Connecting FluentCommunity to a Glossary Plugin: Ideas?
Hi all!
I have an enhancement I would like to add to my community that I'm not sure how I'd do. I'd love any ideas you can give me!
So, I have a glossary plugin, CM Tooltip Glossary, that automatically injects links into my posts and pages (including custom post types) when I use a term I have a glossary entry on. I would love to carry this over to FluentCommunity!
The use case:
I run an educational community where I am trying to provide high-quality help for school-aged students. The students are between the ages of 14 and 18, and they need to know a wide range of quite complex linguistic, literary, sociological, philosophical and political terminology.
It's a huge mental load to expect students to be able to follow discussions that use these terms without definitions, but it's clunky as anything to always be explaining a term every time we use it in a discussion. It also doesn't teach them good writing for their exam. So, I would like to point students to my glossary to learn more if they want to.
It would also be helpful because it would increase SEO and clicks throughout my website, hopefully increasing the viewership of my site overall.
At the moment, the plugin can parse every other part of my website, but not FluentCommunity.
Any ideas?
FluentCommunity is not a regular wordpress page. Ive used this creative minds plugin for glossary and believe me its not the best glossary plugin there is even though it looks like the best, its a mess of old code and most of CM plugins the same. Now in regards to making it work in FC SPA, this will never be possible for CM :D
Cointacter What would you suggest for a glossary plugin?
Shani Cipro if I was you I'd be asking AI instead of people. Personally I dont know at the moment and would need to do a research.
Cointacter to be honest, I don’t trust AI with code stuff like this! It doesn’t say anything unless someone smart has said it before, and unlike humans, it doesn’t admit when it doesn’t know something! It just makes stuff up!
Shani Cipro research existing plugins on the web is not code. And yes indeed im saying you should use AI to make AI to research things that people have built, obviously
Cointacter I mean, most pertinent info about fluentcommunity comes from here right? So go straight to the source haha
Shani Cipro glossary is too niche, i highly doubt any glossary plugin will have FC integrated by the end of 2026
I use a different (better) glossary plugin. I’ve accepted it doesn’t work with FC, and a glossary feature is unlikely to be added by the ninjas (too niche).
My first compromise was to add a course link called “Glossary”. Unfortunately course links only show up on the main course page, they don’t show up on lesson pages.
I’m still looking for a better conpromise.
Coffs Trails Ooh what's the glossary plugin you use?
Shani Cipro search this space for my comment on glossary about two weeks ago to see my plugin
Hi everyone, I have spent the past week testing and trying all sorts of approaches to programmatically creating or updating space posts. There are some examples of things that got me started in the dev docs.
- shortcodes will not execute in a post title or message. It is not like a WordPress page or post.
- You can add some html when you make a space post, in my case (if you look at my posts I have on this forum) I am trying to automatically update some images on posts. BUT, you can't use inline JS to execute and make changes in the post (confirmed by FluentComm).
- It is very easy to create a new post A) using a snippet and PHP or B) using Flowmattic plugin and the fluentcommunity integration. Flowmattic is the WordPress equivalent to microsoft 365 power automate IMHO. VERY powerful in its own right... and combined with fluentsnippets with some custom code, it could do a lot!
- You might take a look at Flowmattic, if a miracle happened it might have an integration or something with your glossary thing. It might help you do some cool things... like transferring your glossary or an export of it in cvs to a table it can iterate thru and create a post for each glossary item. Then keep all your glossary items as posts in a new space called Course Glossary. It would always be visible on the left menu, even when they are in a course. You can link to posts too, maybe from the course lessons?
Those are just a few thoughts. I do use a few WP pages for some things, BUT am trying to adopt the fluentcommunity post structures to my needs. I believe I am close on mine (having posted on this forum as well as having a detailed support ticket open too). Hope my ramblings help.
So far I am very impressed with the clean design of fluentcommunity and fluentsnippets, as well as the handy integrations I have tried with Flowmattic.
Good luck, Jamie
Jamie Robe I can't code #4, but I can follow your logic - and that idea is 🔥
Jamie Robe Those are really helpful! Although my glossary looks like it's building up to be over 3000 terms so I'm not sure if a course would be the easiest to navigate!
Did some digging into both plugins. The one you're using Shani Cipro would require some serious code manipulation to get it to work and then probably continuous maintenance, so definitely not worth the effort for anyone.
The one that Coffs Trails is using would be easier, but still require some extended code.
I think the better option is to build out a new one just for FCom, which I am now working on. I can't promise anything because I've got several other things I'm working on right now as well.
Jeff Brigman thanks for that! Please let me know if you get round to developing it & how much you’d charge!
Shani Cipro working on it now. Have a rough settings page created and confirmed my script is loading in FCom. Feel free to post any must have features here as a reply.
Already have enable/disable button, content selector (in case they change the content classes in a future update), tooltip character limit, and tooltip link limit.
This will be a CPT (custom post type) in the standard WP Admin area, so you will be able to easily export/import any current glossary terms you are using for the rest of your site using the default WP tool.
So far everything is looking pretty good, but having already done some things with FCom I've come to realize it's a whole different animal trying to get things to work correctly with it like this.
Shani Cipro still a long way, but here's what I have so far. Still have to integrate it with SPA so it stays as you navigate around your community.
Jeff Brigman You are far cleverer than me! Thank you!
Jeff Brigman Amazing! I'm looking forward to it! One of the main reasons why I chose CM Tooltip Glossary is because you can have both synonyms and variations. I like that synonyms appear separately on the archive but link to the same entry, but variations can just be things like a change in tense or plural vs singular and won't appear as a separate link on the archive page. It's great that synonyms are listed under the main name for the term while variations aren't, too. I like that it's a CPT so that I can use Advanced Ads to inject ads (it's how my website is funding itself at the moment so I can focus on making money for me from sales).
I also love that I can separate the glossary into multiple independent glossaries with their own archives based on their categories and tags. That way, I can separate things for specific learners. Plus, the fact that the tooltip can just contain the excerpt and you can click to read more is great. It makes it so that my glossary posts don't have to compete as much with AI, since I'm not just defining terms, but also giving examples of when and where to use them that don't clutter up the tooltip, if that makes sense?
It is really cool that CMTTG gives you the option to allow your community to suggest new terms, as well. My community is very small because I literally only built it recently, but it would be useful in the future, I think.
The thing I'm missing from CMTTG is the ability to ignore unimportant articles. I hate that 'The Odyssey' is under 'T' instead of 'O', for example!
Also, I like that CMTTG has the ability to turn off glossary terms or blacklist terms for specific posts and pages. In linguistics, there are terms that are just used in regular day-to-day speech but mean something important when you use them linguistically. It's useful to be able to blacklist those terms when I'm not using them linguistically.
Shani Cipro here's where I'm at now. I think I've finally got the SPA navigation figured out. I was up until midnight trying to get it to work... I could get it to work but not link multiple terms in a post, then I could get multiple terms to link but when navigating the site it wouldn't detect the terms unless you reloaded the browser.
https://snowy-pebble-179685.1wp.site/community/space/general-discussion/post/hey-1766419853
Jeff Brigman Ooh let me know if you need testers for anything!
Shani Cipro I definitely will. I thought I was ready for a basic beta version but found some issues between SPA and caching I need to try to resolve first.
Jeff Brigman Also happy to help test.
Shani Cipro Coffs Trails just an update: https://snowy-pebble-179685.1wp.site/community/space/general-discussion/post/test-1766608366
I can say I officially hate caching even though its a necessary evil. I've been fighting server, site/page, and browser caching for the past day. It's been a huge pain in the rear, but I'm at a stopping point for now/today.
I still need to tackle some minor caching issues as unfortunately this is tied to the WordPress side and not so much the FCom in regards to cache
Jeff Brigman It looks like good progress to me!
Got a stable beta working on the staging site and now mine. Join my community to join the testing, I will sharing the beta plugin there soon.
https://jeffbrigman.com/community/space/fluent-community/post/fluent-glossary
Jeff Brigman registration 2fa email coming into spam box because mail that your email is being sent from is jeffandape@xcloud.email
Cointacter fixed, for some reason it kept forcing that free email address. I have removed it and confirmed the correct MX records.
Jeff Brigman I can't get the confirmation email either (I tried to sign up today). The prob may be on my end, but I thought I'd mentioned it in case.
Charlotte D the email was rejected as a catch all and due to your server returning a 403 forbidden error.
Shani Cipro Are you using the repo version or the premium version of Tooltip Glossary?
Charlotte D I'm currently using the premium (ecommerce) version!