Abies

Bring your community to life with the latest live community features coming to Invision Community 5.
Last year we introduced new features that immediately showed who was currently reading a topic and who was replying. This feature leveraged new technologies to connect members with each other instantly.
In this blog post, we'll delve into the latest live community features for Invision Community 5 and explore how they enhance our sense of togetherness within our communities. We'll examine how these features instantly notify us about new events, updates, or interactions and how they contribute to a shared sense of presence.
These features go beyond the static posts and comments we've grown accustomed to and introduce a real-time element. Whether you're part of a support community, a gaming forum, or a professional network, these features will have you feeling like you're interacting with other community members simultaneously, fostering a strong sense of shared experiences. 
 
 
Posting
We've all been involved in a busy topic where you're keen to see what replies your latest post has. Select packages on Invision Community 4 can see who is active on a topic and who is typing, but you have to hit refresh to see the new posts added to the topic. If you're anything like me, then you hammer refresh until something new appears.
With Invision Community 5, this is no longer a problem. As you interact with a topic, new replies are automatically added to the topic without needing to refresh. This one feature brings the conversation to life, and you get a real sense of other members interacting with the topic at the same time as you.
 

 
Reactions
Did you drop a razor-sharp GIF or post something applause-worthy? Watch as others react to your content in real time with Invision Community 5. There's no need to refresh or return to the topic later to see who enjoyed what you wrote.
Getting rewarded for your content is gratifying and encourages you to post more and show your appreciation for other's content via reactions.
Notifications
Notifications have long been a valuable way to be notified when anything important happens in your community. It may be that someone has quoted your content, tagged you in a post or started a new topic in a forum you're following.
With Invision Community 5, you can watch the notification count rack up in real time, alerting you to new events that you may otherwise miss as they happen.
 

 
We hope that you've enjoyed reading about these new features and look forward to them coming to select packages for Invision Community 5. They provide a sense of togetherness and immediacy, making it feel like we're interacting with fellow community members simultaneously. 
We're keen to hear what you think, please leave a comment below.
The features discussed in this announcement will not be available for Invision Community Classic. Click here to learn more about switching to our platform to get this and other benefits.
 

View full blog entry

Welcome to the third video of our sneak peak series! Today, we're really excited to introduce you to the new Theme Editor!
Built entirely from scratch, the new editor provides an instant, live preview of your theme, as soon as you modify a setting. It's a zero-code approach to creating themes, and has been designed to ensure your theme adheres to your color scheme and looks great on every device, with very little effort. Let's take a closer look!
 
Paragraph 1.mp4
 
To the left of the editor, you’ll see a live preview of your community. You can navigate to any page, as if you were browsing your site normally. At the top left of the editor, you’ll find icons which change the theme between the light and dark color schemes. Below that are buttons which change the viewport size, from desktop, to tablet, to mobile. This is a really convenient way to ensure your theme looks great on every device, without needing to manually resize your browser window.
Lets take a closer look at the Color Palette.
Editing colors in version 4 was a fairly time consuming process. For example, modifying the color scheme from the default blue to another color meant that 26 theme settings needed to be changed. In contrast, the Version 5 theme is powered by just 3 colors: Primary colors are responsible for styling the main elements on your page, such as the Start new topic button. Secondary colors control minor elements, such as pagination links, while the Base color is responsible for controlling the overall tint on your site.
Clicking on these colors opens a color picker. Let’s change this blue color to yellow.
 
Video 2.mp4
 
You’ll notice two things have happened here. First, the preview window updated as soon as we modified the color. All elements which were previously blue, now use yellow, such as the Start new topic button. Secondly, the text color in our button has changed from white to black. This is our automatic contrast feature and it ensures our text is easy to read on our new yellow background, since white text may be more difficult to read for some viewers.
Below the color picker is a text box, with our color displayed in HSL. You can paste your own colors in this box, in any color format and that color will be applied to your elements.
 
Video 3.mp4
 
The Base color controls the tint of your backgrounds and text colors. Let's try a few examples to demonstrate how easy it is to recolor your theme.
 
Video 4.mp4
 
Next up are Logos! Invision Community 5 has three logo types: a text logo, an image logo for desktops and an image logo for mobiles. Let’s edit our text logo.
 
Video 5.mp4
 
After changing the text to “Theme Editor Demo”, we can see that the logo in our preview window updates instantly with our new text. Below that, we have multiple options to help us style the text logo, such as font-family These fonts are a combination of system fonts and web fonts. The web fonts are hosted locally on your site for optimal performance. Additionally, we can also change the font-weight and font-size. We might want a different font-size for mobile logos, so that can be edited too. We can see a live preview by changing our viewport to the mobile option.
If you’d prefer to use an image logo, you can assign it using the Image Logo options. Image logos are made up of 2 upload fields, one for the light theme and one for the dark theme. Below these upload fields, a slider lets you resize your logo so it fits neatly.
 
Video 6.mp4
 
Layout options let you assign the default layouts in your community. In our first sneak peak video, we showcased the new side panel layout, feed view for forum categories, and compact view for topics. These can all be enabled via the theme editor using a simple select menu.
 
Video 7.mp4
 
Lets explore some Color options! In the Header panel, we can see a list of elements we can customize. Clicking on an element opens the Swatch List, which is a list of 22 colors that are powered by the Base, Primary and Secondary colors from earlier. We have 6 "light" base colors, 6 "dark" base colors as well as various shades of our primary and secondary colors. Clicking on any of these swatches will apply that color to your element.
But what if none of these colors suit your requirement? That’s where the Color Picker comes in handy. Here, we can easily choose any color, or even paste in our own color like before.
 
Video 8.mp4
 
A major hurdle with themes in version 4 was customising the header. Depending on the complexity, this would typically involve modifications to both the CSS and HTML. That is a thing of the past with version 5! If we flick over to our Settings tab, you’ll see a brand new interface for customising the header. A new drag and drop feature allows you to easily reposition header elements without touching a single line of code.
 
Video 9.mp4
It’s an incredibly fun tool to play with, and we’re really excited to hear what you think!
Below the drag and drop area, we can customise the header further by using sliders to adjust its height, or we can enable navigation icons with a single click. Body settings let you can customise global elements such as the body background color, text colors, the max-width of your site, the font-family, font-size and more.
Editing Content boxes has always required code modifications in the past. Using this new editor, we can adjust not only the colors of the boxes, but also the borders and shadows. Theme editing has honestly never been this easy!
 
Video 10.mp4
And there you have it! Our brand new theme editor. With a few simple clicks and drags, we've been able to create a customised theme that looks great on desktops and mobiles, with a new color scheme, new logos, a customised header, new page layouts and restyled content boxes - all without touching a single line of code.
Speaking of code, for those of you who want to apply more advanced customisations, we’ve added a really convenient way to access your custom CSS file, via a new dialog box.
Video 11.mp4
And last but not least - the new theme editor is fully responsive, so even if you’re away from the desk, so you’ll be able to change colours and settings, upload new logos, redesign your header and even add your own code!
 
Video 12.mp4
 
Developing this new editor has been a lot of fun, and it’s even more fun to use. Themes have never been easier to edit and we're really excited for you all to get your hands on it so you can have a play for yourself - but for now, let us know what you think the comments, and we’ll see you next time!

View full blog entry

This looks really, really good. I'm so glad to see new CSS underpinning everything - about time! Automatically creating color palettes from main colors is lovely too. While we worked towards some of these changes with v4 it was always difficult without breaking the entire ecosystem. I'm happy you've managed to get a clean break.

Welcome to the second video of our sneak peak series! Today we'll be taking a closer look at the new Invision Community interface, including dark mode, accessibility improvements, performance improvements and the mobile layout! Before we begin, I should mention that this is a pre-alpha version of Invision Community 5, so some areas of the design may change before the official release.
 
New traditional header design
In our previous video, we showcased our new, optional side panel which formats your navigation into a vertical list. For those who prefer a traditional, horizontal header, here it is!

A much more compact header compared to version 4, the new design condenses the navigation bar into a single row, moving all sub-navigation items into dropdown menus. A new, optional area below the text logo allows you to add your website slogan or announce events such as anniversaries or holidays, and our new search modal provides convenient access to the advanced search filters from any page on your community.

 
Accessible interface
The main content area has been designed with accessibility as a priority. High contrast text colours and larger font-sizes help to make reading more comfortable and clickable table rows (which can be enabled or disabled via the Theme Editor) allow you to navigate between pages more easily. A visible focus ring significantly improves navigation for visitors who find it more comfortable to browse with their keyboard TAB key, instead of using their mouse (ie. visitors with conditions such as Parkinson's disease, or those who have temporarily lost function due to a broken arm).
 
Focus.mp4
Elements are highlighted while navigating with the keyboard
 
Dark mode
Dark mode has become increasingly popular over the past few years - so it's no surprise that Version 5 has been designed from scratch with both light and dark mode in mind. With version 4, it was necessary to manage two themes in order to provide a light and dark colour scheme. In version 5 though, all of that is handled by a single theme.
By default, your members will be able to choose their own color scheme preference: either light, dark, or system. System assigns a color scheme based on your system preferences - so if your device automatically switches to dark mode at night, your community will too! With that said, as an administrator, you also have the option to restrict your site to a single color scheme - so if you ONLY want to offer a dark theme, that's easily achieved.

 
 
Performance
Despite all of these new inclusions, the version 5 UI has been coded with significant reductions in both CSS and Javascript. We'll dive deeper into code reductions in a future blog entry, however two great examples are:
- Grids: which have had a 100% removal of Javascript and are powered by only a few lines of CSS, resulting in a faster rendering time, especially for users on slow connections.
- And carousels: which have had a 95% reduction in Javascript and now rely on native browser scrolling, for a much smoother experience on both desktop and mobile!
Additionally we've removed a number of helper libraries that are no longer needed with modern browsers saving even more.
 
Mobile UI
With an incredible amount of mobile visitors accessing the web, we’ve placed a huge priority on redesigning the interface to ensure it lives up to todays standards.
A new navigation bar at the bottom of the page provides convenient access to your activity feed, notifications, messages, a search panel, and navigation links. A conscious effort was made to ensure that this information was available within a single tap, and we found that a bottom bar like this was easier to interact with compared to icons in the header.

The mobile navigation bar from Invision Community 5
 
A goal of the mobile UI was to display elements that were previously only available on larger devices, while still maintaining a clean interface. For example, to improve navigation, we've added a scrollable breadcrumb list to the top and bottom of the page. To improve guest participation, we added Sign In and Sign Up links to the bottom navigation bar. These links were previously hidden within the hamburger menu, so we feel like this will really benefit those looking to improve registrations. And as demonstrated in last weeks video, profile information is now available within posts, comments and reviews on small devices.
We’re really excited for you to literally have a hands on experience with the new mobile interface of Invision Community 5, and we're interested to hear your feedback in the comments!

View full blog entry

These theme updates are making me extremely horny, not gonna lie. 😍

Getting some great quotes for the marketing material, thanks!

Looks great, good job on tackling some of the oldest bug bears 🔥

I'd go back to plain text with Markdown.


 
One thing we do want to do is do something extra for Pages. The functions you need for most topics/replies is vastly different to what you will need for pages construction.

This is similar to when Google created Alphabet to enable them to expand into other markets. Clearly Facebook understand that it is past its peak and can now only decline so it makes sense for them to look at where they can go next.

I'm not overly keen on living in a Facebook universe though.

Discord has its place.
It's a great tool if you're just starting a community and want to see if there's a need, or you want a semi-asynchronous chat that focuses on a 24-48 hour time window.

However, we have a mature support community so it's less useful. We want to encourage thoughtful posts that have a life beyond a few days. We want others to find these topics from search engines and we want to build a crowdsourced knowledgeable for Invision Community.
If we were to create an official Discord, it would create a brain drain and instead of us being able to look back and look at feature request trends, or customers being able to search for answers to their questions we have a 'here and now' relatively informal chat room.

Hello,
Currently all the reactions (both given and received) in users profile are mixed all together.
Problem: What if I wanted to check what posts I've reacted to, or what posts of mine are the most "reactable"? 😉 ☢️ It's quite challenging to scan the whole list to get a quick overview.
Solution: The idea is to add a switch between Reactions given and Reactions received.
Quick visualisation:

 
In my eyes this could make the list more useful and easier to use. And what's your view on this idea?

hi my lords,
Thank you if you check the following features in future versions:
1. bookmark button like below:

2. mention tab in profile (To view users who have mentioned):

 
thank you for all your efforts 👏

I knew the prices would rise with this site relaunch, but I expected more a generous correction for inflation for new orders (not renewals). But the changes are far from slight. And for people like me who have many licenses, it actually threatens my entire business, because the price change is multiplied by the number of licenses. And the new terms make it all even worse. For my oldest license, I had an upcoming renewal of $85 as the last payment in this financial year. Now that jumped to $310—well over 300%! Yes, it’s for 12 months, but I still need to pay it NOW without having earned this money through the site or even planned for it. And even if would manage with this one site, I certainly can’t manage it for 5 self-hosted licenses and their upcoming renewals. 
And it didn’t had to be this way. There is the established system of grandfathering existing prices while only charging more for new customers for example. Or it could be a slow transition that is announced a year or two in advance, so we could have prepared for it someone. Dropping these drastic price and terms changes on us like a bomb, effective and possibly charged immediately, was a bad move. 
 
 

+1. There was already a similar suggestion:
 

There should not be categories section for databases that do NOT use categories:

When you have a section that has many subsections, it is impossible to go thru each section because it will collapse the tree each click and you have to find the section you were in and open in t again.
it would be most helpful if there was a dynamic previous/next links at the end of the article on the content page 
 

Bootstrap has a solution to this. Well, actually two solutions:
https://getbootstrap.com/docs/5.0/components/modal/#scrolling-long-content

I think this is better as a plugin.
It's a seriously infected issue that will cause division in the user base. Personally I would never add it, unless my community is based around a community that think this is important. The reason for that is that it is pretty much a safe bet that people will behave just as bad as on Twitter and I think we have enough trolls to worry about to not add strife amongst our members if we can prevent it.
I am all for expressing yourself and adding whatever labels you feel is appropriate to your community, but this is what custom fields are for and this is what plugins should be used for in my opinion.

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.


 
 

This is an amazing option we have with Pages, yet it does need some new feature that will make admins work whenever they decide to use Pages easier.
First suggestion, we need a "Copy forum to database" option. It is really hard whenever you decide you want to make a new database for new project that already has been using forum has 500 topics more or less, and then move them one by one. 
Second suggestion, whenever you copy topic to database it has all options, but the time stamp. It's really would be great if you guys add this.
 
 

 
 

Hello,
Currently all the reactions (both given and received) in users profile are mixed all together.
Problem: What if I wanted to check what posts I've reacted to, or what posts of mine are the most "reactable"? 😉 ☢️ It's quite challenging to scan the whole list to get a quick overview.
Solution: The idea is to add a switch between Reactions given and Reactions received.
Quick visualisation:

 
In my eyes this could make the list more useful and easier to use. And what's your view on this idea?

I have brought this up internally for further review, I can't promise anything at this point, but it's being considered for a future version.  Thank you for all of your feedback on this item. 

I think it would be really nice to have the ability to create a post and schedule it to be posted at a later date/time.  This would allow me to do a LOT of work ahead of time on my forum.  

Hello there!
The main purpose of user profiles is to make discovering user's content easier. I've found a way to improve the process a bit.
1. Content discovery
Let's take a look on my profile and especially on the filtering options:

Problem: It's quite a long list that grows with every new app or a content type. I find it confusing as during my time here I've posted only a topic and some posts.
I don't think I'm able to post anything in the documentation, release notes, providers, guides, IPS Blog etc. But I'm still able to filter my results by those options [basically to get no results note].
Solution: The idea is to hide all the empty-result-filters. Thanks to this we exactly know what type of content certain user posted, and save our time on scanning the long list.

2. Reputation view
I wanted to check my reputaion activity and this happened:

Problem: The page shows no results. Quite confusing as the sidebar clearly shows that I do have reputation activity. This is because by default the resulsts are filtered by Status updates in which I have no activity. And the list of possible filters is also very long (as stated above).
Solution:  As we have All activity filter in user's content page by default, we should also have All reputation activity filter in user's reputation page. And limiting the possible filters would (as above) make the experience more intuitive and clear.
In my case it would look like this as I have reputation activity in blog entries, blog comments and posts:

Thanks for reading! 🙂

Here is my suggestion below. Please make something of it. I'm a bit tired of seeing blurry avatars in a number of my members. 😞