Issue #156 Loop

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Hi, friend. 👋

Welcome to Issue #156 of Loop WP!

Last week, we looked at Ollie 2.0 and the most joyful WordPress onboarding experience I’ve ever had. I also make a clarification on Speculative Loading.

This week is about Community Building with WordPress (I am not using affiliate links for these products).

Let’s go! 👇

Building A Community with WordPress

Some of my most successful newsletters have covered or celebrated the WordPress Community, particularly what has been happening since September 2024.

🧠 But building a Community on WordPress has been notoriously difficult in the past, and with the rise of Podia, Circle, Fourthwall and more, is WordPress even worth considering for building a community?

⚡️ With powerhouse creators like Mike Oliver, Dave Foy and Paul Charlton all using platforms like the above for their communities and courses, it’s where I went looking first.

But for my recently announced new community (Campfire), which I’m launching for my email marketing newsletter, I’m building it with Fluent Community.

It was “nearly” Circle

✅ I was set on using Circle for my community.

The one thing that kept putting me off about Circle was the pricing. It’s significantly higher than Podia, and the costs at Circle can quickly grow.

Circle is a MoR (Merchant of Record) and one hell of a platform. I’ve enjoyed being part of the Rockbase Community, No Stress DNS, and the WPTuts Academy on Circle.

🙌 Massive thanks to Paul Charlton (WPTuts Academy) for all his help and advice about Circle.

I was about to commit to Circle, but then I discovered Fluent Community.

Fluent Community

Being a big fan of Circle, Fluent Community immediately appealed to me, as it’s a visual and functional clone of Circle.

As I looked more into Fluent Community, I discovered that Jonathan Jernigan uses it for his new community, and David McCan has a massive deep dive. 👇

💡 If you don’t want to watch all of the video, David also puts together a nice conclusion to help you weigh up your options at the end of the video.

Jonathan Jernigan has also been using Fluent Community instead of other platforms; my interest was piqued, and Jonathan made a short video on his experience. 👇

Fluent Community Pricing

💰 Fluent Community offers various site license pricing and an LTD (Lifetime Deal), but they also have a free plugin version.

Prices start at $199 per year for a single license and a maximum of $699 for a 15-site license. LTD prices start at $399 and a maximum of $1599.

After testing the free version of Fluent Community (feature-rich), I will need the paid version for my community.

🚨 However, many of you could get by with both the free version of Fluent Community and the free versions of its recommended integrations.

Final Costs

If you do need the paid version of the plugin, then you will probably have additional costs for:

• Fluent CRM

• Fluent Forms

• SMTP

• CF R2 (for content storage).

For my needs, with all of the above, it roughly comes in around $36 per month, which puts Fluent Community right alongside Podia but still significantly cheaper than Circle.

Fluent Community for the Win!

With costs the same as Podia but as feature-rich as Circle, the only thing possibly holding me back was the WordPress database and the notorious issues other community plugins have had in the past, as your community grows.

🎉 Thankfully, Fluent Community uses its own database tables and is optimised for performance and security.

Whilst Fluent Community will work with lower specifications, they do recommend for the best performance:

• A VPS or Cloud server

• PHP 8.1 or higher

• MySQL 8.0+ or MariaDB 10.5+

• Nginx as the web server

• Redis for object caching.

• At least 2 CPU cores, 4GB of RAM, and NVMe SSD storage.

🔐 As well as enhanced privacy controls, another advantage of using Fluent Community is around data:

• I own my data.

• I control the data.

Those luxuries aren’t necessarily true when using a hosted platform.

🎉 Again, credit goes to Paul Charlton, who explored Fluent Community when it was initially released and has been listening to me patiently over the last couple of weeks.

Paul alerted me to the new Fluent Community Beta, which brings WordPress content, theme support, and more to the Fluent Community.

👀 While cloning Circle is never bad, the ability to insert dynamic content and have more control over content and appearance is very exciting.

Sponsorship Opportunities

🚨 The Google Doc contains all the details if you’re interested in sponsoring the Loop WP Newsletter.

That’s It For This Week 👋

⏭️ We finished up last week with Matt Mullenweg, and it’s happening again in the form of Mike McAlister:

If you aren’t sure what Mike is talking about, I’ve got Matt’s original question below.

See you next week! 😀

Weekly WordPress News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful WordPress News & Tips:

• Birthday Offer - Pie Calendar LTD Available During May. (Pie Calendar)

• Nope, Nope - Canonical Plugin Proposal for Accessibility Prompts Concerns from Contributors and Experts. (The Repository)

• WP CLI Update - WP-CLI v2.12.0 Release Notes. (WordPress)

• PageSpeed Insights - Lighthouse is moving to performance insight audits. (Chrome)

• mShots API - Automating WordPress Playground Screenshots with Node.js and Playwright. (Birgit Pauli-Haack)

• The Responses - What would be the best agency to elevate the WordPress brand? (Matt Mullenweg)

• AI Improved Support - How Woo’s support team uses AI to improve the customer experience. (WooCommerce)

• Coming to Core? - Blueprints - A UI to import/export your site settings as a blueprint.json. (Brian Coords & James Kemp)

• GAAD 2025 - Join 33 people pledging 151 hours to improve accessibility in WordPress.. (Equalize Digital)

• AI Copilot - This AI Tool Writes Your Website for You! (WPTuts)

• StellarSites - An Inside Look at the new StellarSites powered by Nexcess. (The WP Minute)

• Free Tickets - Less than one week to the Page Builder Summit 8.0 - FREE Access to 35+ Industry Experts Helping You Build Better WordPress Websites Faster. (Page Builder Summit)

• Case by Case - WordPress Leadership Reinstates 32 Banned WordPress.org Accounts, Launches Formal Review. (The Repository)

If you have a question about this email or WordPress, reply, and I will answer you as soon as possible.

👋 Until next time,