Matt

Collecting, curating and organising ideas and feedback is a critical part of managing a community for a product. Even though here at Invision Community, we have a relaxed approach to ideation, we do read and review ideas and feature requests that come into us via our support community and via emails and tickets and organise them off-site. If you wanted to add more rigour to your ideation process, then Invision Community has built-in tools that you can use. This video covers setting up a "Question & Answer" forum, which forms the basis for your ideation section along with using the built-in translation tools to tweak the interface language. The complete process takes around five minutes and is the perfect way to collect and organise community ideas. Once you have it set up, your community members can post their ideas and fellow community members can upvote their favourite suggestions, leave comments on ideas and even upvote and downvote replies inside the idea. Let me know what you thought, and if you have any further questions below!

Minor releases are almost always just maintenance releases. We gather up a fistful of bug reports and fix them to ensure that every month or so, our clients enjoy more stability and efficiency with Invision Community. However, more recently we've noticed that we're running low on bug reports, so we've managed to squeeze in a handful of improvements in Invision Community 4.4.5. Let's take a look and see what's new in Pages. How should the canonical tag behave? While this isn't the most exciting name for a feature, it does explain it reasonably well. We had a recent discussion on the forums where it was pointed out that the canonical tag directed search engines to the first page of any record. While this makes perfect sense for an articles or blog system where the content you create is more important than the comments, it makes less sense if the user-generated content (aka the comments) is more important than the content you put up. A good example here is where you put up a video or link for review. You don't want the canonical tag pointing to the first page as it will ignore the reviews themselves. If you didn't understand much of that, don't worry. The idea behind this feature is to provide Google and friends with a better hint about which content is more important. A happier Google bot slurping your site is a good thing. How about that Admin CP menu? When you create a new database in Pages, it is shown in the ACP menu under 'Content'. This is fine, but when you get a lot of databases, it starts looking a little cluttered, and it can be hard to find the correct one. We've reworked the menu so items have their own section, and can be re-ordered using the ACP menu re-ordering system. Member fields are now filterable. Pages allows specific field types to be filterable. This means you can sort by them with the table's advanced search box, and you can drag and drop a filters widget next to the table to refine the rows shown. Now a member custom field is filterable, which is handy if you use them in your databases. Other areas of the suite. Messenger search A while back, we made a change that removed the ability to search messenger by the sender or recipient name. We also limited the reach of the search system to one year and newer. Unsurprisingly, this wasn't very popular. We've restored sender, and recipient name searching removed the one year limit and re-engineered the internals of search, so it's more efficient and returns results much faster. How many members do you have? You can see quite quickly if you have the member stats widget on the front end, but finding out via the Admin CP is a little more tricky. Until now! We've added a dashboard widget that not only shows the number of members you have registered, but also a break down of their email opt-in status. A happier autocomplete. Apple has this cool feature where if you receive a text message for a two-factor authentication login, it offers to auto-fill the code box for you. We've had a sweep throughout the suite to ensure two-factor authentication fields allow this autocomplete to happen. While we were at it, we made sure that other fields are more easily autocompleted. That wraps up the new features in Invision Community 4.4.5. How many have you spotted after upgrading? Let us know your favourite below.