App for 2 communities + push notifications – any tips? Update on native app?
Hi everyone,
We’re looking to build an app for two of our communities, and push notifications are our top priority. Right now, we’re struggling with low engagement, and we believe push notifications could really help improve that.
Does anyone have experience implementing push notifications in an app, or integrating them with platforms like Fluent Community?
Also, is there any update on the third-party company that was working on the native app for Fluent Community?
Any insights or advice would be greatly appreciated!
Have you looked at a plugin, like PushEngage, to see if it can work with FluentCommunity?
William Beem No, do you have experience with this one? They have some kind of integration with Wordpress posts it seems. I have no experience with push notifications. I think we will go the route with a PWA app, because we don't have to submit to App store than.
Sam Jansen No, I'm aware of it. Push notices seem to require a service, so a plugin is mostly an interface to the service and you'll have a cost to send notices. Seems like you'd need something that will allow you to push notices that you can define for a custom post type, like a new post or a reply.
FluentCommunity has email notices, but you may get more engagement from push notificaations if people don't check their email.
William Beem I looked at PushEngage, but it's a bit too expensive for now. I'm going to look into integrating Webpushr with Fluent Community
Have u looked at OneSignal -> https://onesignal.com/pricing?
Peter The free plan is better than PushEngage. I saw OneSignal too, but their free plan still includes branding. Webpushr, on the other hand, has no branding and also offers 10,000 free notifications.
From my initial research, it seems quite simple — it looks like you can just hook into fluentcommunity_send_notification and use that as a push notification. However, I'm not 100% sure if it will work.
Update: It wasn’t too difficult to implement. For the private messages, I still need to decide what I’ll do. FC is currently batch processing the email notifications. I might do the same for the push notifications.
Sounds interesting, Sam Jansen - can you elaborate on what you've done / what the result is?
Jonathan Gwyer I wrote some custom code to integrate FC with Webpushr. I'm using the default notification triggers from FC, like comments, mentions, etc., and sending that notification info as a push notification with the same link as the default notification.
To integrate Webpushr into FC, you need to add a JavaScript snippet inside FC. Through the Webpushr settings, I disabled their notification bell and message popups, since FC already has its own notification system — I found it too much otherwise. So I’m only using their push notifications.
The first time, the user gets a prompt to accept push notifications. I tested it and it worked quite well on both mobile and desktop. I think it even works when the app or browser is closed. The user receives the push notification almost instantly.
The only thing I still need to check is private messages. Since FC uses a cron job to trigger email notifications for private messages, I haven’t been able to test that part yet. I didn’t spend much time on it so far.
Once I finish and everything works well, I can share the code here.
Sam Jansen that's excellent - look forward to seeing more!
Sam Jansen Sam, thank you so much for being willing to share! I'm in need of the same solution but I'm up to my arse in alligators and have almost zero time to research and code this. I'll be very grateful for your generous offer. <3
Sam Jansen will be glad to have the code as well.
Great job here
Sam Jansen have you looked at Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) for the push notifications? It seems to be completely free https://firebase.google.com/pricing
🎉 Wow Sam, congratulations on everything you’re doing! 🔥
I’m actually in a very similar process — we’ve been working non-stop for two and a half months, and just this week we finally launched the first official version of our app for both Android and iOS 🚀📱
Right now, we’re exactly at the stage of integrating internal notifications, because as you said, engagement drops a lot without them. They’re absolutely essential to keep the community active and alive 💬📲
Our original approach was exactly like yours:
👉 Hooking into fluentcommunity_send_notification and redirecting it via custom code to OneSignal.
📌 In our case, I highly recommend OneSignal, for a few reasons:
- It works natively on both Android and iOS
- It’s stable and well-documented
- And even if you go for the paid plan, the pricing is very affordable 💸
So we’re working on this right now, and your post came at the perfect time — thank you! 🙏
Also, huge thanks for pointing out the situation with private messages. That’s something we were planning to leave on stand-by for now, exactly because we suspected it required a different level of integration (especially with the cron job handling email notifications).
I’ll stay tuned in case you share more insights or code! Your contribution is a huge help to the whole community. 💡👏
hello Sam Jansen and David Badilla Salazar could you please give me a hint here?
I can't find anywhere in the code fluentcommunity_send_notification.
Thank you very much,
Giorgio
Giorgio Luciani Hi Giorgio — thanks for the ping.
We’re still in the early integration phase, wiring our native app (via Web2Native) to FluentCommunity and to OneSignal (IDs, tags, and delivery). Because we’re focused on getting that handshake stable first, we’re not using—or documenting—any fluentcommunity_send_notification entry point in our code yet. That’s why you won’t find it referenced on our side.
Once the app ↔ FluentCommunity ↔ OneSignal link is solid, we’ll be able to share more concrete details about the notification hook we end up using.
— David
David Badilla Salazar thank you so much for your kind explanation David!
Hello,
if anyone is still looking for a solution/workaround I've shared my code snippet here:
https://community.wpmanageninja.com/portal/space/community-meta/post/push-notifications-any-news?comment_id=28840