mcartemon2we23

Welcome to Invision Community 5!
Over the coming weeks, we'll be exploring a bunch of new features and improvements coming to our user interface including our brand new theme editor, a new mobile UI, dark mode and performance improvements thanks to a reduction in both JavaScript and CSS. To kick off this series, let’s take a closer look at the new sidebar layout and new view modes for the forum index and topic pages.
Sidebar Layout
Traditionally, Invision Community has shipped with a horizontal header and navigation bar at the top of the page, which is still available in version 5. We're introducing a brand new (and optional) sidebar layout, which can be enabled or disabled easily from within your theme settings. The sidebar not only provides convenient access to your applications, activity streams and search bar, but you can now add links to nodes for even easier access to popular or commonly used areas of your community. For example - a category from your forum, an album from the Gallery, or a product group from Commerce.
Sidebar-zoom.mp4
Forum Index: Feed view
One of our goals for version 5 was to re-imagine new ways for your visitors to consume content, and the sidebar layout is just one of our solutions. Table view has been the typical way of displaying forums, providing visitors with a simple summary of the most recently active topic. Grid mode introduced cover photos to forums and is a great way to make your page more visually engaging, while fluid view allows visitors to filter through a list of topics to easily focus on multiple areas of the community.
Joining these view modes in version 5 is our new Feed view. Optional cover photos and featured forum colours allow you to personalise each forum, and a list of recently active topics with snippets of the most recent reply allow you to easily see what each forum is focusing on at a glance. The topic list drops below the cover photo and converts to a scrollable list on small devices. It's our fresh take on content display, and we can’t wait to hear your feedback!

 
Topic pages: Compact view
In addition, Invision Community 5 also introduces a new, compact layout option for topics. We wanted to create a layout which placed focus on your content while still keeping all of the authors profile information easily accessible within a mini profile. Stats, rank, badges, reputation points and more can be found by tapping the icon at the top of every post. The mini profile strip has also been added to other areas of the software too, such as comments and reviews in applications like Gallery and Blogs, and will appear on the mobile layout when the traditional "table view" is used in topics.
Switching between the new compact view and the author sidebar view takes just seconds giving you complete control over your community.
Mini profile.mp4
 
As part of this view, you also have the choice to feature/pin the original post to the top of every page, making it a breeze for your visitors to easily understand the context of replies without navigating back to page 1. Pinned posts have a slightly larger font-size to distinguish them from replies, and we've thoughtfully truncated them on pages beyond the first to keep scrolling to a minimum.

 
The new sidebar layout and view modes offer a fresh and innovative approach to navigating and interacting with your community. We’re really keen to hear your thoughts on these new views and whether you’ll be unleashing them on your own sites! We appreciate that no two sites are the same, and those who are a fan of the classic header look will benefit from quick styling tools and a visual way to re-arrange the header elements which we’ll cover in a later blog.
We’re looking forward to showcasing a whole bunch of new features over the coming weeks - so stay tuned, and we’ll see you then!
 

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By adding such a possibility, you a priori kill the forum in the understanding for which it is intended.
This is not WhatsAPP or Discord, this is the Message Board, which was originally conceived like this.
It's the same as buying a motorcycle in order to convert it into a car... An idiotic solution.

Seeing the same message (or messages) every day even though I dismissed the same message the previous day is supremely annoying.  Unfortunately, it's not always easy to just upgrade your forum when such a message appears.  Smaller forums, sure, but when you have a large forum with a custom theme (as well as third-party themes) and various third-party plugins and applications (many of which were custom jobs written for your forum), it's non-trivial to just update your forum on a whim, especially with major revisions of the software.  I know I need to upgrade the forum, I don't need to be reminded every single time I visit my forum or ACP.

I've not really played around with achievements yet, but I think that's all the more reason to give this feedback now.
My initial impression as a user on this site is that it's not obvious:
What points are How I get points, and how many points things are worth How many points I have How the ranks compare (beyond just that each one is higher than the previous) (ie how many points each rank is worth) What I can do to unlock new badges (there's an argument that some badges should be secret, but certainly most should not) These are the sorts of things that experienced members will figure out within a couple of weeks, and maybe all that information is available for users somewhere that I'm not immediately seeing. However, the fact that I'm not immediately seeing it is the problem. For achievements to really work they need to be walk-up usable - a new member needs to be incentivized to ask questions, to post good answers, and to come back to the site next week, and right now, it doesn't do that.
On the user menu, it highlights my rank and progress, which is great, but I want to click it and see more details. It feels weirdly non-interactive, and leaves me wanting more info.
For a good case study, take a look at Stack Overflow. I can look at all the badges, and see my progress towards them. I also see a graph of my rep (which on SO is less valuable because rep is compounding as people find your old questions, but on forums would be a more active incentive to keep increasing it).
Building on the SO example, wouldn't it be neat if achievement ranks could be configured to actually benefit you? Even the group promotion rules are conspicuously missing the ability to promote by rank. I want to set some rules like "level 1 can only use forums, level 2 can use blogs and status updates, level 3 can post news, level 4 can use classifieds, level 5 gets more messenger storage, etc", which I think would be a great way to incentivise engagement and give users a goal to work towards that is more than just a slightly different coloured icon on their profile picture.
Also, and this is borderline a bug, the default badge descriptions are inconsistent - some don't have descriptions, some have passive descriptions ("a week since joining"), some have present tense descriptions ("making your first post"), and some have past tense descriptions ("visited daily for a week"). There's also no way to edit them (which I will report as a bug).
Another thing - wouldn't it be nice if getting a badge could give you points? As far as I can see, that's not a thing at the moment.

Welcome to part 3 ( Part 1 & Part 2 ) of our series for 3rd party developers.
 
Let's recap the interesting stuff:
A new extension was added to the core app to allow 3rd party apps to extend the achievements.
Content Items can be marked as anonymous
We have cleaned up our code and have removed almost all the deprecated methods and variables!
 
One if the most concerning changes for IN_DEV users will probably be our new ACP warning once the CSRF Key is being exposed in the ACP

 
That's nothing to worry about, it's only returned with enabled IN_DEV mode, but please take it serious and try to avoid any redirect to any URL containing the CSRF key and containing user generated content.

Please forgive the odd request, but if someone within the Invision would be so kind as to please active and then ban the user account @Banned-User-Test that would be most helpful.  It is my sincere intention to test the community from a banned user perspective. I like to be thorough when testing a new product in development.
Thank you in advance for indulging my particularly eccentric request.

I'd recommend using the demo instead: https://invisioncommunity.com/demo

The demo is not using 4.6.  I checked before making my unusual request. 😉

That's fair - however I should note that the handling of banned members has not changed between the two versions.

I think there are two different use cases:
Editor for user-generated content. Should be simple, not too many options, clear and foolproof. I think that the actual IPS editor fulfills the requirement. Editor for articles wrote by admin. Should be powerful, have many options (text positioning, blocks, columns, grids, custom code pieces, custom styles, extendable with SEO and other plugins, have additional extensions via Marketplace etc.) For this case, the actual IPS editor is not enough. 

We're very much aware of CKEditor 5.

As mentioned above, the migration to v5 isn't a simple case of dropping in the new files. We'd need to re-code all of our custom plugins that handle many things including embedding, drag and drop uploading and much more.

CKEditor 4 is supported until 2023. While CKEditor 5 brings many useful new things, it's not urgent enough for us to "down tools" and focus a 6-12 week block on it.

It's on our roadmap along with other javascript improvements that we want to develop and deploy.

Back in the day (long ago), nearly every project and development I know about used CKEditor. In its heyday (gold age), WYSIWYG editors were still a relatively new concept (I feel old. ), and CKEditor was considered top of the line. Times have changed.
Ideally, you want your editor not to be the focus of your development. By that, I mean to say the editor should blend effortlessly in the background as something you do not notice (an afterthought). So many developments no longer use CKEditor because the editor itself often gets in the way.  I cannot count the many times when I have heard or experienced why something was not functioning right because of the editor.  Or why something could not be developed or extended because of the editor. The editor (CKEditor) is not the afterthought it should be.  Even here on Invision, the editor and its limited functionality has proven problematic by the sheer request to work around it https://invisioncommunity.com/search/?q=editor&quick=1&type=forums_topic&nodes=499
Speaking personally, I love where Invision is going. I admire their creativity in where they are taking the development. I enjoy many of the features and am looking forward to the new features they have suggested they have planned. But I dislike the editor. It is my 'pet peeve' for Invision. I know of only two developments that still use CKEditor (the other is not a forum, and they use CKEditor 5). In both of them, I dislike the editor (v4 and 5). Why? Because in both of them, nearly all the issues I encounter, all the bugs I stumble upon, and all lack of functionality and adaptability surround CKEditor.  Besides Invision, only vBulletin, whose market share is shrinking and development has become stagnant, concerning forum software, still uses CKEditor.   
I do not expect Invision to change editors overnight. As SeNioR- pointed out, it is not easy to change editors, not even to CKEditor 5.  So regardless of the discission (whether we stay with CKEditor or change editors), we are still looking at a large transition. We have two (2) years to think this through and explore our options before CKEditor 4 reaches the end of life. Plenty of time to think this over.
You'll note I did not specify any particular editor (besides a few examples I gave). My request is not to promote any specific one, only that an exploratory investigation be conducted and that Invision considers their options.
 

It's not easy to switch to CKEditor 5. 
Source: Migration from CKEditor 4

To recap:
You do not need to enable the new rules, badges and ranks. There is an option pre-upgrade that asks you if you want to switch to the new system or not. If you choose not to, then you retain the existing ranks you already have.


The upgrade will also move any custom titles across to a new custom profile field.

If you want to show the custom member title under the user's photo in a post, then just switch on these custom field settings which are off after the upgrade.


 
 

👏 

Awesome news @Stuart Silvester! Apologies for not seeing this in the detail when I read it previously! 😄

Hi Gazza!
Yes, this is enabled by our Progressive Web Application (PWA) improvements coming soon in 4.6
 

@kmk
I use the following code in custom.css:
/* Allow forum names in grid view to wrap */ .ipsApp .cForumGrid__title{ white-space: normal; }  

Folks, please try to pay more attention to the version numbers you're using for your customisations!
There's just another upset client who can't upgrade his file via the ACP - Marketplace because the system doesn't recognise the new upgrade release as "upgrade" because the recent version has long version 2800 while the old long version is 24344. I hope everybody here sees the issue?! The newer version is lower than the last version.
Another common concern confusing clients and our backend is that some developers started going back with version numbers for their 4.5 releases. So from 1.4.2 ( 104020 ) they went back to 1.0.0 ( 100000 )
Personally, I would suggest to try to use a proper semantic versioning system
 
Last but not least, while it's mentioned in the MP guidelines, here's a slightly reminder: Please also increase the versions for EACH release, even if you changed only a minor typo because clients will freak out because the MP shows it as upgraded, but their installation not..

There's also Custom Notifications by @Fosters available in the Marketplace.  

Tell us how you really feel 😆 
Lol jk. We are always striving to offer the best UX. I think it's worth mentioning that functionality and look will continue to improve in all areas of IC, including Achievements :] 
Fortunately, there's a bunch of options for all to stylize things to match their own taste (it may require a bit of extra work, but if anyone needs help please feel free to create a topic!). 

As a matter of opinion, I like the location of the badges. I feel far too many things are centered on "postbit" on most forums, which adds too much noise. The unification of everything neatly in its place means I often tune stuff out and forget something is there. Introducing a little harmless chaos to the layout gives the site character and makes it more attractive. If someone wanted it centered, they could perform a template edit or perhaps use some CSS. But I, for one, like the location 'as is.' 
 
As for the coloring of the badges, I believe that depends on the avatar. Where it is located can cause a bit of a color clash depending on what your avatar looks like. I am using Linux (openSUSE Tumbleweed) with Mozilla Firefox ( Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:89.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/89.0 ) and find no real issue. But for argument's sake, attached are a few random screenshots. 







Upon uploading my attached (see post above), I notice they look a little rough around the edges. But this being an alpha, I do not presume the images used were of HD quality, merely proof of concept.

Hi. I don't know about you, but I didn't like the "look" of the badge in the topic. In my opinion, the badge is too big.
What do you think about this look?
Example 1

Example 2

This will be back in the next build 🙂 

No, it means that the end user will need to cancel any active withdrawal request (per currency) before creating another.
So if you create a withdrawal request today, you won’t be able to create a second one until the first was completed or canceled .