Hi. Really glad to see this. I did a pretty extensive search for community apps for my membership site and wound up not doing one as a) I wanted them to be more like circle/hearbeat/mightynetworks than a "board" or facebook group. But the most important thing was I've already have a membership and dont the community app to take over membership, registration, profiles, etc. It needs to integrate with an already carefully crafted membership structure, user profiles that are supported by user meta fields etc. In the community apps I saw, I would have wound up with two "profiles" for every member with no great way to synch them. So that's a concern I have, but otherwise, you are spot on - there is a big gap here.
FluentCommunity uses the users' table + it's own table to store some extra data to make the SQL queries super fast. So it will be auto-synced always.
Shahjahan Jewel, that is great. Does that mean if I register a user, that they auto have a profile in community?
Brett Hill, in the current implementation, when a logged in user visit the portal for the first time then we create the portal profile (like adding a flag that, it's a community user).
Shahjahan Jewel, ok thanks. I know you're in beta, and I'm really good at finding problems so if you're interested in another tester, I'd be happy to put this on my staging site and see if to would work in this scenario.
Brett Hill yes, please. It's always great to get feedback from experts like you.
Shahjahan Jewel, where do I get the beta bits?
Brett Hill, please check the unofficial starter guide - maybe it will be much easier to start.
Okay, it's installed and looks promising. The key issue I have, though, is the one I mentioned. My members have already have completed proflies with details stored in user meta fields for the most part. For example, a LinkedIn account URL,. I see that your profile also has a linked-in URL, but I have no way to map what they have already entered to your prorfile. Also, the user image we use is not the gravator image.
Having two places to edit profiles on the site, is bound to be confusing.
I need to be able to either a) map your user profile fields to the existing user meta fields or b) have a way to populate these automatically. Otherwise, this is going to be confusing for people.
Any thoughts on this?
Thanks. Love the work your doing here.