When Trust Breaks: The Missing Events Feature

Shahjahan Jewel will there be a native Fluentbooking one-off events integration? Or is this something completely different?

I hope for Fluentbooking integration because I use this in many client sites and it would be awefull if we had to use 2 different systems for events. I really hope you extend the events part for booking, instead of building a whole new module

Shahjahan Jewel definitely looking forward to your event plugin, but also hoping what I've done will be diverse enough to continue to exist 👍

David Churchill to be clear my message was more about my concerns regarding the ninja team and not your effort.

Ioannis Glossopoulos yes, I got that 😊 - just hoping SpaceEvents will continue to be useful, which I think it will once I've added in the new features I'm working on.

Shahjahan Jewel will this be something we need to purchase to have event functionality in Fluent Community?

Shahjahan Jewel yeah i remember u stating that fluent team will make events for fluentbookings plugin, so i have no idea why here so many other people built their events plugins :D

David Churchill being useful is one thing. Building addons for fcom when fcom itself will release the same thing - thats another thing. You can build the most innovative out of this world with help from aliens, but if fluent team will build it themselves then your plugin out of business

Thanks for your support Cointacter 🙏

David Churchill im just being real. Think yourself - would it be better if id be telling you yes build it no matter what keep going etc.. this is rainbow sentence, far from reality. Youre doing this business, its your choice and decision. Fyi i clearly remember Jewel telling us there will be calendar for fcom via fluentbookings.

Cointacter I know they are building an Event addon (I have requested it and commented on the roadmap), but I needed something now for my clients, so I built my own. As it worked I offered it to other people who are also using it, I owe it to them to continue supporting it for as long as they need it. I am also building some other addons to fill gaps and add extra functionality, in the same way I have for BuddyPress. I may decide to switch when it's released, I will just have to wait, see and test it when it's launched 😊

David Churchill right ok its your choice and you know what youre doing :)

Cointacter wherever I see you post something, it's always so negative, cold and odd.

Anne-Sophie W how many events addons are there currently for fcom? 3 that i know at least. FCA is now 100% focused only on Events plugins. Leave me alone I cannot stand all this bullshit anymore. Wait and you will be paying me money for my products all i can say

Cointacter me, buying your products? All you can do is type angry nonsense. Since when you are a developer? Lmao. And even if you made the best add on I wouldn’t give you a penny but hey good luck with your community serving god knows what purpose x)

Anne-Sophie W even the best stuff will be free and you will sneakily install and use it without me even blinking

Cointacter there isn’t one thing you write that isn’t weird like what you just wrote honestly… you’re lucky that you don’t get flagged lol

Anne-Sophie W u dont even understand where youre commenting. This guy David, according to your unconditional King Ross, David stole code from Ross and thats the reason why King Ross left his community in silence for a month 😀😀

Cointacter get a life. Seriously.

Anne-Sophie W my life is exactly how you would imagine it perfect in terms of me working for you. Yeah, im your Slave, free one, without u even knowing. I work full time for you, im 200% dedicated, 200% passioned, and 200% exactly experienced for what i do. And im happy about it, Your Majesty

Shahjahan Jewel I'm celebrating already, this is a super useful feature, I can't wait for its release

Shahjahan Jewel Any update to the events plugin? If you need beta tester, I would LOVE to be one of them and more than willing to provide feedback 😊

Christian Frank Ross posted a major update to his Events Pro plugin one day ago.

Melynda Yep. But my update isn't working.

Marek the lack off a way to hook into the software also. It's such a closed system you can only add plugins really by sketchy overwrites. Really sucks

Wilco Wietsma what is closed? The UI ? How do you imagine hooks for UI ? This isnt any kind of normal practice. API itself is strong and growing .

Cointacter take a look at discourse or NodeBB and see how they allow for customization. Whole different playing field

Dan Linstedt I will have a look @ PieCalendar, seems a good one!

Dan Linstedt does that actually work within your community?

Anne-Sophie W I've not done the integration with the community tbh. However that said, I integrated it deeply with LearnDash, wpFusion, wooCommerce, and wordfence on our site: https://dvaUniversity.com What I do know is this: I've used "The Events Calendar" (TEC), and "WP Event Manager" (WPEM).

TEC: highly complex code, hard to customize look & feel, layout, fields on event entry forms. Difficult to find the right callbacks to hook into. Regarding the quality: we used it for 2 years, stopped using it because of the constant flurry of "what appeared to be" untested quick-fire release patches.

So, we moved to WPEM: WPEM is great, well documented, and fits the bill IF you want your "entire site" to be dedicated to WPEM. They have a series of "add-ons" (over 40+) that help customize everything from colors to look and feel. The difficulty there is two-fold: the code (with about 20 add-ons we needed), is extremely heavy, and slowed down our site (we were on Cloudways, big machine config, and we had an additional 25 plugins we MUST run, so that made for a very heavy footprint. The second thing we struggled with was their support, not necessarily slow to respond (kudos to them), but they were never able to "reproduce our issues" and were constantly asking for admin access to "see what we see". A no go, even when I told them DIRECTLY which code lines were failing, and how to fix it.

So - frustrated, we moved to PieCalendar.com. HAPPY HAPPY ! JOY JOY!! so lightweight, most of it is JavaScript driven, they use a fully exposed custom post type (which is easy to extend, add/import/export items to) we use ACF Pro for this, and "fits" or embeds in any page seamlessly.

Because the "model of operation" of PieCalendar "fits" with the javascript driven focus of FluentCommunity, I would assume it fits very very nicely without any hassles what-so-ever. You might want to use Claude Code, or ChatGPT to "generate a custom plugin" to "carry over" permissions to events and such, but that's an easy thing. OR you might check out wpFusion for tagging abilities, it can tag your users, and then you can control permissions (even on custom post types) and visibility from there without custom code.

Hope this helps,
Dan

Dan Linstedt I couldn't figure out how to get Pie Calendar to work inside FluentCommunity. I ditched TEC when I migrated off LearnDash and BuddyBoss, but the biggest issue is FluentCommunity is in Vue and a lot of plugins won't display (at least that's my understanding) if you want a fully integrated experience.

Hi Jen McFarland obviously a plug for my own product, but SpaceEvents has a lot of features and integrates with FluentCommuity (both Portal and Spaces). The next update will include Gutenberg Blocks and [shortcodes] to display events on any WordPress page, with options to let Public and Members book (RSVP). I'll be adding payment options after that, likely Stripe and FluentCart options.

I moved away from Pixelite's Event Manager and BuddyPress, which needed tweaking to work the way we wanted.

Jen McFarland sorry to hear about your experience with PieCalendar. Did you talk to the creators? What did you try that didn't work? I might be able to help out here.. If you are done with PieCalendar, I understand. No harm,no foul.

Mark Halvorson It always surprise me, being a senior entrepreneur with at least 3 businesses in the service sector to still see developers or other entrepreneurs in the B2B sector to join a hype, promise a lot and then underdeliver. BUT my main problem is the NOT clear communication. I can do that, i can't do that. All businesses have timelines, features, estimated time for these new features. Its not a privilege or a right, it's just common sense and clear boundaries.

Ioannis Glossopoulos fully agree. If u create a software and a roadmap and some one purchase it under a promise, u have to honour that, not to sell something else, because the trust goes down

Mark Halvorson I'm with you. I don't like the tone of the OP's message and I'm continually impressed with how Shajahan responds to people like this. My advice to anyone up in arms about Fluent Community is go to Buddy Boss, Circle, Mighty Networks...any of them. Then you'll realize how amazing Fluent Community is and come back with a little more humility.

kyler boudreau Dude I just made a simple statement with some of my concerns. I don’t want to go anywhere. I appreciate the fluent ecosystem I am a client for at least 6 years now. I just need clear communication and some understanding.

Mark Halvorson half a century of experience? What did you build online 50 years ago? Truly curious..

Anne-Sophie W 

Anne-Sophie W There was no online then, of course. My first job was as a software/hardware engineer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in '74 while I was studying computer science at UCSD, so yeah, it was punched cards and paper tape era. 😀 I did machine language at Scripps and Algol 60 (predecessor to Pascal) the next day at school on a Burroughs B6700 mainframe.

I guess I should have added that as a software engineer we become used to software projects failing, life getting in the way, and being leapfrogged and left behind quite a bit. I guess that may be why I only rely on things that are already working and never on something that's promised.

Ioannis Glossopoulos take this portion of your post: "My business relies heavily on online events, and now I’m left exposed, without a stable solution. At the same time, events have been repeatedly requested on the Fluent roadmap, yet there has been no clear action or communication from the Ninja Team."

I'm still with Mark H. Software is a gift. We don't have a right to it. We don't have a right to when they make updates to their roadmap.

Gratitude is what explodes from me for all fluent products. I've been through the ringer with the other solutions. They're horrible. Can't imagine life without Fluent.

Mark Halvorson I agree. The third-party plugin in question being referred to was made by someone who offered lifetime deals with the transparency that he works a full-time job, has kids and that this is a side project that he isn't sure of the timelines for things. He then didn't reply in his community for around 2 months and people basically suggested that he's scamming people.

I'm not a software person, but it amazes me to see other, more techy people treating creating complex addons like it's baking a cake with clear baking times – especially when the person has communicated before that there are no clear timelines.

It's doubly true when you're making addons for another plugin that doesn't communicate new updates with you. You could be working hard on some new addon update, only for the WPMN team to announce a (much loved and much wanted) whole week of updates that break all the things you've done. And people assume that someone not going on their community for a while so they can prioritise the making of the actual addon means they've disappeared.

Don Miller I remember those days fondly. Exciting.

Don Miller Hey, see my comment above about working at Scripps Oceanography doing computers. The guy who hired me was a guy named Don Miller! Crazy.