UE / Integration wishes
I was dismayed to find that to fully use Fluent Community I also need to buy Fluent Forms and Fluent CRM, and integrate the 3 apps. I realize there are legitimate revenue/business reasons for this on Fluent's side.
But it's Kafkaeque from the customer's side. if I were the Fluent Community product manager, I'd advocate for using all the Fluent payment and automation code that already exists, and bundling it into this product, to the extent that the product would be able to stand alone, and so your users don't have to integrate 3 apps together to use one app. If your users could use Fluent Community without needing to integrate, think how much less friction there would be, lower support costs, and better satisfaction and word-of-mouth.
The reason I chose FC over SureDash is this exact thing. SureDash requires investing in their entire Sure suite of apps to work correctly. Since I already paid for a lifetime license to FluentForms, I went with Fluent Community. (Look up psychological principle called "Sunk cost")
But if I'd not already invested in FF, maybe I'd just be using WPForo, etc.
Other users, do you agree/disagree? Have different advice?
What do you mean fully? Because I’m not using either with fluent community right now and I have a complete setup.
Donald McGuinn Since I sell more than one course, I need granular access controls, per course, and community discussions tied to the granular course access.
There is some misinformation regarding this info, and you are not alone. Many people got confused. Let me clear the air.
- You don't need Fluent Forms or FluentCRM to run FluentCommunity. We have some great integration between our products so you can use them together and reduce conflicts.
- We have a very extensive API (more coming) so any plugin author can connect with us. Flowmattic was the first, WPFusion is coming (just talked with Jack today). We will add more integration from our side as well.
- For monetization, You can use Fluent Forms Pro to sell access to courses or spaces. But we also want to integrate with Paymattic so anyone can use the integration for free and accept payment.
- We are going to have webhooks / invitation links, then you can connect with virtually anything.
We could build a built-in payment system, but that would take lots of time and resources also managing a module is also hard. Payments are always hard and that's why we are integrating with existing solutions. Many people may not need payments. But if you do, we want to make sure you can use anything in the WordPress ecosystem.
Please feel free to ask if you have any corresponding queries about this.
Shahjahan Jewel “Many people may not need payments.” This makes sense. Personally what I'm looking for is the ease of doing everything within the portal for both admins and members.
e.g. a member could easily subscribe to a space, buy a course, cancel a subscription, change password etc. right WITHIN the portal. I guess this will be possible when we have theme compatibility, but we still need to spend a lot of time on the integration part, namely page building, testing, troubleshooting etc.
Shahjahan Jewel Invitation links would be great.
I use StudioCart.
And thankfully I do own a FluentForms LTD.
But my biggest concern is granular access control — not open access to everything, but course-by-course access for those who sell multiple courses or tiers. It seems for that, you need FluentCRM?
All well and said to integrate 3 apps, then you can integrate triple the price also kinda thing! ... let's be mindful and grateful for what FluentCommunity already gives us at the price point it does. Having a separate FluentCRM, FluentForms etc is great! ... this gives us the flexibility of what to add or not. You are not forced to use the other Fluent products, they are giving you options, if you want the other Fluent products then you will have to pay for them.