We’ve already discussed why you should host your community on a platform you own, rather than on borrowed land from a social media giant. And while Skool, Circle or even (Go) High Level are interesting options, in each case, you are tied into their service, limited by what they want to offer, and affected by their future decisions.
So we’re looking at WordPress options for flexibility, cost, and ownership.
Although there are plenty of membership and learning management systems (LMS) – the list of options for an online community is much shorter. The most established being BuddyPress, BuddyBoss, and PeepSo. Unfortunately, these tend to be heavyweight plugins, needing lots of resources and quickly bogging down as your site becomes popular.
In early 2024 a newcomer started making lots of noise. However, the team behind it are certainly well established – WP Manage Ninja have been around for years, producing Fluent Forms, WP Social Ninja, FluentCRM and more. They launched their own portal to provide support to their users, hinting that it was the testbed for a future product release.
And sure enough, in October 2024, we were able to start beta testing FluentCommunity – so impressive was it that we made a committed investment into the product and started building out our first client site – before it even officially launched!
Soon after, the team behind SureCart and SureMembers started working on SureDash, highlighting a key distinction between that and FluentCommunity.
WordPress – but not as we know it
Whilst built on top of WordPress, FluentCommunity (FC) is not a typical WordPress (WP) plugin. It hooks into WP for user access and integrates deeply with FluentCRM. But when you’re writing posts or a course, although you are using the “Gutenberg” or “Block” editor, it is a cut-down version.
This bypasses all the problems with bloat and poor performance that could be caused by your theme or other plugins. But they’ve come up with clever ways of presenting other parts of your WordPress site within the portal experience using their “theme compatibility” feature. That’s why this blog post appears seamlessly within the rest of the community.
SureDash took a different approach, embedding within WordPress and using other workarounds to address performance. I’m sure it will come good, but progress has been much slower – I also purchased licenses for SureDash… and got them refunded.
The key indicator for me is the self-belief in their product. FC now has over 10,000 members on their portal (and over 7,000 sites running the plugin), whereas the Sure team still uses Facebook for their community.
100% Faith
Although we’re building this community partly as a demonstration and partly for fun, our business is building these platforms for our clients. So we have to completely believe in a product to use it and recommend it. The support and hard work of the WP Manage Ninja team have earned our respect and trust. So that’s why we use FluentCommunity.
Geeky Bit
I’ve recorded a quick video of FluentCommunity being installed on this site – a brief run-through of our typical settings for our clients.
Community Discussion
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