Matt

There's a lot for your members to love with Invision Community 5, and we recently covered five of the best features. Today, I want to discuss five features your team will love. One of the main concepts for Invision Community 5 was to reduce the complexity of power-user tools like theming and page building. These functions had been built around those with deep technical and coding knowledge, locking out many community teams. We also wanted to build new tools to help busy community teams organise, moderate and identify trusted members. Did we achieve that? Let's look at five new features we think your team will love in Invision Community 5. The new theme editorI can't describe how much I love the new theme editor. It is everything we wanted for Invision Community 5 and more. Now, anyone can manage their theme without needing to be knowledgeable in HTML and CSS. There's so much to discuss, so it's best to head over to the news article we put together. From an easier way to select colours and drag-and-drop header arrangements to simpler ways to upload logos and preview your community on tablets and mobiles, the theme editor puts all the power and complexity of managing themes into the hands of your community team. The editor, combined with the new views, such as the feed view for forums, article-like featured first post in topics, and the new sidebar view, Invision Community 5, really does take things to the next level. The new page editorWe've taken the concepts of drag-and-drop widgets to a higher level with Invision Community 5. You no longer need to create custom blocks using HTML and CSS to produce fantastic custom pages. With the new page editor, you can access a library of pre-built widgets with multiple view options, such as grids, rows, and carousels. Coupled with the power of Pages databases, you can quickly build custom pages to showcase the best content from your community. Jimi, a valued customer, recently created a walkthrough video showcasing the new theme and page editors. It is a must-watch to experience the system's power. Assign topicsGetting the right help to your members at the right time can take time and effort. Pairing a community question with the expertise of specific team members can require some manual overhead with external systems. It can also be difficult to hold your team accountable, ensure they are answering questions in good time, and get an overview of their assignments. These issues are fixed in Invision Community 5 with the topic assignments feature. You can assign a topic to a specific member of your team or a group of members. You also have complete oversight on the volume and time required to reply to your entire team. It's a great feature that helps keep your community running smoothly. Badge creator and icon pickerThis feature is a dark horse. At first glance, it looks like a nice feature, but perhaps it is something that you may not use. However, I believe this is a feature your team will love. There are many areas where you may need custom graphics. We have rank badges, one-off celebration badges, custom reactions and more. In the past, you'd have been required to do this with apps like Illustrator or Photoshop and import them back in. As part of our vision to bring power tools to everyone, we built a badge creator that allows you to combine over 1,700 icons and hundreds of emojis with badge backgrounds to quickly create custom badges and reaction icons. It really only takes a few minutes to create all the custom graphics your community needs. In addition, there are now many areas, such as menu items, where you can use icons and emoji to enrich your user experience. Who doesn't love the ability to create badges without needing a designer? Community ExpertsCommunity experts are vital to the well-being of any community. The Pareto principle holds true in your community. Twenty percent of your members create eighty percent of the interactions across your community, but featuring those members to newer users can be difficult. In the past, we've relied on metrics such as the date they joined and the number of posts they've made, but these celebrate longevity but not expertise. Invision Community 5 uses a bespoke algorithm to identify and feature experts based on the speed, accuracy and helpfulness of their responses. This not only celebrates those members with an exclusive badge and notification, but it also helps other users identify those community leaders who are more likely to help them and guide them through their journey with you. We think your team will love that Invision Community 5 identifies these members for you and allows them to help lead your community. I could have easily written about ten features your team will love, but these are my top five. Do you agree? Which features are you most looking forward to? Let us know in the comments. View full blog entry

We are working on a branch with some changes to the toolbar which should help.

If you look at our current pricing page, you'll notice some features only appear on certain package levels, so we're just clarifying when people say "self hosted or cloud only" it's not an accurate question. As Marc said, some are a technical limit (node, etc) and some are a business decision.

It's a paragraph level tool, so it does make some sense it being in there.

Phew, thankfully you're not our only customer. 😅 Joking aside, Ehren and Matt F are working on a few improvements to the menu system.

Not all features we've announced will come to all package levels. We'll have more information on that later this year.

Some of these features will be for specific packages. It's not as simple as "cloud" v "self-hosted". We have a total of 7 packages including the Classic self hosted option. Like all businesses, some features are limited to package levels and above. We have not finalised our decisions yet, but when we do we will update the pricing page with "coming soon" as we have in the past.

As we move closer to releasing Invision Community 5, I wanted to review a few key features I believe your members will love after you upgrade to Invision Community 5. The all-new editorWe have to start with the brand new editor, recoded and redesigned from the ground up. The new editor is not just faster and leaner, but also remarkably user-friendly, ensuring an upgraded experience for your members in Invision Community 5. Your members will love the streamlined toolbar that no longer hides buttons on smaller devices. They'll also appreciate the new emoji and icon panel, which allows them to insert over 1,700 icons to enhance their posts. Content boxes, resizing images, and media embeds via drag handles will also be well received. Finally, small UI improvements, such as new line arrows on blocks that can be tapped or clicked to insert new lines accurately, will end fiddly cursor placement and settling for poor spacing. The editor is the most important touch point within your community, so we wanted to ensure that Invision Community 5 does this perfectly. New live community featuresI can speak from experience that when I see other people typing, I'll stick around to see what they say. Likewise, if I post a topic and I see multiple people reading it, I'll keep tabs on it to see if any replies come in. These are not just great engagement features but also an exciting experience. Invision Community 5 takes it further, blurring the lines between group chat and a traditional topic. Now, when a new reply or reaction is made, it will appear magically on your screen, keeping your members on site for longer. Your members will love feeling like they are part of the live community and watching reactions and replies in real-time. They'll also appreciate seeing their notification bell numbers increase without having to refresh or move between pages. Topic SummariesTime is our most valuable resource. Your members use many apps and communities in a day, so when they make time to visit your community, we want to ensure that they get the most from your forum in the shortest amount of time possible. Long topics are great but few have the time to read through dozens of pages. Topic summaries take the very best of a topic and remove the rest, allowing your members to optimize their time well while on your community, making their experience more efficient and productive. They'll love keeping up to date with more topics without scrolling past gifs and side quests. Dark mode and the new mobile experienceLate-night scrolling becomes much more comfortable with Invision Community 5's native dark mode. Your members will love being able to choose a mode or allow it to sync with their devices, giving them a uniform experience across the many apps they browse. They'll also appreciate the new user experience, which includes improved performance, better accessibility for screen readers, and a vastly improved phone experience. We've made sure Invision Community 5 is mobile first. The new tagging experienceInvision Community 5 reinvents tagging to make it more community-focused and increase content discovery across all apps. With its new tag pages, you can easily bring gallery photos, forum topics, events, and blog entries into a single page in Invision Community 5. Your members will love following their favourite tags to get notifications on new content and discover more of your community they are interested in without having to browse many forums and different areas of your community. These are just the top five features we think your members will love. Are you looking forward to these features or perhaps some of those not mentioned here? As always, let us know in the comments. View full blog entry

You can still do this in Pages databases.

It works for some, but not others. What version of PHP are you using? I think there's an issue with 8.3 and delta zips. Nothing in 2024 due to the holidays. But we'll keep moving forward with beta releases. We're also profiling v5 on very large sites to ensure that it's all running well. You'll notice some optimisation stuff in the release notes for beta 6.

Beta 6 is now available 😮 Another week, another beta! More bugs squished thanks to your feedback and testing. The full list is available as always on our release notes page. Let us know how it goes.

Changed Current Release to No

Yes, lots of thoughts. We want to do it but there's a few things to consider such as our entire website is Pages and there will need to be minor CSS tweaks. We also link up with the client area (which will be on v4 for a while) along with a bucket of customisations for various things. It's on our list but not as simple as just running the upgrader.

I can see all your thumbnails on desktop and mobile.

We still retain the findComment method for areas which we have no idea about page numbers (widgets, etc) but you should see the new links when sharing links from posts.

We can renew it one more time. Pretty soon we're going to have to cull all these demos as we move towards the final release.

tl;dr we chose a fixed range of colours that we adapt based on if you are using light or dark mode. Adding any colours may mean posts are illegible on either light or dark mode.

Where are you hooking it?

It's a bit too broad of a question to answer with any real insight. What is it you want to do?

Should be fixed in an hour or so. Thanks for your patience.

It's removed in Beta 5.

Beta 5 is out, and you can blame Mick for the title of this post. 😅 If you're under 40, you'll have no idea what that gif is all about, don't worry. It's just an ancient movie from the before times. Anyway, Beta 5 is working its way through the cloud system and will be available in your AdminCP shortly. As always, the full change log is here: https://invisioncommunity.com/release-notes-v5/ Thanks!