Deep Dive: A (very) brief look at Invision Community 5

[JoelR]

A (very) brief look at Invision Community 5

This was the opening shot on Invision Community 5, and the video gave us plenty of eye candy even though everything was super fast.  IPS highlighted 3 notable features and a hint at a fourth:

1. Drag-and-drop theme editor
2. Dark mode
3. Helpful
4. New 'modern' forum view, which IPS would later reveal to be Forum Feed view 

But that's not all ... for careful watchers of the video, IPS leaked some surprise changes:

The button for "Mark site read" was moved from its current position to the User Menu and renamed to "Mark all content as read". My personal take is that IPS realized most users don't actively use the button or it's not universally needed, so they tucked it away.  

 

Easier access to Subscriptions: IPS added a link in the User Menu to "Manage Subscriptions." We've known for awhile now that IPS was moving away from physical goods (which was deprecated in Commerce), so this might be a small but thoughtful change on digital subscriptions as an area for future emphasis. Joel's tip: look for more features and build-out around digital subscriptions.  

 

Iconography for +Create and Report have been modified. A small change, but a cleaner look in that area

 

"Helpful" is a new signal that sits alongside Mark as Solution and Reactions. My personal takeaway is that IPS continues to explore how to streamline topics, intelligently summarize them via a mix of both automation and manual signals, and offer more structure for support topics.  While Mark as Read provides the solution, sometimes users need an identifier of posts that still assisted them but didn't get to the full solution: hence, the new Helpful reaction.  In addition to the Helpful reaction highlighted in the video, IPS also leaked two additional features related to Helpful:

• Going to the most helpful comment
• Summarizing a topic by showing only Helpful replies

All of this was packed into a 38 second teaser video!  What do you think about these extra changes?

[dismalbliss]

I'm all in for V5. It's clear that they don't consider other forum scripts to be the competition anymore. They are taking their cues from modern community platforms and making them even better.

[JoelR]

4 hours ago, dismalbliss said:

I'm all in for V5. It's clear that they don't consider other forum scripts to be the competition anymore. They are taking their cues from modern community platforms and making them even better.

Are you going to be one of those brave souls who upgrades on 5.0.0?? 😆

I'm still a little shell shocked on the v4 upgrades.  The 4.0.19.4 upgrades were a little rough, and I'm intentionally trying to keep Invisioneer.org as clean and as vanilla as possible to prepare for the upgrade.

[dismalbliss]

5 hours ago, JoelR said:

Are you going to be one of those brave souls who upgrades on 5.0.0?? 😆

Actually no, lol. The first few releases are emergency bug fixes. I'll let the others be the guinea pigs for that.

[IC Essentials]

16 hours ago, JoelR said:

Are you going to be one of those brave souls who upgrades on 5.0.0?? 😆

I will😂 I'll try to update my site ASAP , probably soon after the first public alpha/beta/whatever release

[Motorcycle Nerd]

I have two communities. One of them is an ambitious project that's very light on activity, so it'll be the perfect guinea pig to use in order to learn my way around the software before upgrading my more active community. @JoelR, great catches on the teaser video!

[JoelR]

1 minute ago, Motorcycle Nerd said:

One of them is an ambitious project that's very light on activity, so it'll be the perfect guinea pig to use in order to learn my way around the software before upgrading my more active community

That's a very smart way of going about it.  

Some admins try to chomp off more than they can chew; it's always better to start small before scaling to something bigger.  

How long have you used IPS?  Would be more than happy to help you with any questions

[Motorcycle Nerd]

1 hour ago, JoelR said:

That's a very smart way of going about it.  

Some admins try to chomp off more than they can chew; it's always better to start small before scaling to something bigger.  

How long have you used IPS?  Would be more than happy to help you with any questions

Thanks @JoelR! I've used V3 long ago, but haven't been involved with being an admin of a community until one I was interested in became available about 4 years ago, which I instantly migrated to IPS. Definitely had some bumpiness at first, but the community is very happy with where things settled.

My more ambitious project has been on IPS for a few years as well, despite the lack of activity. This spring I converted my WordPress site to pages, so I'm all in now.

[JoelR]

2 minutes ago, Motorcycle Nerd said:

This spring I converted my WordPress site to pages, so I'm all in now.

Honest question for you. And tell the truth.  

Wordpress or Pages?  And why?  

[Motorcycle Nerd]

16 hours ago, JoelR said:

Honest question for you. And tell the truth.  

Wordpress or Pages?  And why?  

For me, it's a no-brainer, but I don't think that's the case for everyone. WordPress will be easier for most people out of the box, so that might be a better solution for many, but the tight integration with the Community is important to me. I'm utilizing the sidebar in articles to showcase recent activity and clubs, I am able to craft a homepage that ties the whole site together, amongst other things. IPS has some room for improvement in terms of showcasing articles though. I wasn't a fan of the default layouts for articles so I purchased templates (plugins) to figure out how to give them the look you would expect from a publisher. I had to do the same to create custom blocks that would also showcase content professionally on the homepage.

In the end, I'm very happy I made the switch. It required a bit of extra work to get the functionality and look out of it that I wanted, but it looks good now and has shown that ranking content won't be an issue, which was a concern of mine. I do think IPS does taxonomy better than WordPress as well.

[JoelR]

2 hours ago, Motorcycle Nerd said:

For me, it's a no-brainer, but I don't think that's the case for everyone. WordPress will be easier for most people out of the box, so that might be a better solution for many, but the tight integration with the Community is important to me. I'm utilizing the sidebar in articles to showcase recent activity and clubs, I am able to craft a homepage that ties the whole site together, amongst other things. IPS has some room for improvement in terms of showcasing articles though. I wasn't a fan of the default layouts for articles so I purchased templates (plugins) to figure out how to give them the look you would expect from a publisher. I had to do the same to create custom blocks that would also showcase content professionally on the homepage.

In the end, I'm very happy I made the switch. It required a bit of extra work to get the functionality and look out of it that I wanted, but it looks good now and has shown that ranking content won't be an issue, which was a concern of mine. I do think IPS does taxonomy better than WordPress as well.

That was always the concern I had too. In my very first foray , I cobbled together Coppermine Photo Gallery + SMF + something else in a very Frankenstein manner LOL.  Yes, it all had SSO, and even though the themes were close enough to each other, you could still feel the stylistic difference between going through each of the different systems.  

There's something to be said for unifying everything into one platform, with one consistent look and feel, one account, one login, one set of notifications.  On the other hand, it does mean we're dependent on that one platform to do everything great for us - and that can be hard when you want an amazing LMS and an amazing physical shop.  Pages definitely does a great job with some extra templates though.  

[Motorcycle Nerd]

On 10/10/2023 at 2:21 PM, JoelR said:

That was always the concern I had too. In my very first foray , I cobbled together Coppermine Photo Gallery + SMF + something else in a very Frankenstein manner LOL.  Yes, it all had SSO, and even though the themes were close enough to each other, you could still feel the stylistic difference between going through each of the different systems.  

There's something to be said for unifying everything into one platform, with one consistent look and feel, one account, one login, one set of notifications.  On the other hand, it does mean we're dependent on that one platform to do everything great for us - and that can be hard when you want an amazing LMS and an amazing physical shop.  Pages definitely does a great job with some extra templates though.  

I've been there. Frankensteining things together is probably my biggest trait. I'm pretty much a modern-day Macgyver 😆. I remember the days of working in IPBWI to make this work very very well, but I'm very happy to have moved on from that.

Finding the right options for me took some time to find what I liked best and configure it, but since then it's been very much set it and forget it since and was worth the upfront time investment. Long term, I'm hoping to get FanClubs.org to a place where it can be a primary source of income and I can have my own in-house dev for that kind of stuff.

🤔💭 One day....

Edited October 11 by Motorcycle Nerd

[Ryan]

 

[JoelR]

2 hours ago, Ryan said:

 

Thanks for sharing. 

IPS is doing an awesome job with its theme overhaul.  There are so many ways to customize the default theme out of the box.