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Community admins always want to improve their website and there are typical areas of concern like ‘search engine optimization’ and ‘page speed’. But often, when I see websites running the Invision Community Suite, I see an area that is needlessly neglected, even though it would be easy to improve and changes could make a huge difference: the menu!  Think about it: It’s one of the most important parts of your website, because it is what users interact with the most when they browse your website.

Running online communities will often feel like parenting. You have to settle disputes, ask your members to behave and even punish them when necessary. There is just no way around it. If many people get together in one place, there will be conflicts. And as community owner, you have no choice to step in, even though it will often feel like you will be the ‘bad guy’ no matter what. If you don’t step in, your members will complain about that and things will probably escalate. And if you do step in

In this bonus lesson I explain how I built this very section on opentype.space, where database records can be accessed by anyone, but only paying members will see the actual course content and everyone else is encouraged to upgrade their account to get access.  Background With Pages databases you can easily set custom permissions on the category level to offer content exclusively to certain member groups, like your paying members. But there is a problem: if you remove the access for guests and r

Invision Community 5 makes much better use of Pages record images for your articles. These images are now shown in various aspect ratios throughout your community using the CSS “cover mode“, so parts of your images will simply be cut off! I created a Photoshop template (and PNG image as alternative) to create and test suitable cover images before uploading them. The template shows a pixel-perfect preview for all relevant aspect ratios that Invision Community 5 uses.