Hi everyone,
Just tested the latest beta version, it looks very promising, so keep up the good work!
I was asked to provide feedback, so although I haven't spent much time, here are a few ideas:
- Could the admin edit their points so that they don't start at the bottom of the food chain? :)
- Although the plugin looks very ambitious, it's goint to take a while before the courses aspect can catch up with Learndash and its ecosystem. As we already have many existing courses and groups and would like to add the community aspect of the plugin, it would be great if you could make some changes / offer some options that I'm going to list below.
- Please could you swap groups and space, or provide an option for us to do it in the back end? It doesn't make sense for existing users to see their groups become spaces, and to discover groups that are new spaces. Way too confusing!
- Could you offer Learndash integration, so that we can sync LD groups with Fluent Spaces (ideally called groups), and decide in which Fluent group (ideally called spaces) Learndash groups we select should appear. Note that import won't work, it has to be real time sync/integration, as members come and go all the time in LD groups.
- I love the idea of moving our courses to this plugin at some point, but there are many things that would be needed for us to make this work, starting with Easy Digital Download compatibility (to purchase courses, the way we use it to purchase LD courses as EDD has a multi-currency option and can use Paddle which automatically supports VAT and sales tax reporting)
- Alternatively, as Paymattic already supports multi-currency, Paymattic could be an option if you add Paddle support to it.
- Some of the things you would need to compete with the Learndash platform: a) course certificates on completion ; b) ability for the students to take notes in each lesson, so that they can be saved as MS word or printed; c) custom notifications to send to the users ad different times/according to different events.
For me, the biggest thing in order to be able to use it now (so with Learndash) would be LD integration so that LD groups and courses are supported (and so that we can rename spaces as groups and groups as spaces, if you decide to stick with the current organisation).
That's about it after a very short time spent with the plugin, I'll post more when I can.
Keep up the good work!
The Course option is not meant to be a replacement for LearnDash.
Ryk Melck, sure, it can't be at the moment, which makes a Learndash integration all the more important. As I said, at this stage, that's the only thing that would make the plugin usable for us, so that LD groups are automatically available in the community plugin. We can't sync all our groups manually.
Welcome to the community @screenplayunlimited. I will write a detailed post tomorrow about the product philosophy and what the future will look like.
About the terminology: We are using the same terminology of circle (I am a fan of).
Regarding points: The system should not allow leaderboard manipulation. It should be real.
As Ryk Melck said, our course module will never be as feature-rich as LD / Lifter / Tutor and that's not the product goal. We want to keep things simple, and super-fast. Of course, we will have a course monetization option and I think you can easily do that right now with the help of FluentCRM.
In the future, we will add more integration for sure.
Shahjahan Jewel, thanks for the reply. I understand that you don't want to compete with LD, but for us LD users the two main feature requests I made stand:
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if you want to keep the current groups/spaces nomenclature that you're a fan of, please let us change this to what makes sense to us and our users. It's hard enough to get users to understand the concept of groups with having to then confuse them further.
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Especially as you don't want to compete with Learndash, please confirm that LD integration will be on the roadmap in the near future, so that we can use the community aspect of the plugin and keep LD to manage our courses and groups. Without LD integration (so that LD groups are automatically useable in the community), there is no way for us to use this community plugin. We're not going to ask our users to register twice on the same website.
Regarding payment, I own most of Fluent plugins, but none of them allows to charge users without having to deal with EU VAT and Sales tax. As far as I knowm Paddle is the only payment processor that is also a merchant of record, and no fluent plugin supports it. So no payment option will do for us as it's too much of a headache to calculate VAT or sales tax according to each user's location and then report and pay it to whoever. I've already added this as a feature request for Paymattic, so hopefully this will happen at some point. I'll purchase Paymattic as soon as it supports Paddle.
This is not a problem for us in the near future, as we'll keep using LD and EDD with its Paddle integration. The only thing we need to be able to use the Fluent community plugin is the ability to rename spaces into groups and groups into spaces (or whatever we want), and a learndash integration so that we don't have to recreate/update/manage our groups outside of LD.
Thanks and I hope you'll consider these two suggestions, if so I'll purchase the plugin at launch!
Emmanuel Oberg, Just to let you know, Fluent Forms just added Paddle in the last update :)
Emmanuel Oberg and Shahjahan Jewel - Learn dash let's you set the nomenclature to what you want (just has a settings page that lets you give a new singular and plural name to each level of content) - something like that could be handy as a feature update here, or could be adjusted to match in LD (though then people need to get used to the new names.)
As for mapping LD groups, could that be accomplished as part of a fCRM automation?
Blaine Moore, this is what I meant by offering a way to change the spaces and groups to whatever we need. I've changed the "lessons" in LD by "modules", because that works better for our audience (professionals). We have hundreds of clients used to their "groups", there is no way we're changing this in LD, so hopefully this small customization can be done in Fluent Community.
I don't see how a CRM automation (or Automator, we have Uncanny's plugin as well) could deal with not only creating the group in community but also creating all the users with the same login. This is why an LD integration seems like the only way forward. Not sure if FLuent community allows WP users to join a community without having to create a new account. If so, then that's not the plugin for us and I'm not sure I understand its philosophy, so I'll wait to read more from Shahjahan Jewel detailed post tomorrow.
Emmanuel Oberg there is a way to add a Learndash customer to a community. I would setup an automation in FluentCRM and use tagging. I would however like to see a tag option directly in the Fluent Community moving forward. But for now this functionality exists.
Ryk Melck, thanks, that's a start, but it looks like for my needs (LD groups having a forum for discussions) I might just need the free bbpress plugin and the already existing (and free) Learndash integration for it. I'm a huge fan of Fluent (we own and use the pro versions of CRM, forms, ninja tables, social ninja, boards, booking and support and we're trying to move everything we use to Fluent due to the quality of the coding and support) so I was hoping that this Community plugin would do this easily, but it might not be as easy as I thought to integrate such feature. Let's see what Shahjahan Jewel says today about the plugin philosophy, I might have got it wrong. For me, LD integration looked like a no-brainer and a day one addition to widen its market, given that many Fluent plugins (well, at least FluentCRM, it's EDD integration that helps with fluent support) have LD integration already.
Emmanuel Oberg, sorry but I do not get the issue. If you are using FluentCRM Pro its breeze.
Ryk Melck, The issue is that we can't rely exclusively on automation (we have both Automator Pro and FluentCRM Pro, so automation isn't an issue). We have dozens of existing LD groups and many existing courses, we want to be able to simply assign a specific forum / discussion to each of these existing groups (and, ideally, courses), and to all future groups, as they are created and populated.