's representative of my reaction in response to your post. 😊
We seem to be going backwards with this community, against a backdrop of pandemic's emotional and financial turmoil going on, ideally we need to either be moving forwards or finding some stability, especially as we're now practically mourning the unexpected departure of such a knowledgeable, respected, prolific and supportive member of the IPS team without a chance to wish him well. I know that people come and go but still, IMHO he's left such a massive void. I'm not wanting to draw conclusions and there's a lot of talent and knowledge within the IPS company, but just this morning I read that IPS is dropping the facility to copy custom Pages blocks in 4.6 because it's overly complicated; surely copying and duplicating blocks is a basic facility for any modern page builder or CMS software. I'd actually be embarrassed as a CEO if my CMS couldn't do this in 2021.
Also, apologies as I'm in my early fifties and I'm not firing on all thrusters these days, but I just don't understand the cat reaction! What does it actually mean or reference, if it wasn't solely an April Fool's day inspired joke to make us chuckle, which it did me? I mean I've used it for fun which I thought it was for, and I'm not against it, but going back to your challenge, why do feel that adding a cat is any different or more acceptable than that of a saddened/empathy reaction in that it should require a follow up post/comment?
I feel that there's perhaps other similar things going on at the moment. I mean I have absolutely no idea what this Hump Day thing is all about, or FBF topic prefixes or whatever that is. We keep getting told that this a professional forum community, one that is representative of commercial products, which obviously it is, but where do cats and these bizarre references come into the equation? It's not really feeling inclusive, it's feeling more exclusive, to those hip enough, or those who have the time to read every topic or those in the know.
I kind of feel that we are also somehow almost going backwards in terms of new feature announcements being vaguely revealed within these obscure topics, where as for years they've been properly revealed and well demonstrated in the corporate blog. When people started referring to a new feature called Awards, I then had to search for the subtle announcement.
Anyway, thanks for reading.

Is this the place to request a late addition to 4.6? Only half joking, but thinking granular control of what folks can post in topics and comments might come in handy. I for one am not a fan all of the street furniture that's appeared in this 'community' over the past couple of months, but appreciate of course, that for every one like me, there's probably several who think the complete opposite. With this in mind, catering for both sides of the divide makes sense to me, allowing administrators to control what can be posted beyond the current globally allowed file types.
I do believe @Nathan Explosion has a plugin that achieves some of this (which I hope to purchase in the near future), but it doesn't as far as I know have a 60+ OAP switch allowing oldies like me to be able to browse forums just like we used to 20/30 years ago. On a more serious note, such functionality, both in the hands of the administrator and end users would allow us to control what we see at the individual forum level, beyond being able to hide signatures. Of course hiding or preventing the use of animations and the like (I own a VFX business, so I'm not totally averse) would of course mean that many comments would, for many of us, go unread. Which at the moment some might say isn't a bad thing, plus of course, folks suspecting they aren't being 'read' by the topic's entire audience might well instead resort to that old favourite - letters and words. In saying that, perhaps the creators of Giphy and the like have missed a trick. Shouldn't they have designed (or have they already?) their witty delivery mechanism to include a native alt attribute so that post/comment authors could include real words for those blocking the graphical part of the content. Or, in lieu of this, perhaps Invision could allow our humorously minded friends the option of adding an alt attribute to images of all types (without needing to add a CKEditor image plugin), so that we can see what they meant, even if we decide to block what they intended.
To the principle reason for commenting. I think Invision Community should be both proud and thankful that so many of its clients are still around after so many years. For example, selecting solely from this topic,  @The Old Man  and @Chris Anderson have both (if I've interpreted their joined date correctly) been here for 17+ years and @Kjell Iver Johansen, for 9+ years, whilst evidently, also caring very much about the platform.  As for me, I'm relatively new here, but older than most it seems, but I share with those mentioned a deep desire to go about my business in the most efficient way possible, if only because at my time of life (61) time isn't an endless resource and I'd rather spend it as frugally as possible.
Finally from me tonight, I do hope the community can pull together here. I've made representations to @Matt about this just recently. I am very pleased to see that an investment has been made in hiring a (semi?) dedicated resource in @Jordan Invision, but I would ask that more care is taken to involve the community as a whole. Otherwise as others have outlined, some of us might find it difficult to contribute. Now although me holding my tongue might suit some of you, I do feel the community will suffer disproportionately if some of the older, more experienced regulars here, stop contributing in the ways that they have done.
Looking forward to 4.6 and beyond. Thanks for a great platform.
 

Giphy's mostly do - but they don't necessarily describe the image in the way it's being used, which could lead to some hilarious unintended consequences - unless the poster modifies them to reflect what they would otherwise have said.
Thanks for the links. Looking forward to seeing how they develop.
 

@christopher-w
Hi Chris,
I didn't realise those animated GIFs didn't have ALT attributes.
I don't know how useful it will be but there CSS accessibility improvements being more supported in browsers that may help to compliment the granular controls. 
 
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-reduced-motion
Real early draft, this one...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-reduced-data
You may even be able to create a copy of your current theme, say "My-Theme (less clutter)", and make use of the CSS to display: block certain content, more of a sledgehammer approach I know. 

Regards
 

__ / \ /|oo \ (_| /_) _`@/_ \ _ | | \ \\ | (*) | \ )) ______ |__U__| / \// / FIDO \ _//|| _\ / (________) (_/(_|(____/