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Hello there. And in this video, I want to talk to you about a brand new community plugin called Fluent Community. It’s put out by some of my favorite people to do Fluent CRM and Fluent Forms and all this. I think Fluent Community is going to end up being a bit of a game changer here. It’s still early stage. I want to show you what it can do. But I think the days of having to go to Buddy Boss for community functionality may be coming to an end. Let’s go ahead and talk about that. Obviously, when it comes to building a membership site, one of the things that a lot of people end up wanting is community functionality. Now, for a lot of people, when I end up advising them, I first have them look at how badly do you actually need community functionality. A lot of people think they need it, but they really don’t need it. And I want them to think through the strategy and just how much work it can be to have a community. And there’s no getting around that part. It’s one of those things that if you want to have community functionality, you have to think through why you’re going to do it and how you’re going to get that community to build up inertia.

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But all that set aside, let’s look at the platform. What ends up usually happening is that we end up with some forum software like Bbpress, something like that. We start looking at Buddypress, which is like some intro-level social networking, but it brings on some complications. Because you got to put all these things on top of it to make it do what you want. Or we start looking at the big beast in the space, and that is Buddy Boss. Now, Buddy Boss is something that I have definitely talked about in the past. When it comes to community It’s a community functionality. I will say it is the current top thing. It is the best tool out there for that. Now, the trade-off, though, of Buddy Boss is that it’s also an absolute beast. I will say that I believe it is bloated. I think that it just got a lot of code in there. It brings on a lot of requirements on the server, so you end up having to put additional horsepower on there. It can slow down the site quite a bit, and it’s just a real beast. And the other thing that’s interesting about Buddy Boss is that it does so many things, okay?

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And you end up having to install this platform. If you do the pro version, you do the pro add-on. And the The other thing is that it requires you to use their theme, otherwise it looks like garbage. And so you end up having to use the Buddy Boss theme. And because the Buddy Boss theme is so incredibly hard to modify, you end up putting a page builder like Elementor on there, just so you can make this site do what you want. So you got Elementor, which is already a pretty beefy builder. You’ve got the Buddy Boss theme, which is a beefy theme. You’ve got potentially a child on top of that, which you are going to want to pull your hair out if you start getting involved with creating a child theme for Buddy Boss. And then you got these two massive plugins, especially if you want the pro add-ons of Buddy Boss. All that, whereas what I find is that a lot of people that are using Buddy Boss aren’t really using a good chunk of what it does. They might be using the group functionality. Maybe they want user profiles with member profiles in a directory, but they’re probably not utilizing all the other stuff, or they’ve got everything turned on thinking it’s super awesome, but yet, hardly anybody’s even using it.

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And so you got this beast that’s slowing down the whole site. It’s an all or nothing affair because you can’t use any your theme, and you’re not really utilizing all that stuff. And so what ends up happening is that some people end up looking at remotely hosted communities.

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Do you want to have a Facebook group? Do you want to go with a paid community thing where you don’t then even own the data? You’re in a proprietary setup that you have to pay monthly for. If you stop paying for that, you just lost your community.

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So it’s not digital sovereignty in any way, shape, or form because you don’t own that community.

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It’s someplace else.

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We haven’t really had any good options other than Buddy Boss, but now we do, and it’s called Fluent Community. Now, Fluent Community is part of the Fluent family. So that includes Fluent CRM, Fluent Booking, Fluent Forms, things like that. Like that. And because of that, it’s got some natural integrations. One of the big ones, and I’ll show you this in a minute, is that it has integrations with Fluent CRM. And so that when you’re using the marketing automations that are inside of that CRM, it has natural hooks right into Fluent Community itself, which is going to make life a lot simpler in a lot of cases, because with Buddy Boss, you would have to integrate it with some other tool and put more mishmash on top of it in order to make this work. It’s going to be a lot more streamlined when you use the Fluent tools. The other thing is that this is a 1.0 version product right now, so we’re pretty early stage. So one thing I want to be clear about, and I’m going to show you the limitations at the moment, is that Fluent Community does not do as many things as buddy boss.

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That’s part of the reason why Fluent Community is so much more streamlined. It’s going to be much, much faster. You’re not going to have the server load problems that Buddy Boss brings us. Fluent Community is inherently way more efficient. The trade-off of that is that it doesn’t do everything. It does most of the core functionality. The things that I find that most Buddy Boss users are using, it does those things, but it doesn’t do some of the other stuff, at least not yet. I do think some more functionality is coming, but I just want to make clear this is a 1.0-level product right now. It’s its early stage, and as the If the product develops out further, I think some of the things that I’m going to show you that I wish it would do, I think they’re going to fix it. But where Fluent Community stands right now is a really solid, minimum viable product for a community. If you’re willing to accept the more streamlined setup, this thing is the community tool that I think that I’m going to be recommending from here on out. Once they handle some of the limitations that I’m about to show you, it’s It’s going to be an absolute no-brainer.

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Right now, as long as you’re willing to accept a few caveats, I still think it would be a no-brainer to not have to deal with the hassle and the expense and everything of Buddy Boss. How about with that? Let me show it to you here. First, let me show you what a fluent community looks like when it’s actually got some data in there. Now, this is their community. This is actually a community that they’ve set up over at WP Manage Ninja. You could see active discussion going on in here. You can see how we’ve got the main feed here where this is bringing in updates from different groups. And then you have the groups themselves. Now, in the Lingo of Fluent Community, they call these spaces. You can see that they’ve got them for Fluent Boards, Fluent Community, different things. These are a couple of test beds here. You can see how many members are in there. But these are basically groups. So Here’s one for Fluent Community Founders, people who have been testing it and stuff like that for a little while. It’s a really nice interface. It looks a lot like Facebook, actually.

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So that means it’s going to be familiar with a lot of people, very natural. You got different areas here that you can categorize, post in. When you post, you got an optional title, but you can just type whatever you want. I’m not going to post anything because this is a public group. You can select your titles here that are from this area here, like categories. You can post images if you would like. You can put videos in there. You can do gifs just like you could on Facebook. You can even post a poll if you would like. It’s very familiar with somebody who’s used to social networking. It supports hashtags, things like that. If you go over here, you can see the member directory. They do have leaderboard functionality in here. Now, I’ll show you this in a minute, but there’s not a whole lot of control over this leaderboard right now.

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You could turn it on and off, and you can control these names for these labels.

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But I didn’t see any way where I can control the point system or anything. So I think that’s functionality that they’re going to have to add in later. If you come up here, you can put it into dark mode or light mode. You can run searches on the entire community. You’ve You’ve got notifications, of course, which the notifications is something that is a source of slowdown with buddy boss, but it just doesn’t seem to be having any negative impacts at all here with Fluent Community, which is really nice to see. And then, of course, you’ve got the messaging system where you could do private messages between other members or with other members, whatever it is. It’s the messaging system. One thing I did note when I was poking through the settings is there does not seem to be the ability to to turn off the messaging system, which is something that I think they should add. I’ll show you on my test install here in a moment, some of the back-end settings of Fluent Community, but I just wanted to show you what some of this stuff looks like when you have a community with data in it.

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These are all product links that you can set up and shortcut off to different places, so probably different parts of your website or what have you. When you set up these different spaces, you can add them to different sections here in the sidebar menu. And it’s pretty easy to use, but this is the way that it looks and feels. You don’t have a lot of customization options right now. It pretty much looks like this. You can control the logo up here in the top left, and that’s pretty much it. You do have to control over these menu options, but it doesn’t seem to be using the built-in menu system of WordPress. It has its own setup. You You can see in the domain that it’s their domain, and then it goes /portal. The entire community sits inside of basically a folder.

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That’s the way it looks from a URL perspective. It looks like a folder, and it’s self-contained. It’s very, very different than the rest of the website. So it doesn’t matter what theme you’re using or anything. When they click into the portal, it’s going to be this look and feel. So that’s something we’re going to need to talk about here because because there’s not a lot of flexibility there right now.

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Okay, so now we switch over to a test install where I’ve got Fluent Community installed. And you can see here that we’re inside the… Where’s my mouse? I got too many things going on here. We’ve got the WordPress dashboard, and you can see we got Fluent Community here. Now, I want to make sure you know, here’s what happens when I click on that. See how we basically, if you want to do any of these, any of these, They’re going to head on up to the portal. So that’s the main thing that you understand is that pretty much everything about fluent booking takes place inside of the portal. Even the settings, frankly, you do leave the WP admin and you go into the portal. Now, one thing Another thing this is just a personal taste for me, is that I would prefer that I can control these settings for Fluent Community inside the WP admin panel. It just feels weird that I’m sent off into a different tab in the whole thing. It feels a little jointed. So that part, I’m not a massive fan of. Now, once you’re in here, here’s all the different portal settings.

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Under the General settings, we’ve got logo. We could do a different one for dark mode. We can control the portal access, whether it’s open to the public, people who are logged in or only select user roles. We’ve got the redirect URL. So basically, if people come here and they don’t have access, we can send them off to a landing page, stuff like that. If we go under Customizations, very little that you could do in here right now. This is something that I brought up to them, that I feel like we really need to have more style options here to be able to make Fluent Community match existing brands. Right now, is pretty much what you see is all you got, other than swapping out the logo at the top. You can see here in my little test version, I put the blog marketing academy logo up there. That’s pretty much all I could do. Unless I started getting really into the to assess and stuff. But even with that, it would be a hack. It’s not something that the platform supports at this particular moment. If you go under Managers, we can set up Community Managers for different groups and all that.

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That should be fairly self-explanatory. Definitely important functionality, but pretty self-explanatory. Under Email settings, when the community spits off notifications to members, you can control what those emails look like and that type of thing.

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There’s not a whole lot of template control over them, but control some of the basics. I’m assuming that in the not too distant future, we’ll have more template control over those options in a more obvious way. Under Features and Add-ons, we can turn on the leaderboard, user badges, the course module, which we’re going to talk about here in a minute, GIFI, if you want people to be able to do animated GIFs, stuff like that, emojis. One nice thing for media, for people who are uploading their own photos and that type of thing, is that it has built-in capability to offload that to either Cloudflare or to Amazon S3. Really handy because if you have an active community, you don’t want them pop it up into your media library and stuff like that. You can offload that stuff off-site and make it load up a lot better. There’s also a cool capability here with something called Fluent Community Chat. And so if you do this, you actually do have real-time chat capability that you can embed into these spaces and basically have a chat room. It’s pretty quick. It’s a different plugin, but it would be brought on, and it works inside the context of Fluent Community.

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But pretty cool if you actually really want real-time chat. I know in the past, I used to do office hours back when I had a more developed membership site, and I did all this stuff, and I used a tool called Chatroll, I believe it was, to embed a third-party chat room into the site. It was an additional monthly charge, and it was a nice setup, actually. Looks like with Fluent Community Chat, we might be getting the makings of being able to do that stuff in-house, which is a cool functionality. I wanted to make mention of the leaderboards module. Now, me, I probably would turn it off because I don’t really I don’t really think most sites need this type of stuff. But if it’s turned on, you can see how you can label these different categories of the gamification, and you could set these points. But when I’m So what’s lacking here is any control over exactly what goes into these points. I don’t know how that stuff is controlled. From what I can tell, it doesn’t seem as if there’s any control over that right now. It’s just built into the code. So that’s something that they either need to clarify or we need to have some options, or perhaps we get rid of this and maybe ability to work with Gamma Press or something like that.

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But this leaderboard set up right now just seems like I don’t have a lot of control all over it, and so I probably wouldn’t use it a whole heck of a lot. The course module, there’s not a whole lot in here. It’s basically turn it on or turn it off. I’ll show you that in a minute because it does have the makings of making it to where you would not need an LMS tool like LearnDash or Tudor LMS or something like that. Because, yeah, Fluent Community actually can do online courses. Now, it’s super basic, but for a lot of people, it might just be enough, and it’s something to keep in mind. If you go to Manage Topics, this is basically the categories that you can post in inside of these different spaces. You can group your spaces together, drag and drop on the order and stuff like that. This is where you can control your menus at the top and in your sidebar for a fluent community. It’s not using the built-in menu system, which is interesting. It has its own thing, which I don’t exactly know how I feel about that. It works, but it really makes it to where it would be a little harder to integrate this into the rest of your site with the way that it is.

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Then you got the privacy settings, which are the permissions for the community itself. Let’s look at the courses. Now, if we go into courses, I got nothing because this is a test install, but let’s see what we got. Let’s go to add a course. We’re going to call this test_course. I’ll keep the typo, who cares? It’s a public course, or do you want to be private or secret? I guess we’re going to go ahead and go private. You can do your custom lock screen or use the default one. I’ll go in and put it under that menu group. This will control how it shows up in the sidebar. Self-paste, or do you want to go out on a schedule, that type of thing, your thumbnail, pretty self-explanatory stuff. Now, here is our course. Now, if we want to add a section, let’s say Section 1, probably the name of a module or something like that. Now, let’s add a lesson, Lesson 1, Add and Edit. This is where you have your options.

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Now, it’s not really that advanced.

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You can put a YouTube video or a Wistia or some other embed in there. You can do a customization email code if you want to bring in an embed from some other location so you’re not stuck. Then in terms of your editor, I hope I don’t sneeze here while I’m recording.

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In terms of your editor, it’s pretty basic.

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Basic formatting options, things like that. This is not a Gutenberg block editor. You’re not going to be able to drag in anything that you want. It’s just basically this. Then you could turn on the video embed or off. You can also turn on comments or not comments. I would imagine that most people are going to want to have the comments turned on because community is the point here, and you can set your video link. But it’s really pretty basic.

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This is certainly It’s certainly no learn-dash.

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It’s certainly not something where you’re going to have the quizzes and the different instructors and all that stuff. What you see here is what you got. I do think that one thing they probably do need to do at some point is to have some type of an integration with learn-dash, tutor LMS, and other tools. The other thing, too, is that just so people can swap over to a fluent community, you don’t want them to have to rebuild all their courses. You don’t want people to have to to use this system. I think for many people, this would be completely adequate and totally do the job. But I can definitely see why some people are going to want to integrate with a different LMS tool, and I think fluent community should definitely support that.

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Now, if we pop back into WP Admin, the other thing I think is really cool that I definitely want to make note of is the natural integration with Fluent CRM. And where that really comes in handy is under automations. When you We’re going to build an automation, we’ve got a few things that show up. First of all, you’ll notice that there’s now a new community tab, and we have these available triggers in order to trigger an automation. If you could trigger an automation when they join a space which remember, a space is basically a group, if they enroll in a course, or if their leaderboard status has been upgraded. We could trigger automations, and that allows us to do all kinds of really cool automated things. Now, if we do one, let’s just create a real simple one here. I don’t have the pro add-on on this particular testbed. Let’s say new user sign up. Let’s just go ahead and do that so I can show you some of the other options. And that is that as a step of the automation, we can go down here to We have community, and we have these things that we can also automate as part of our automation.

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We can add them to a space, we can change their membership status, take them out of a space, remove them from a course, or enroll them in a course. You can see how this would come up really handy where you build this in with the integrations with other tools, like the one that I just said. Watch this. Add to space. I’m not going to bother to set all this stuff up right now. But with this really basic automation, we make it so that if anybody registers for the site, they’re automatically put into a particular group of our community. Boom. Nice and simple. Using these automations, you can do any number of things. When they buy something in Woocommerce, you automatically can add them to a space. You can also automatically add them to the appropriate course inside your portal if the course is being done inside a fluent community. You can see how this would integrate with a lot of other tools. And the cool thing is that in this case, you would not need extra tools such as WP Fusion, which I happen to be a massive fan of WP Fusion. But the thing is, you’re not going to need it for this because Fluent CRM and Fluent Community work together.

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They also work together with Woocommerce very nicely, and it would do all this stuff just built in with those tools without adding the extra layers. So that’s really, really powerful. The things that you can do because your email list and your marketing automation tool is going to be so tightly integrated with the community itself is that you can really get really creative and automate and simplify so many things. So as you could see, Fluent Community really has the feature here of being able to simplify our workflow. It allows us to skip over all the bloat and crap that goes along with having to use something like Buddy Boss. We could skip over all that. We also don’t have to skip off to some third-party platform and pay for some proprietary platform. We can build a community that we fully own and control, right in the house on top of WordPress. But do it in such a way where we don’t have to add all this overhead. As you could see, Fluent Community is pretty lean and mean. It It doesn’t do everything, but it does the most important stuff. The way that it’s put together, the way that it’s programmed is pretty streamlined.

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It uses custom database tables, so it’s not meshing up with everything else inside of WordPress. So it’s a lot more tidy in how it’s put together. Even when you upload the zip files for the plugin itself, you’ll see that they’re significantly smaller, like 20% of the size, practically, of the Buddy Boss zip files. I mean, it’s just a significantly smaller platform, and it does This is what it does cleanly. It’s got the ability to do online courses, which if that’s enough for you, you are set. You don’t even need another one. Actually, the way that the courses actually look, look nice. It’s just not as full-featured as something like LearnDash, but a lot of people don’t need all that functionality. Personally, in the world of LMS tools, I think LearnDash is like the buddy boss of course platforms in that it’s bloated. Most People don’t use everything that LearnDash does. They don’t need LearnDash. With Fluent Community, it does online courses, and it does it just enough where I think it’s going to suit most people’s purposes. And that’s the theme of the platform. It gets there. It does just enough. It doesn’t do everything, but it does just enough.

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Now, with that being said, a few things that I really do hope they am. I do think they need to add more color control over the branding and stuff like that so you can better integrate Fluent Community and that portal into existing sites. I think it’s really important. The other thing is that I do think that we need to have the ability to integrate some of these community components into actual themes, so that we are not forced to use the entirely separate portal. I think for a lot of sites, the separate portal is going to keep things nice and clean. That being said, I don’t want to be forced to do it that way. I think one way that they could possibly do that is maybe setting up some Gutenberg blocks or something like that so that if I’m on a page with a course, I could drag in a space or something like that and have that functionality in place. I don’t know what the best way to do that is, but I do think there needs to be some option so that we are not forced to use a standalone portal. I also do think that we should not have to use the functionality of the online courses with Fluent Community.

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I do think that there should be some clean integrations with LearnDash and stuff to bring those courses in and still have it take place in context with the community functionality. I think these things are coming. I’ve already been told they’re on the roadmap. And keep in mind, this is a version 1.0 product we’re looking at here. And so I fully expect additional enhancements to come, probably pretty quickly at the beginning. That’s usually the way this team does things. I think Fluent Community is going to develop out quite nicely. Okay, so that is first look at Fluent Community as it launches out of the door from the team. I’m really happy to see what they’ve already done with this plugin. I’m really excited to see what’s coming next with Fluent Community. I think this is probably going to become my new go-to recommendation for clients and people who are looking to put community together on their site. I’m such a big fan of how this team builds plugins and how they make everything work together. And I think that Fluent Community is going to be a really solid option. I’m really happy that I’m seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, where I no longer have to say, Okay, I guess you should use Buddy Boss.

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I’m a fan of Buddy Boss, but it just comes with so much bloat. It’s like comparing a motor boat that’s real nimble with a huge cruise ship. And for most people, they don’t need the big cruise ship. They could get away with a lot smaller, streamlined find boat. And Fluent Community is that boat. Bump the mic. It is that boat. It does what it needs to do. It does what most people need. Some people are going to find, I wish it did this and that. And maybe some of those features are going to come. But this thing, the way that it works, the way that it works with Fluent CRM is the way that I would want the community to work. As long as they can get that integration with the existing themes, I think we are there, and I’m really excited to see that. Now, As with most of their tools, usually when they launch this stuff, they launch with lifetime deals and discounts and stuff like that. And I would encourage you, if you think you’re going to want to do community on your site, I would encourage you to pick up a copy.

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I think that, especially if you’re already into the fluent family of products. I think that this one is going to be one that you’re going to be happy that you have. Does it do everything that you want right now? Perhaps not. There are definitely some things I I would wait for, but I think it’s going to come. The other thing is that this team is very receptive to feedback. They definitely do develop out their stuff, and I have picked up almost all of their products at early stage, and I’ve watched them develop into some really robust tools. I don’t think this one’s going to be any different. All right? So that’s Fluent Community. I guess if you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments, and I’ll see what I can do to help you out or take a peek for you. All we’ll talk later.