Almost 10 months ago, I thought building a proper app for our FluentCommunity might be impossible. Today, my community is live on the App Store.
For almost ten months, I was trying to find the right way to turn our FluentCommunity platform into a proper mobile experience for our members.
I run Kidnest, a Greek parenting education platform for parents of young children. Our community is at the heart of the platform: parents share real questions, access guides and courses, save helpful material, and feel less alone in the hard moments of parenting.
At first, we used a PWA. It worked well: it was fast, had notifications, and gave parents an easy way to access the community. But I kept feeling that, for the kind of experience we wanted to offer, we needed a real native app, something simple, fast, familiar, and trustworthy for a parent who may already feel overwhelmed.
The difficult part was not simply “making an app.” It was making sure that FluentCommunity’s structure, Spaces, groups, courses, feed, saved content, messaging and navigation ,could become genuinely easy to use on mobile without making the platform feel confusing or fragmented.
That is where James Elrod and Two Birds Code made a real difference.
James did not just hand over a generic app wrapper. He spent serious time listening to the way Kidnest works, looking at the real issues we found during testing, and improving the app step by step.
From native navigation and deep linking, to courses inside groups, login details, messaging behaviour, app review requirements, and all the small things users notice but rarely mention he was consistently present and willing to work through them.
Today, the Kidnest app is officially live on the Apple App Store. We are now waiting for the final Google Play production approval, and then Android will follow as well.
It has been a long process, but I am genuinely proud of where we got to. More importantly, I am excited because Greek parents will now be able to carry their Kidnest community, guidance, courses and support with them in a much simpler way.
A big thank you to the FluentCommunity ecosystem for making this possible, and especially to James at Two Birds Code for the patience, care, technical work, and genuine commitment he put into this project.
If anyone here is trying to move a FluentCommunity platform from PWA to a native mobile app, I am happy to share what I learned along the way.
Seems like audio-files can't be uploaded to the community, when "video-upload" in fluent-player-settings is deactivated.
If you try - the audio-upload icon is still shown - an error-message "you can't upload videos.." is shown in the right corner, as soon as you choose a file and click on upload.
Bug or on purpose?
Hi Fluent Community team,
I would like to propose a feature request regarding content retention when a user's membership or subscription expires.
Currently, if a user's subscription lapses and they lose access to the community, any posts or discussions they started can become inaccessible or hidden. This can unintentionally erase valuable community discussions, threads, and the time other members spent replying to them.
Suggested Feature: Introduce a setting or behavior where:
- Revoking a user's access due to an expired subscription blocks the user from logging in or participating.
- Their historical posts, threads, and comments remain visible on the platform as archived content so that valuable discussions and community knowledge aren't lost.
This would help keep community archives rich and prevent valuable troubleshooting or conversational threads from disappearing entirely when a user leaves.
What do you think? Would love to see this considered for a future update!
Pulling the trigger this week on moving from BuddyBoss to FluentCommunity. Before we do how does it work with SureMembers & SureCart?
This is a single-item private community, so I don't really need a cart feature. I'd be open to moving to Paymattic, but i don't see where Paymattic can add people to groups within FC. It looks like I need FluentCart to do that, which is $250/yr where SureMembers is free. Please correct me if I'm wrong and Paymattic does member group integration.
In the past I used forum systems like phpBB, SimpleMachines and vBulletin. One of the cool things those forum platforms have are some cool statistics and info.
Would be nice to have a widget or something where I can see Who is Online. Another widget could be Today's Birthday, including a list of users who are celebrating their birthday today.
There could be other small widgets with different info. Actually, you already included a few ones. I'm just suggesting a couple that could be nice to be included in future releases.
Thanks!
Product: FluentCommunity 2.9.1 (Pro 2.9.1), WordPress 7.1, PHP 8.3
What happens
A mention at the end of a sentence is not resolved:
Thanks @ pcl,renders as a link to the profile. Correct.Thanks @ pcl.renders as plain text. No link, no notification.
Every other punctuation mark works. Only the period fails.
It is not limited to the one mention: getMentions() returns null for the
whole post as soon as no candidate resolves, so a second, correctly written
mention in the same post is dropped as well.
Why
app/Services/FeedsHelper.php:
public static function getMentions($text, $spaceId = null, $withUsers = false)
{
// the mention may have . or _ or - in the username
preg_match_all('/@([a-zA-Z0-9_.-]+)/', $text, $matches);The period is part of the character class, so @pcl. yields the candidate
pcl., and XProfile::whereIn('username', ['pcl.']) finds nobody.
The comment above the pattern does not hold. Every path that assigns a user
name goes through CustomSanitizer::sanitizeUserName():
$username = sanitize_user($username);
$username = preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9_]/', '', $username);Neither a period nor a hyphen survives that. Callers are
ProfileHelper (2x), ProfileController (2x) and PortalHandler, which even
compares the stored name against the sanitised one. Measured on a live site
with 236 profiles: 0 contain a period, 0 contain a hyphen.
The affected mention paths are FeedsController::store,
FeedsController::update, FeedsHelper::createFeed, CommentsController::store
and CommentsController::update. Beyond the missing link, the post also loses
meta.mentioned_user_ids, and with it the bell notification
(NotificationEventHandler::maybeHandleMentionedUserIds), the mention e-mail
(EmailNotificationHandler) and the Pro FollowHandler.
Suggested fix
Drop the period and the hyphen from the character class, matching what
sanitizeUserName() allows:
preg_match_all('/@([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)/', $text, $matches);If older installations may carry imported names with a period, a fallback that
retries the candidate with trailing periods trimmed would cover both.
Related, same function
strtr() replaces substrings anywhere in the text, so a mention that resolves
also rewrites an e-mail address that happens to contain the same name:
$t = 'Thanks @ anna, write to hello@ anna.de please.';
strtr($t, ['@ anna' => '<a>Anna</a>']);
// Thanks <a>Anna</a>, write to hello<a>Anna</a>.de please.A replacement anchored on a word boundary before the @ would avoid it.
I would appreciate it if Fluent Community and Fluent Messaging could convert characters into emojis.
Like: :-) to 🙂 etc..
just putting a new community together and planning spaces and had an idea.
What if we created a space and added a few topics to that space and when that space grows big enough would could branch out topics in that space out into their own space and move all the posts featured with that topic.
Eg space is SEO
Space topics: Google, Backlinks, social.
if there was a lot of social topics in that space if we could just turn that topic into its own space and move all those posts to that space with a few button clicks, this could be a great way to expand the community as it grows. Start with one space a few topics and expand as site grows.
After Updating FC to 2.9.1 now my vimeo videos shrink in desktop and mobile. They tend to inherit the width size of the title.. Please I need it to be always 100% width of that container like it was in previous versions
