sidebar navigation
Hi FluentCommunity Team,
First of all, I'm in the process of building a large-scale community platform using your plugin, and I'm very impressed with the architectural power of Group Spaces and Spaces. It's incredibly flexible.
As I plan for the long-term growth of my community, I'm designing a structure that will eventually have dozens, and potentially hundreds, of Spaces. While this is great for organization, it presents a user experience challenge for the main sidebar navigation.
This has led me to a feature idea that I believe would add immense value, especially for larger communities.
The Proposed Feature: A Truly Dynamic and Personalized Sidebar
I would like to request a new visibility mode for the sidebar. The idea is to make the sidebar a dynamic reflection of a user's personal memberships.
How it would work:
- When a new user registers, their sidebar would be empty of any community groups or spaces.
- When the user navigates to the main "Spaces" directory and chooses to join a
Spaceor aGroup Space, that item would then dynamically appear in their personal sidebar. - Conversely, if the user decides to leave a
Space, that item would automatically be removed from their sidebar.
Essentially, the sidebar would transform from a static directory into a personalized list of the user's "favorite" or "subscribed" spaces.
The Key Benefits of this Feature:
- Profound Personalization: Each user would have a sidebar that is 100% relevant to them, creating a powerful feeling that the platform is truly "their own" customized hub.
- Scalability for Large Communities: This is the most significant advantage. It would allow administrators like myself to build a platform with hundreds of
Spaceswithout ever worrying about cluttering the user's primary navigation. A user only ever sees the 5-10 spaces they actually care about. - Reduced Cognitive Load: It makes the user experience much cleaner and simpler, adhering to the "don't make me think" principle.
- Increased Engagement: A clean, relevant, and personalized interface encourages users to interact more frequently with the content that matters most to them.
The current "Show Spaces Even if..." setting in the Appearance tab is a good global toggle, but this proposed feature would offer a much more granular and user-centric approach to navigation.
Thank you for considering this feature request. I believe it would be a game-changing addition for anyone looking to build a large and thriving community with your fantastic plugin.
Keep up the great work!
I'm in your same boat, developing a site that will ultimately have at least 3000 different spaces. I solved the problem of menu clutter by adding a could of side menu items, "My Spaces" and "All Spaces."
The "My Spaces" item is linked like this: https://mysite.com/clubhouse/discover/spaces#user_url/spaces. (I called my community "clubhouse," and you'd--obviously--put in your own site's domain name instead of "mysite.com"). That page can show a user all spaces or just the ones they're a member of.
I decided to add the "All Spaces" side menu item for clarity. It's linked to https://mysite.com/clubhouse/discover/spaces.
While it would be a nice option to be able to put a menu item on the side menu for each of the spaces a user belongs to, if the user belonged to dozens of spaces (as they probably will in my use-case), that would seriously clutter the side menu, so it's not an option I'd use.
If my solution doesn't float your boat, you could, perhaps, develop a plugin or code snippet that will do what you want. Or you could wait to see if the devs will implement your feature request. But, really, I prefer that they - not - develop features that people (including me!) - want - but concentrate on features that nearly everyone - needs -, because the more options the devs add, the slower the software will be. And for very large communities like ours (mine will ultimately have hundreds of thousands of users!), it's absolutely necessary to keep the core software as lean and as fast as possible.
I hope this helps!
Melynda big help. you gave a nice idea. thank you so much for your help
I agree we need a dynamic sidebar to build a large community. I already submitted the idea for the change to make every page have its own sidebar to improve navigation and add more customization to the spaces and courses.
VOTE HERE: https://community.wpmanageninja.com/fluentcommunity-roadmp/#/idea/983/
Sean voted. thank you