We built a full collaborative Notes app inside FluentCommunity — here's how
Hey everyone!
I'm Jerome, founder of Domini — a network of ~50 independent real estate agents in France. Our entire team lives inside FluentCommunity, and we've been building custom plugins to extend it into a full business platform.
Today I wanted to share our latest module: Notes — a collaborative note-taking tool fully integrated into FluentCommunity.
What it does:
- Full-page Apple Notes-style editor, rendered on a dedicated FC hash route (#/fccn-page/notes)
- 3-column layout: folders | note list with search | rich text editor
- Real-time collaboration: share notes with any mandataire, see who last edited, get live updates via polling (5s)
- Bell notifications: when someone edits a shared note you haven't seen in 1h+, you get a notification in the FC bell — we insert directly into fcom_notifications + fcom_notification_users
- Email on invite: when you share a note, the collaborator gets an email with a direct link
- Activity journal: full history of who created, edited, or shared the note
- Autosave (1.2s), folders with custom colors, print support
- Mobile responsive with 3 views (folders / list / editor)
- Unseen indicator: blue pulsing dot on notes with unread changes
Technical details for devs:
- Pure vanilla JS + PHP, no frameworks, no build step
- Uses FC hooks: fluent_community/portal_head, portal_footer, app_route_paths
- Positions itself dynamically next to the FC sidebar (detects .fcom_sidebar, .fcom_vertical_nav, header) using CSS custom properties
- REST API with 12 endpoints under domini-notes/v1
- 5 custom DB tables (notes, folders, shares, activity, last_seen)
- FC notification integration via direct DB insert into fcom_notifications (we check table existence first, so it degrades gracefully if FC is deactivated)
The whole thing is a single lightweight WordPress plugin (~2,300 lines total across 6 files). No npm, no webpack, no external dependencies.
We're using it in production with our 50 agents for meeting notes, property briefings, and internal memos. The real-time aspect makes it feel much snappier than expected for a polling-based approach.
Happy to share more details about the FC integration patterns if anyone's interested. FluentCommunity's hook system made this surprisingly straightforward to build.
Would love to hear if others are building custom modules on top of FC! 🚀
This is really cool. Love what you built on top of FluentCommunity.
We’ve been building something too, a custom points and gamification addon for FC. It started as a way to get more control over points and leaderboards, but it turned into something much bigger than we expected.
Really great to see more people extending FC in creative ways.
Honestly I don't really like fluentcommunity search and it is one of my changes plus I like for users analytics and more what I did.
This looks really cool, looking for something like this. Are the notes site-wide or can they be used in spaces, so members of the space can share notes separately from other spaces?
