While there are plenty of bugs still in Invision Community V5, they are not bad and compared to the state of this site right now it is still a big improvement. I am still waiting for the next Beta to come out though as there is a bug with the Tags that I want to have fixed before I switch over. Once that is fixed I will most likely switch over and start working on the site again. When I switch over things will be very messy for a while, but that is expected. I will basically revert all customizations and then start over with the V5 engine to redesign certain templates. Right now I am saving all the templates as code for safekeeping, and so I can check what customizations I have done in the past. Once I have that I will make a fresh export to the beta site with the production data and production files. Next step is to change the templates for all databases to the default ones. I will then delete the old template files to make sure there are no customizations anywhere that can cause problems. After that I will do a V5 upgrade and if all goes well then I will just wait for the next Beta release to get the Tags bug fixed before I upgrade the production site. Once everything is upgraded I will start configuring everything. I will focus on the Articles, Stories and Atlassian Product Updates since those are the ones I will work with most after the upgrade. After that I will probably take a look at the My Projects database, Videos database and then the Atlassian CVE's. This can all change depending on what I see I need to focus on next.

Beta 1 had some bugs that prevented me from moving forward to upgrade this site. I will wait for Beta 2 to see how that feels. I am not overly concerned for having bugs as this site is not working very well as it is, but I need to be able to build content and with Pages being a bit messed up still in Beta 1, that is not possible. I have the beta site up, and I will probably wait for Beta 4 or Beta 5 before I feel comfortable doing the full upgrade on the live site. That is based on previous Beta cycles, and it can be different this time of course, but it has been fairly consistent over the last 20 years 🙂

As Invision Community v5 is around the corner, I am digging deeper into the content. At the moment I am deep into planning the structure as it is a bit tricky to get all the areas set up the way I want them. This is because of the content structure is so diverse and because I want to split things up a bit, which will lead to quite a lot of configurations. I always tend to get things a bit complicated, then I simplify too much, and then...well, you get the idea 🙂 So this time I need to step back again and consider the pros and cons of the approaches, as the new tag system really will throw a wrench into this thought process. There must be a value in how I divide things, or it will just be a waste. Right now, I am considering the SEO effect as I have quite a lot of content, but I have not really put any effort into SEO in the past because this is a playground. Part of this is also a massive update of pretty much all content. Not only to freshen up the content, but also to change all graphics to WebP and remove the branding. This to be more in line with the new branding, making the site much faster, AND to make the site easier to rebrand in the future. So, I have a ton of work before me and I absolutely love it!

Yesterday, Matt announced that Invision Community V5 is available in Beta. This is amazing as that means that we are now moving into the final bug crushing before a stable release. This also means I can now set up a test site and test the upgrade and start playing around with it to see how it will behave with an existing site rather than just an empty one. While I still expect a few months before a stable release, I feel that things are moving in the right direction and I can finally start building things here again! I will see if I can set up a test install here this weekend and do a test upgrade. This should tell me roughly what to expect for the live site. Once I have that, I can start playing around with the templates and things of that sort. While it is now almost impossible to work with database link designs as we can no longer access those templates, I think I can work around that since the new tag system will replace many of those areas anyway. Overall, I am excited to sink my teeth into testing Invision Community V5 in more depth using a self-hosted test site rather than a cloud hosted alpha site 🙂

Back in the day, Digg.com was one of the hottest websites in the world, acting as an aggregated link farm for all blogs and news outlets in the world. It ultimately failed because it became too bloated and because large groups started to mass vote to get higher rankings. When planning Stories, these are things to consider and to design around so I don't repeat these mistakes. Instead, I need to focus on what made Digg something valuable to the users. The first advantage is that Stories is focused on a fairly limited number of topics, where the Atlassian ecosystem is the main focus. While the Interesting and Ways of Working categories are fairly broad areas, they are still limited to a reasonably niched community. I also do not expect to go viral anytime soon, so the volume should be manageable. If things escalated, then we can always split the database into several areas....which I might do anyway now that I think about it... Functionality wise, I will try to keep things as easy as possible and expand only if I see that it actually lead to more value. The main focus will of course be to make sure the users quickly can get to the website to read the full article. The secondary function is to rate the Stories to help them become more visible, and the third is to provide a discussion area for the story for those that want to comment or discuss the story. I think that once I have some traffic it might make sense to split up to have more than one sorting on the start page, but in the beginning I will just have the latest Stories. I will also have the latest Stories block for the sidebar, and then I can add blocks for top ranked over time and make that a tabbed block. For now my main focus is to update the categories for the Atlassian categories, since they are the main focus, and then I will consider if I want to split the Stories for the other main focus areas, or keep them in one database. Stories will be a fun thing to build, I think, and I will look at how I can combine this with the Release notes as well...

This weekend, I have been having some fun getting serious about images. I have also done some work to prepare for the release of Invision Community that I assume will drop around the end of the year. It might be sooner, but I am in no hurry, as I have plenty of other things to do at the moment. One of those things is to plan the new structure of the website here, as there are quite a lot of changes happening for both content and design. This weekend I have updated the forums a bit so they have descriptions and are toned back a bit when it comes to colors and things like that. I am also adding a new level since the new design require that, and I have moved a few things around to accommodate the new databases I have added. Those databases are the Atlassian Release Notes, Atlassian Product Versions and the Atlassian CVE databases. In the clubs, I have created two new clubs: The Swedish Jira Users and the Content Creator clubs. Swedish Jira Users will be for local Swedish users that prefer to discuss things in Swedish, and the Content Creator club are for those of us that create content on various social media and on our websites or blogs. This should be enough for now and show that there are more than just one club. For the blogs, I have added a second group blog named "If you don't - Mind" where I will post more about psychology and how that affects us. It is a pretty big area and I hope we will see that people will enjoy it, have opinions and of course contribute with their own perspectives. I am also getting back to add Stories that I will rebuild a bit to remove the colors to unify the color scheme. For now, I am adding news update as I find them in the Atlassian Community and some other resources. I am going to duplicate the databases for Articles and Videos because I want to divide them into My Articles (since it is my website) and community content. So rather than messing with the categories, I will keep the database separately. This way I can also develop those separately, which will be good since I might have different need than the community in general. Both Articles and Videos will be rebuilt to reset the design and go back to a more standardized template. I also want to make sure the videos especially get more room in the display template. I will also make some changes to the My Projects database, since I have not updated that in a while. As I am looking for new employment, I will also update my CV's in the Files section and I want to make sure I have my projects updated with proper information in case potential employers drop by and read it. For all content, I will do a massive overhaul of the graphics. This is one of the reason why I am also investing in graphics and set up new workflows. The idea is that all content will have new graphics that is optimized and in the WebP format. While doing this, I am also going to promote some content or repurpose it into new content. This will reduce the content size and improve load times by a lot, but it is also a massive undertaking that will take a while to get through. So there are things happening, even if you might not see much design wise 🤖

I am currently alpha testing the new V5 version of Invision Community, and it will be some time before it will be ready. It has a lot of potential and I very much look forward to it being released, but it has a lot of bugs at the moment, so I don't expect it to be released anytime soon. This means I have more time to play around with things, but it also means that I will probably not have any new site done this year, or very late this year. This is neither good nor bad, but the way things are. There are a lot of other things I can still do on this site to prepare it for the new design. One of those things is to go over all the content and adjust it a bit to make sure it fit the new structure and focus. I already wrote about the new focus in my personal blog here: What I am looking into deeper now is how the new tags system work and how I can best use that. The new tags system will allow for more of a node thinking, which is something I have wanted for a very long time! This new system will allow for easy organization of content, so you have tag sites that will give you the latest and greatest content for a specific tag from all products within Invision Community. This will be a very interesting way to summarize and group content that I very much look forward to. I am currently considering how I can best utilize this functionality, since all tags are curated and require manual setup. I want to combine this with the databases, but I am not 100% sure how I want to do that yet. I know that everything related to Atlassian as a company will be one tag and then one tag for every Atlassian product. I also want one tag for each of the Ways of Working and Interesting categories. This means that I can provide a pretty nice structure of information and allow people to subscribe to the content they are interested in. I have not yet decided how to do with other companies and other products, but I figure I will add some of the largest companies and products that I will write about most... This will require quite a lot of work to create the tags and then go over all content and tag them with the new tagging system. It does allow me to touch up and republish some articles, though, which is always a good thing. So, I guess the summary here is that I am kind of waiting for the release of V5, so I can start working on this site again and rebrand myself again. For now there is not much point in doing anything since the code is still moving in V5, and I am not sure what CSS classes I will be using once it gets released. I will keep posting thoughts here until we are getting closer to release.

While it is not exactly a problem, there is a distinction between what is an Atlassian Product and what is a feature that is sometimes overlooked. For example, Jira Service Management is a product and in Jira Service Management we also have Assets, which is a product, but not a standalone product...if that makes sense. So the question is how to handle that in a way that is both trackable and easy to understand? I think the problem is not so much to set this up as it is to present it. So while I can just create the products as categories and then have the Features as subcategories, it will mean that I separate content from the main product. This is because I can't have a data object connected to more than one category. So what I can do instead is to work with Prefixes. This allows us to mark articles and stories that are for example related to Data Center or Cloud, but also if it is related to a Feature like Assets or Plans. While I can't lock down the Prefixes per category, and it will be a little messy if people start to abuse it, I think it will be worth exploring it to see how it will pan out. I will also ponder a bit on how to make this visible in the product pages as well once I get to those.

It always is 🙂 The problem tend to be how to get to the know how part 🙂

I'll see that I write a general tutorial, of how to update fields per custom JS in Pages. It's pretty easy if you know how.

I would love to learn how to do that 🙂 That would make building a Digg-like site a lot easier than having to rely on ratings 🙂 But you are right, that is not the correct path forward. The standard function should work properly.

I can build around it. I can create a custom field for rating, that is filled on the fly via JS. Every time the user votes, the field is updated. Then sort by this default field. But that would be a crutch. And it's a shame to invest time in a crutch just because the standard function is buggy. 😉

If we nag enough, they will change it 🙂 Or we build around it...

I am not very optimistic whether they see it as a bug or “cosmetic”. If the latter, they will not change anything, I afraid.

As it is easy to get lost when building a website by taking on to much, this is a discussion thread on what to actually build and why. The focus on this site will be two-fold: Personal and Professional. The Personal This section will be pretty much the same with my personal blogs, my gallery and the about me section. Projects and my awesome people will be on the backburner is it is not a priority. About Me My Blog My Swedish Blog My Gallery Professional The professional aspect of the site is also divided into two sections: Information and community. The information aspect will be focused on three areas: News, Articles and Videos. The Community area will be focusing on the Forum and events with Clubs and Blogs as extras if anyone want to use them. Things like Companies, Products and apps will be in step two as they are not as important at the moment. I will just have them for connecting purposes with a standard setup. Information News Articles Videos Community Forum Events Clubs Blogs That is it for now.

I use the native function and I was not aware of the rating bug. I am just playing around at this time and the rating bug will be fixed eventually and probable before I will build this anyway 🙂

How to you make actual rating given? Do you use the native rating system of IPS? It has a bug right now preventing precise rating. I use it on the large live project, but the rating itself does not make sense with the bug. E.g. you can have 8 of 10 items that have exact the same rating in the IPS database even if they are really not. 😄

Concept...

One of the key features I want to build is a news site. This has always been a big focus for me, as I love to consume news. This site already have a News setup, but I never got the functionality working properly. Hopefully I can re-imagine this a bit once the Invision Community V5 is released. In short, I have been trying to adjust the SuperVote page template by OpenType, one of the best Pages developer there is. While partially successful, I never got it working 100% and that is probably because I broke everything while trying to adjust it to my liking. Instead of trying to hack the ratings update from the page listing, I will see if I can work with what already works. There are a few things that already work very well. For example, the actions taken are very nicely displayed based on the actual rating given. A little indicator show which news items you have rated, and the news itself is dimmed out if it has been given a low rating. These things are very nice, and I can work with this to show things nicely when I redesign this. If I can figure out how to update the ratings in the listing view, then that would be awesome, but I will not put too much effort into this to get started. Getting the news added in a news section will be the main focus. Automate News Automation of news will be important. Getting it done without ripping full articles is a bit trickier. While Invision Community comes with RSS import, it is crude and basically just show the RSS content. This will not work because that way I will basically be stealing articles from the Atlassian Community for example and that is not what I want. I can kind of mitigate this by truncating the content, but that is crude and not really a proper solution either. I can go with Zapier, of course, and I probably will do that in a limited way as it is quite expensive. The advantage with Zapier is that I have a lot more control, and I can for example truncate the content before it even comes to the site. Setting this up can be done using multiple Zapier accounts, where I set up one Zapier account for each RSS feed. Considering the number of RSS feeds, this is quite a lot of accounts to set up. Designing a new News setup I will spend some time to design a new News setup and try to figure out where to take this today and what the vision would be for the future. I am looking into the old Digg setup from the early 2000 as inspiration for what I would like to build eventually. For now, I am just brainstorming to try to figure out what functionality would make sense. I see some of these functions also being useful for other databases, so I will gather some functions together as a base for future database ideas as well. I will update with some designs once I have something to show.

As I have already posted, it is time for a new beginning. In this section I will blog about the progress of this site and my thoughts about building it. As I am paying for the blog feature I figure I might as well use it. I will ponder a bit on how I want to use it, but it makes sense to have it available, especially for Clubs. As for what I am currently doing I am playing around with design while I am waiting for Invision Community V5 to be released. I am creating the new icons and playing around with the colors a bit. I have decided to steal the Atlassian colors because they fit pretty well with what I have in mind and it provides a pretty good starting point. I am also playing around with the Atlassian product logos where I am exploring a line art version, but I am also creating new icons that are based on the Atlassian logos. These logos are different because unlike the Atlassian logos that have curves, my icons are built up with "pills" instead. I am having fun, but there is a lot of work to be done to set this up the way I want it. The colors alone are around 130+ colors and then I will need to decide on product colors and make the new icons. I will also need to create the CSS classes for all the colors, but for ths icons I am adding them to FontAwesome, so that is super handy! I will write more about the changes here as I get deeper into the process. So, more to come!

With the base design for the page listings I can now easily change the style by just changing the CSS attached to the page. This is because the standard layout was built using flex so it can fit pretty much anyway I want them. So far I have added the following Layouts: Default view Big Image on Top 2 column listing 3 column listing 2 column with first entry big Image I also created a new Block template for page feeds based on that same layout. I added this to the custom CSS however, so I don't have to add CSS to pages and are free to use blocks on any page. This means that I now only need to create a new Page Display template and a Form template before I have a fully customized experience for Pages.

It is now live 🙂

I played around a bit with a new portfolio design this weekend. I kind of like it so far...