FluentCommunity: What It Is, Why We Built It, and Where It’s Headed

Hello, I’m Shahjahan Jewel, CEO of WPManageNinja. Our journey began with one goal: to serve the WordPress community. From day one, we aimed to identify challenges, solve them, and make WordPress accessible to everyone.

Today, with over 1M+ businesses across 190+ countries using our plugins, I’m amazed at the impact we’ve made. But we’re far from done!

Now, I’m excited to introduce you to FluentCommunity—the fastest community-building plugin for WordPress

In this blog, I’ll cover what FluentCommunity is, why we created it, its standout features, and our vision for its future. But first, let’s take a moment to reflect on our journey!

What is FluentCommunity, & who is this for?

FluentCommunity is an all-in-one WordPress plugin designed to simplify personal, professional, and business community building. Whether you’re creating a space for personal interest groups, professional networking, or business collaborations, FluentCommunity offers powerful tools to foster engagement and connection. 

Additionally, it enables seamless course sharing, making it perfect for educators and businesses looking to offer training or educational content. With intuitive features, user-friendly customization, and complete control over your community, FluentCommunity helps you build thriving, interactive communities directly on your WordPress site.

The journey of WPManageNinja

Let’s rewind 9 years to 2015 when our journey began as a technical service provider. We were lucky to build a team of passionate problem-solvers who embraced every challenge. Solving issues quickly became our passion.

But our curiosity pushed us further—we wanted to create something that truly made a difference. That’s when we stepped into developing WordPress plugins.

Fast forward to today, we now have over ten powerful WordPress plugins, supporting more than 950,000 businesses globally. And here we are in 2024, launching another innovative product: FluentCommunity! 

But how did this idea come to life?

From journey to innovation: The birth of FluentCommunity & why we built it?

As many of you know, we faced a challenging time from mid-July to early August in 2024. In Bangladesh, where I’m from, a major uprising occurred against the former government, and the response was shockingly brutal. The violence was horrific, and to control the unrest, the government made the drastic decision to completely shut down the internet.

This blackout had serious consequences:

• No social media or messaging apps to stay connected with loved ones
• No reliable access to information
• Anxiety and rumors spreading due to the lack of credible news
• Safety concerns, as government curfew announcements were inaccessible

In response, I needed to ensure our team members’ safety and help them stay connected during this crisis. An intranet became the solution, and fortunately, we had already been building a platform to make it happen.

Long before the internet shutdown, I saw the value in creating a private internal social network for our team—a place for us to share meeting notes, post quick project updates, and celebrate milestones in a simple, tweet-like format. We call it the AuthLab Lounge, and today, I’ll share that experience with you. To list a few notable functionalities in the existing version:

Discussion boards

To ensure that irrelevant posts aren’t flooding the feed, we set up separate discussion boards for different departments – Development, Marketing, Support, Motion Graphics, and so on.

Private blogs

Soon, we realized that sharing quick updates wasn’t enough. Our team was doing incredible work, learning new things, and achieving great results! We needed a more detailed way to share these experiences. That’s when we added a closed blog feature, allowing team members to write articles and dive deeper into their projects and insights, fostering better knowledge sharing.

Project management

When we developed FluentBoards as a standalone plugin, we integrated it into the Lounge as well. This way, our product teams can stay aligned, easily sign in to the office, and get a quick overview of the day’s tasks, all in one place.

HR dashboard

We also custom-developed an HR dashboard so that people can apply for leave without writing a formal email or anything. The daily sign-ins and sign-outs are managed from the same portal, too.

In a nutshell, it was a custom-made and more elaborate version of what you see at https://community.wpmanageninja.com/portal/.

Anyway, all these features would have been enough to keep in touch with the team members at any given time. But again, we were cut off from the internet. So, I had to somehow connect the team members to a network first.

What needed to be added to the platform?

Once we launched the portal, it became clear we needed more features to make it a fully functional social network for these difficult times. With no idea how long the internet shutdown would last, I quickly began adding essential functionalities:

• Super-admin approval for sign-ups
• Direct messaging
• Comment threads
• Multimedia support

These features were a game-changer. With the internet down and many lacking cable TV, community members started posting video clips from news broadcasts to keep everyone informed. Those who could step out during curfew brought back newspapers and shared photos of the reports as albums.

That became one of the most valuable features we developed during the shutdown.

There were plenty of other small updates over those five days, and I’ll share more about them next.

Key features of FluentCommunity

With FluentCommunity, we took the initiative to help you in building and managing online communities and courses. Whether you’re an educator, course creator, community leader, or business owner, this plugin is designed to simplify your operations and enhance the experience for your members and learners.

As FluentCommunity is packed with powerful features for building both communities and courses, it remains the most lightweight and fastest community builder plugin for WordPress. Here’s a quick overview of its key features.

Community features

The plugin provides powerful community-building features, including unlimited members, groups, courses, and admins. Easily add member profiles, forums, messaging, and social feeds to your WordPress site. Fully customizable to match your brand, it’s perfect for blogs, niche communities, or business websites, fostering engagement and lasting connections.

Community Dashboard: A central hub for real-time management and tracking of community activities, member engagement, and performance.

Leaderboard: With the leaderboard highlight top contributors and encourage competition.

Activity Feeds: Create and manage groups for discussions, collaboration, and networking within the newsfeed.

Profile setup: Allow members to create and personalize their profiles, showcasing their interests and contributions.

Groups: Create and manage groups for focused discussions, collaboration, and networking within your community plugin.

Posts: Members can share updates, news, and insights with the community through engaging posts.

Chats: FluentCommunity facilitates instant, private conversations between members with built-in chat functionality.

The community functionalities of FluentCommuity doesn’t end here, 

Course features

FluentCommunity lets you create an interactive learning space where students collaborate and engage beyond just content consumption. It facilitates discussions, shares updates, and unites your students in one central hub. Let’s explore how FluentCommunity can help you build your own e-learning platform. Some noteworthy features from the course section are:

Course Builder: With our intuitive Course Builder you can design lessons, and assignments all in one place, making it simple to deliver structured and engaging learning experiences.

Progress tracking: Track your students’ progress with detailed insights. Monitor completion rates, scores, and overall performance to ensure they’re on the right path to success.

Lesson Discussions: FluentCommunity will also guide you to foster a collaborative learning environment with Lesson Discussions.

Other features

The power of FluentCommunity goes beyond just community and course features. It offers all the tools your community needs to thrive, without the need for complex coding. Here’s more information about the plugin.

• Customer dashboard
• Notification
• File Upload
• Media Storage
• Role Manager
• Dark/ Light mode
• Global Search
• Member Directories

To know more about the features and functionalities, check out our introduction content about FluentCommunity.

Our Community Deserves a Better Management Solution

While searching for a comprehensive WordPress community management tool, we noticed a major gap in the market!

We quickly realized that our community needed the very solution we were searching for. Plus, we received numerous requests for a community management plugin from our existing customers, especially users of Fluent Forms and FluentCRM.

So, we set out to build the solution ourselves, tested it thoroughly, and now we’re thrilled to share it with you!

Another step closer to our goal

When we say, “We want to help small businesses grow,” we truly mean it! If you take a closer look at our plugins, you’ll see that we’re on a mission to build an affordable ecosystem that meets the needs of small businesses.

We created Fluent Forms to assist businesses in lead generation, while FluentCRM aims to make email marketing affordable for all. Similarly, our other products focus on solving native problems for WordPress users and empower them to address these issues directly within their WordPress dashboard.

In this mission, after developing more than 10 user-favorite plugins, we realized that WordPress still has notable shortcomings in community management! 

So, we decided to step forward and fill this gap with FluentCommunity. And it’s so gratifying to see that we now have another plugin that will help WordPress users solve real business problems!

Our vision: Where it’s headed!

“Helping small businesses bridge the gap between where they are and where they want to be” is the driving force behind WPManageNinja’s success. We have never lost sight of this motto.

We:

• Put ourselves in your users’ shoes
• Address their pain points
• Work tirelessly to provide dynamic solutions

With FluentCommunity, our aim remains the same. We’re on a mission to develop a project management tool that meets your needs! 

Yes, you guessed it right! 

FluentCommunity is still in its early stages, and it will evolve based on your feedback. We want you to shape its growth, and we’ll develop it accordingly.

Let’s step into the future of community management, and course building

Struggles with managing the community and building courses efficiently are kind of a never-ending process. So, we are stepping into the future of community management and course building with FluentCommunity.

FluentCommunity offers a streamlined solution to simplify engagement, course creation, and growth, helping you overcome the challenges of scaling your WordPress business with ease and efficiency.

Our upcoming features will blow your mind, so we encourage you to give FluentCommunity a try. You won’t be disappointed!

Thank you for reading this far. Let’s continue helping each other grow and thrive together.