An update - FluentCommunity
I know, we did not release a new version in the last couple of days. It's because we are working on the UI & UX and I can say, you will love it. I am hoping to release the next BIG version early next week.
Just wanted to share something interesting and a background story about this plugin. We built the very first version of this plugin more than a year ago.
We built it to use our team communications, saving meeting notes, product updates, etc. We call it "Lounge". So basically we are running all the projects in this Lounge including our HR activities.
Then early this year, we installed it on this site to onboard our beta users and gather feedback for FluentBoards.
While we are running the beta testing for FluentBoards on this platform, many of you asked which plugin we are using in this platform and I got countless messages about the plugin. Finally, we decided to release the product for everyone.
What to expect:
As I mentioned a couple of times, FluentCommunity was built for speed & performance. We want to keep it lean, simple, and super fast while making it powerful and having all the core features to run a community efficiently.
In WordPress, there are no optimized solutions yet where you can get similar experiences like circle.so or skool. BuddyPress is great but it was built a decade ago and looks like they lost interest. The famous fork of BuddyPress is more heavy and you can never scale that.
So these are the couple of points that I have in mind right now about FluentCommunity
- Keeping it simple yet powerful
- Making it scalable without breaking your server (In fact, we have tested with 500K Posts and Comments along with 100K users and we are happy about the performance. I am sure there is more rooms to improve)
- Give you the ability to monetize your community by selling memberships, and courses.
- The course module will be light-weight and as always super fast for students. We want to make it as a part of your website and have freedom to use it along with your favorite LMS or membership sites. I think we are not competing with any existing LMS. We just want to serve the people, who need a light-weight super-fast Learning management solution.
- Super-Dupper integration with other Fluent plugins like FluentCRM, FluentBooking, Boards (+ a few upcoming flagship products), etc.
- Most importantly, I want to give you the confidence to build & run your next BIG community platform with FluentCommunity.
As you know, it's a niche solution, and based on our market research, FluentCommunity will be the go-to solution for agencies, coaches, Workplaces, organizations, and anyone who wants to build and run a community efficiently.
I am super confident with my engineering team and I can see no existing solutions in WP can beat our performance (Open Challenge 🙈)
We are preparing an exclusive Lifetime License offer only for the beta users within this month. After this internal launch, we will release for the public and that will be a much higher price point.
I want to thank you all for helping us to build this product. Without your feedback, we could not build these useful features, and resolve bugs so quickly. Love you all.
PS: This was the very first status using FluentCommunity Plugin in our Lounge and you can see the date. OHH! yes, this is a sneak peek of our new UI (Work in progress).
Tagging @everyone here.
Exciting times ahead. Thank you Shahjahan Jewel and the team.
It's been a year already?
I remember you showing me the first version of our internal "social network." How long ago was that? 😅
Mat, thanks buddy. You are a rockstar here. if we ever meet, beer/coffee / whatever on me 🍾
Can't wait. Do you think it's stable enough now to go to production? Do you think I can use it already with my students?
And as always feedback :-) When you click on the image you shared - it doesn't expand. I think it should, like in any social network.
Assaf Manor, about image yes I thought the same cannot zoom it
Assaf Manor,yes I mentioned this too in a previous post, I think we need the pop up modal zoom style for images :)
Pat, it will be added in the next version.
Shahjahan Jewel,😍 I knew you guys would include it!!
This is such a game changer! I've had nearly every community plugin installed on sites in the past and they all fell short. FluentCommunity was the first one that just sold me instantly. It's so fast and modern compared to the existing solutions.
I'm big time bought into the Fluent ecosystem so I am beyond thrilled to have FC now part of that! Nice work 👏👏👏
So excitiiiiing!!!
That's awesome, can't wait to grab it 👍
great news from great team. Such a relief to use FC compared with BB !
1 because of the speed
2 because I can finally use Bricks builder for the rest of my website (BB requires BB theme and no page builder)
So more happy than that ….. impossible !
I'm confident with you and your team's track record this will be the best Wordpress community solution. But is it meant to compete with SAAS like Circle that has has a many-years headstart?
Jeff Strank, definitely they have a head-start and it really does not matter in the IT sector. Look at FluentCRM, FluentCRM is the most popular & feature-rich plugin in the the email marketing & automation category. There were exiting products in the same category and they could not catch up with us. Same even true if you compare MailChimp vs FluentCRM. We have much more features and integrations than them. Maybe we can never be as big as Mailchimp but that's fine.
Big corporations are slow!
Shahjahan Jewel,and not so smart
Can't wait for the Exclusive LTD :) Need to prep some money for the next few weeks...
Shahjahan Jewel, any plans to make photos clickable and open in popup instead download when click? thank you
mainlab, Yap. It's coming in the next version.
This will be epic! The Fluent ecosystem is super cool...keep up the good work Shahjahan Jewel and team.
Love it, thank you to Shahjahan Jewel and the whole team behind this great plugin. look forward to many great conversations and updates.
I am jumping on this one!! Been looking for an alternate to the HOG that is the buddypress fork plugin... 👏👏👏
Simply awesome. Cannot wait for lifetime
Looking good
It's a great plugin so far with lots of potential. I just recorded an initial video overview/review and will publish it soon. Next, I'll make more videos of the new updates.
Maestro Stevens, please share it in the community once you publish that.
Man! You know you can count on me.
And please, please, please, keep it simple yet powerful!
Don't fall on temptations doing this a heavy monster...
Don't forget to us, people who need a light-weight super-fast Learning management solution.
Jose Luis Duron, yes we choose to keep it simple yet powerful and we want to serve only the users who want this super-fast solution.
Thanks for the update. I abandoned BuddyBoss a while ago, so this looks more aligned to my needs. I appreciate the info and the plugin.
William Beem,What were your reasons for abandoning BuddyBoss?
Awesome! None of the existing forum plugins met my needs and I was about to spin up Discourse. I'm happy to say that FluentCommunity is now a much better candidate for creating a forum.
Nigel, I would say the same. But I still have some questions in regards to integrating with the rest of WP. I know discourse for example has an option to replace the native comments for Discourse comments. This is something I would really hope FluentCommunity would add also.
And having two different installs and servers has it's benefits in regards to security, performance, uptime etc.
Thank you for the update, which makes me even more excited about Fluent Community
BOOM! Cannot wait! I'm trying to stick with as few plugins by as few developers as possible. I'm using FluentCRM and Forms (and the others) to create my first ever community membership site designed for my 'real world' community in the Cotswolds, UK. I've even set up a limited community interest company (CIC) so we can provide business services then put the profits back into the community via local charities, events and other stuff - Your CRM & Fluent Community combined with a few other choice plugins will make it possible. Things are already warming up for my project, expectations, its scary! I owe you all a debt of gratitude for your work, thank you.🙏
Awesome! Is the plugin designed in a way that we can use it on our main sites or should we do a separate wp install on a subdomain? Would love to have it on the main site for ease of use.
Samuel Peiffer, FluentCommunity will have a very low foot-print on your server. It's built on top of Vuejs 3, WordPress REST API and all custom tables to store the data. Even you can connect with S3 and Cloudflare R2 to offload all the media uploads. So definitely you can use on the main site.
Shahjahan Jewel,thanks for the explanation :)
Great update and a fantastic story! Will it be possible to use full Gutenberg features in the lesson editor in the new UI? This is the one thing I'm missing right now to make it a perfect solution for many client projects.
Excellent Work Jewel. I like seeing the Fluent ecosystem grow day-after-day. My current feature request is we can edit the courses lessons using the Block Editor. This will make it much easier to add content upgrades and upsells with FluentCRM tags and membership plugins.
Woowww THE plugin of 2024. Thanks for the way you improve the quality every day. FCom will be a turning point :))))
I am so excited that you made this product.
Regarding the:
"Making it scalable without breaking your server (In fact, we have tested with 500K Posts and Comments along with 100K users and we are happy about the performance. I am sure there is more rooms to improve)"
Question: what was the size of the server that held 100k users with 500k posts? How many CPUs? How much RAM?
I'm thinking of something that will be much smaller. A couple of thousands maybe around 10k.
Apropos - LearnDash is really problematic in scaling and I'm wondering what's the difference with fluent community as this also shows dynamic content and probably utilizes a lot of ajax calls.
Assaf Manor, It's based on the design actually. All the LMS plugins depend on WP's default post and post meta, user meta tables to store their data and they have to do tons of database queries just to show a single lesson.
We have designed a different way, we can load all the lessons for single course by only one API call and the database query will be max 2n (if you have 10 lessons then the total query will be only 20).
That's the difference. So when you navigate between lessons, no API calls will be made for lesson content. That's how make the platform super fast.
Shahjahan Jewel, I was actually thinking also about the community at large not just the course section. If you have posts published and alert of new content, notification, chat etc' - that's a lot of ajax calls, no?
And I'm not sure I understood about the structural difference. You're not using the wp tables? I mean - all fluent product have special tables and learndash as well. So I don't really understand the difference.
Assaf Manor, when you are using this platform can you see how fast it is loading? Install the beta, create a course, and navigate that. You will see how fast that will load. No other Community Plugin or LMS can match this speed at this moment. It's because it's designed as single page application (mostly javascript) and other plugins are built as legacy codebase mostly PHP.
LD does not use custom tables by the way.
Shahjahan Jewel, I'm not questioning what you're saying - I believe you. I'm just interested to know what the difference is.
What you mean LD does not use custom tables? You have plenty:
umw_learndash_user_activity, umw_learndash_pro_quiz_statistic, ...
Like the fluent product use: fc_subscribers, umw_fluentform_submissions, ...
So what's the difference?
And when you post on fluent community - it doesn't save the posts on a similar db? There are not a lot of ajax calls?
Hello - will you post the link or email us when we can buy the lifetime license? I didn't see it yet and couldn't find it. Thank you!
Love it!
I love its simplicity.
I'd been looking for a community solution for my site for so long... I'd tried everything, but none of them satisfied me. The first problem, and not the least, was that the community wasn't directly integrated with Wordpress! Then there's the cost... Existing Wordpress forums lack modernity.
Ever since I saw the platform during the FluentBoards beta test, I've been looking forward to it! I was convinced that if there was one team that could develop the perfect solution, it was yours Shahjahan Jewel !
I can't wait to see this plugin grow!
PS : and I'm already thrilled about the future flagship plugins you mentioned... 😅
Very cool. Just curious, will it be possible to migrate content from existing forums such as wpforo?
Martin Schürer, I believe there will be migration possibilities implemented at some point
Please see migration tool question here.
Thank you the link!
There is a bug - when I viewed this post in mobile it says it was published 22 days ago.
P.s. - I love it that you can just copy and paste images. Good job team.
Assaf Manor, adding related link for the fTeam to pickup
Example: if a post/comment is older than 26 days in the mobile view we see a short post creation date description - example from the attachment: 39mo but it should be 39d (d like days). I believe all posts >26 days < 40 days have incorrect short description for posts/comments aging in the Mobile view (letters/abbr "mo" should be replaced with letter d but only for the specific aging period) - example attached
Similar issue with short aging notice is for hours where >2x hours shows letter d not h
Thanks a lot for increasing our self hosted possibilities :-) Love it.
Say I want to use only for courses, I disabled other menu items, but the portal homepage lands on feed, is there anyway to have home page as courses if this feature isn't available, kindly add it
Making it scalable without breaking your server (In fact, we have tested with 500K Posts and Comments along with 100K users and we are happy about the performance. I am sure there is more rooms to improve) >>> Server Specs pls 👍
DUDE!!! This is AMAZING. Thank you so much. I have been looking for a solution like this for the past two years. I have been trying to build it myself because I cant stand the lock-in of Buddy Boss or similar. Thank you for sharing it with us!!
Mad Respect for this project and the tie in with the other Fluent products. This indeed will be the go to solution for wp communities.
Can't wait to see.
Shahjahan Jewel is there something on the roadmap when uploading profile picture and banner to have some small editing tools? E.g. spotting (align top/bottom/center), cropping image etc. As well as some notifications as what's going on while uploading :)
Wilco W, and @Shahjahan I think that the UX is very important in a Plugin of community, of users, and that is why customization and design are very important. I'm not a developer, so take my opinions as a non-expert.
Haha I thought the same: "wait no update in the past days? They became slow" :D Looking forward to the changes!
Great Shahjahan Jewel , Just please have this 2 important points:
1# Create a lot of INTEGRATION with all fluent products
2# More upgrades for FluentBoards and FluentSupport
I have both plugins and for owners of companies, both are greats plugins but can have many more options and flexibilities.
Is there a way to force a title in a topic? I really miss a subject box like Circle and other software has.
Wowwww that's amazing! 😍
the new U/I is looks smooth. One tweak I'd have is to remove the feed home button all together and simply make the site logo the link to the feed. Maybe have it be a placeholder for the logo if one is not uploaded.
Finally a community plugin that feels fast and has a beautiful UI, can't wait!