How to Add a Community to a WordPress Site

Learn how to add a community to a WordPress site in minutes! Step-by-step guide with plugin recommendations for forums, groups & more

In this show, we’ll guide you step-by-step on how to effectively add a thriving community to your WordPress site. You’ll learn about the best plugins, key settings, and essential features that foster engagement and interaction. Whether you’re starting a forum or a membership site, we’ll give you practical tips to enhance user experience.

This Week’s Sponsors

Jetpack: Jetback

Ninja Forms: Ninja Forms

LifterLMS: LifterLMS

Rollback Pro: Rollback Pro

The Show’s Main Transcript

[00:00:16.900] -Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the Membership Machine Show. This is episode 184. In this episode, we’re gonna be talking about how to add a community to a WordPress website. Um, interesting topic. There are some great options. Got my great co-host with me, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself?


[00:00:36.290] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, sure. Uh, I’m Kurt von Ahnen, and I own an agency called Mañana No Más. Also works directly with the great team over at WP-Tonic.


[00:00:44.060] -Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. So, um, let’s do the intro. Um, how should we introduce the show before we go for a starter break?


[00:00:55.140] – Kurt von Ahnen
I think getting people to understand what community actually is is like the important part. Because it’s— I think there’s so much misuse of the term in our spaces, especially when talking to other people. Because I could have a membership website, but that membership isn’t necessarily community, right? Community to me is where members, people that have joined, have the ability to communicate with each other and with people upstream and downstream within the website’s hierarchy. And I think that’s super important. And then what that community shares changes. Is it images? Is it video? Is it posts? Is it whatever? But the thing is, is that they can communicate with each other, and it’s like unmoderated communication between members. To me, that’s the definition of community. How about you, Jonathan?


[00:01:47.750] -Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, and I also think it’s the functionality, isn’t it? It’s a combination. Of a, like, a forum experience and the combination of a social media platform. You know, the biggest is Facebook, isn’t it? And Facebook groups. Um, and there are other platforms like Discord, um, which I use. There are a couple of communities I —I don’t particularly—I prefer Facebook groups to Discord. But that’s just personal taste, isn’t it? But I think it’s a mix of old-school forum functionality and social media that lets different people who join something communicate and discuss topics. And they normally have admins, don’t they? You know, it’s also— I’m leaving out the biggest now, and I’ve read it. It’s a combination of Reddit as well.


[00:02:46.380] – Speaker 1
Yeah.


[00:02:46.620] -Jonathan Denwood
Which Reddit, um, is a kind of— it’s not quite, but to me it’s got a bit of, um, the feel of an old forum, isn’t it? But, um, where Facebook groups are different, isn’t it? Is a bit different in some ways.


[00:03:04.580] – Kurt von Ahnen
There’s, there’s a part of me that kind of misses the old, you know, bulletin board forum kind of thing where you had strings and threads and, and, you know, conversations that would happen within those strings and threads, but that you wouldn’t get pinged for everything. Like, um, so let’s say that you have a group on Facebook and it’s a popular group, you’ve got 10,000 people in it. Let’s say it’s, um, an author’s group, right? Well, like, the old forum or bulletin board kind of system would have been like, you know, um, cover art, you know, introductory pages, uh, children’s books. Like, it would have been like— and then there would have been discussions in each of those things. But then people kind of gave up on that and got real attracted to social and Facebook groups and stuff. But then with like a Facebook group, if there’s 10,000 authors in there, all of those topics get mismatched into one feed and into, into one timeline, and it can get messy. So I, I think things that we can build and focus on as a community within our own websites, we have more control over it where like I know we’re going to discuss these tools, but then you can have spaces and, and discussion areas that are— it’s not like everything’s in one feed yet.


[00:04:17.490] – Kurt von Ahnen
You have the ability to split things up, which I think is really important.


[00:04:21.340] -Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, but it is a little bit confusing. But that’s why we’re here to try and hopefully help you clear up the confusion. Before we go into the main meat and potatoes of the show, we’re going to go for our starter break. We’ve got a couple of messages from the major sponsors of the show. We will be back in a few moments, folks.


[00:04:41.900] – Speaker 4
WP-Tonic is sponsored by Jetpack. Managing WordPress sites shouldn’t mean stitching together a pile of disconnected plugins. Jetpack brings security, performance, publishing, growth, and AI tools together in one WordPress-native toolkit. Use what you need. Backup, scan, boost, social, video press, stats, and more. All with modernized dashboards built into WP admin. For your site or your clients’ sites, see what Jetpack can do. jetpack.com. WP-Tonic is sponsored by Ninja Forms. And let’s talk about one of their powerful tools. Conditional logic. Conditional logic is the clearest example. Every rule for the whole form lives in one panel instead of being buried field by field. On client work, build speed and low maintenance are part of your margin. A form that is fast to configure and that a client can run afterward without coming back means less friction during the build and less support load after the handoff. Ninja Forms, Powerful and genuinely easy to work with without being dumbed down. To learn more, go to ninjaforms.com.


[00:06:02.110] -Jonathan Denwood
We’re coming back, folks. Um, so let’s move on, Kurt. Um, why WordPress? You know, let’s be truthful. Um, I think it’s got some great strengths. Um, I know you don’t. Yeah. Why WordPress?


[00:06:17.940] – Kurt von Ahnen
You started to go down there and then you left it. And I’ll go right with you. It, it depends. I’m a big use case person. The use case has to match the tool or the implementation. If it comes down to community and it’s community by itself, I’m not sure that WordPress is the best answer, right? Like, like it depends on a lot of things. Um, however, if you have an online, you know, learning website, if you’re doing e-commerce, if you have a blog and other supporting like marketing style content that goes around the community, well then I think WordPress most definitely is the right answer. And I think that that comes down to scalability, flexibility, ownership. If I have my community locked in at Facebook, I am subject to Facebook’s terms, conditions, rules, and whatever the flavor of censorship is that month. If I’m on Mastodon, I might own that Mastodon channel, right, in theory, but it’s not gonna have the same tools, effects, and widespread adoption that a WordPress page would have. So I think picking those right tools is really important, and it really does come to use case. I’ve seen some great communities grow in Slack.


[00:07:41.760] – Kurt von Ahnen
But you talk to the average person and the average person goes, oh, I hate Slack. Well, then it’s kind of weird to grow that as your community channel, right? And so I think there’s so much opportunity in WordPress to build what you want around the community that it becomes— and you can host it anywhere. So I think that that gives you the inspiration to go that route.


[00:08:04.860] -Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it also depends on the kind of people like friend of the show. We do another podcast called the WP-Tonic, and we have a regular guest, Rob Rowland, um, Tiny Seeds. He’s got enormous community on Slack. Well, but his people are kind of people starting startups, so a lot of them are used to Slack, aren’t they?


[00:08:28.350] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah.


[00:08:28.510] -Jonathan Denwood
But if I was starting a community, um, there’s Slack— I think you’re a member of a couple of Slack communities that are quite large, aren’t you?


[00:08:37.960] – Kurt von Ahnen
Uh, Post Status. I get a lot of action on Post Status. I’m also part of an Educators Slack channel, uh, and that one’s real popular. It’s not popular for WordPress, but it’s popular in the L&D community, right? And so, and again, that’s like one of those technical spaces too, Jonathan. Like you mentioned, TinySeed’s like kind of a technical startup space. That Educators Slack is kind of a technical space too. And I think there’s a certain attraction to people in those tech fields that that enjoy Slack or use it for other business reasons. So it just makes sense because it’s already open.


[00:09:11.060] -Jonathan Denwood
It’s already open. I personally, it wouldn’t be my choice to try and build community on. It wouldn’t even be the third or fourth. But, um, I, I think Facebook does a better job, but you’re using Facebook, aren’t you? Um, but why WordPress? Well, we’ve got to be truthful here. There are, you know, um, If you’re used to Facebook, if you’re used to WordPress and you’re using a WordPress website and you want— it’s probably going to be, um, the easier decision because you’re used to it. And if you want to move, expand from a Facebook group that has got its problems, and the same, um, LinkedIn groups— well, this is a perfect example actually. People put a lot of energy into LinkedIn groups, didn’t they?


[00:10:03.020] – Speaker 1
Yeah.


[00:10:03.660] -Jonathan Denwood
And for, for a few years, they will— they were the thing, wasn’t they? I know people that had really enormous LinkedIn groups. And then I think whatever happened, LinkedIn changed things and it no longer— it faded away, didn’t it? Would you—


[00:10:26.640] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, LinkedIn’s a crazy animal to play because it’s one of my playgrounds, right? It’s one of the things I consider myself to be somewhat of an expert in. Um, the groups were incredibly hard to build, but once you built them and they had some momentum, they used to do really, really well. And then I don’t know if it’s the, you know, the, the Mensa club over at Microsoft or what, but they, they changed the way the thing would, would promote your group. It just doesn’t promote the groups anymore. And so, but it started promoting newsletters. And so like that channel, like if you’re, if you’re talking about marketing and how to promote your business, I, I was like, I have an email list. And then I took the email and I put it in as a newsletter. And then I got a notification 3 days later that said my newsletter had increased by like 600 subscribers. It’s, it’s like, it’s the newsletter’s getting unprecedented exposure, but my groups have just been dead on the vine for 3 years.


[00:11:23.870] – Speaker 1
Right.


[00:11:24.160] -Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, they, they changed the— they changed things and it no longer was promoted. And so does Meta, does the same. I noticed that now I’m getting adverts on YouTube and on other platforms from Meta where they’re promoting Facebook groups. Um, I don’t know if they’re seeing a decline. Um, I think the other thing is school. I think Um, I don’t like the platform. I’ve been quite honest, I don’t like the founders and I don’t like the platform really. Um, I’m not very keen on joining a Skool community because I, I don’t basically— if it was free, I might consider it, or— but I’m not that because I just think it’s drift essential basically. Um, that’s, that’s my opinion. And I don’t say too much because obviously I’m biased. Well, people could think I’m biased, but it’s actually what I actually feel about it. I, I just see it’s, uh, Drifter Central, and I, uh, um, so it doesn’t appeal to me. And then—


[00:12:36.610] – Kurt von Ahnen
I am on a free school group. I bought software for my reMarkable tablet And I had no idea when I bought the software that their support, their announcements, like their newsletter, it all comes through a SchoolLink. And so you end up being part of a free school community in order to get access and support for the software. And it’s the strangest thing in the world. I can’t imagine why a software company would go that route, but that’s what they’ve chosen to do. Um, and I have a I have a course on Skool that I put up myself. You know, it’s $9 a month or whatever, but I put that up just so I could say that I’ve sampled it, I’ve used it, and I know why you don’t want to be on it. You want to have your own WordPress website.


[00:13:22.620] -Jonathan Denwood
Well, if you want, you want to knock something out really quick and that, but it is the epitome of total lack of control. It’s— but there’s always this balance, isn’t there? But They’ve taken it to the far extreme. There’s hardly— there’s dark light mode and, and there’s, there’s 2 levels. Um, and well, there’s 3 levels, isn’t there? There’s free, there’s the £9, and there’s something else. And that’s it basically, isn’t it? Um, where with WordPress, you, um, and I’ve seen this with all sorts of platforms. I, I think you’ve got to use these platforms to promote your content. I’m talking about TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube. Um, there’s about Pinterest, there’s about 5 or 6. Of course, X, i.e., Twitter. I keep calling it Twitter. So there’s about 6 and there’s some others as well, but the main 6, you really got to use them and promote your content through those. Um, But I think not— you want as much control over your intellectual property as you can get. Because the example, LinkedIn, their position around groups, it changed suddenly.


[00:14:49.100] – Speaker 4
Yeah.


[00:14:49.240] -Jonathan Denwood
Um, you know, people, people found— I’m not going to go into the politics, I’m just not going to do it, but People find that different platforms that they don’t own can change direction and they no longer— their business priorities become very different to yours.


[00:15:15.250] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah.


[00:15:16.360] -Jonathan Denwood
And that’s just the name of the game, isn’t it?


[00:15:19.250] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, just a real-life example for people that the people that listen might identify with. There was just a special on TV, women that had signed up and put their life into growing a business in Etsy, having an Etsy store and putting all that stuff. But all it takes is like one trademark infringement, you use a Disney image without their permission or something and boom, your store’s gone. And there’s no way to get that back because it’s someone else’s platform, you’ve been banned off of it. If you owned your platform, you would go, oh, I’m so sorry, let me take that down. And then you’d still be in business, you know, you’d still restructure around it. But if you’re on someone else’s platform, you are, you know, at their will whenever it’s over. Like if they change their mind, they change direction, they change policy, they incorporate a policy you don’t like, you’re stuck with it. And if you’re on a SaaS platform, Sometimes it can be really, really hard to migrate or make a change from that.


[00:16:25.490] -Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, well, that’s, that’s their business model, isn’t it? So let’s move on to the next thing. Key things you need to know. I think we covered that. Is there anything else? I think we covered that a little bit. We merged 2 with 3. Shall we go on to the next one? Do you need an app? Because I think unless you’ve got a very active community already and you know you’re moving to your own, you built something reasonably large on school, on Facebook groups, but now you’re looking at maximum ownership and branding opportunity. So you’re looking at WordPress. Um, unless you’ve got a lot— initial large community, you don’t need an app because, you know, it’s going to be adaptive anyway. And unless you’ve got a very large community, nobody’s going to download an app on their phone. It’s the last thing people want. You know, I haven’t downloaded— I haven’t downloaded an app. I tend, because I’m in front of a computer most, most of the time. So, um, I think if you aren’t and you’re relying on your phone, you, well, you’d probably be even more picky because you just don’t want to download a ton of that constant downloads on your phone.


[00:17:57.650] -Jonathan Denwood
What do you reckon?


[00:17:59.940] – Kurt von Ahnen
I just got one of those new fancy, uh, Insta360 cameras, and it turned out— I didn’t know this when I bought it— you have to edit the videos in your phone or tablet. It requires an app. And I was like angry about it. I’m like, I don’t want to add another app. And of course I added the app and it said, you’re running out of space. You know, that’s the kind of thing that people deal with now with their phones, and it’s frustrating. To your point, no one wants to really add another app. There’s only one one use case where I think having an app is important, and that’s you have some type of large audience and the messaging is time-related and important for a push notification.


[00:18:42.660] – Speaker 1
Yeah.


[00:18:43.000] – Kurt von Ahnen
So, uh, maybe it’s a big giant school and there’s, you know, certain notifications that have to go out for, you know, quizzing, testing, or events, or something’s changed, kind of like When you’re at the airport and you get the thing that says, oh, your gate’s been changed, right? That is a timely, like time-sensitive, important push notification. Your gate’s been changed. That’s like a great use case scenario. But if we think about an e-learning website, a course creator’s website, a small membership, there is no reason to have the requirement of push notifications Unless it was some kind of like built into the business model, like some kind of gamified thing with, with the speed of answering a text message or something. That’s the only thing I could think of.


[00:19:32.310] -Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. And what are your real options? Well, I think we’ve discussed that. That’s going to quickly blast through it. You know, it depends on your community. You could look at Slack, Facebook groups, Discord. Then you’re looking at school. And then if you just totally dislike WordPress, you’ll be looking at Circle. Um, so top end Circle, easy, easy and rough school. But, um, because you can basically sell, sell your community, which you can’t do on Facebook groups. So But I’m not, you know, I personally wouldn’t do it. I would, but if you just want to try something out, um, on Skool, but then if I start, you’ve got some traction, I would look at moving away from it as quickly as possible and getting as maximum control on it. Um, I’m not really bought, I’m not really bought on the benefits of the marketplace, which they push a lot. Just not now. I just, I think it’s just the ease of getting it up. But, um, yeah, but you know, I would either look at Facebook groups or Skool and then make your mind. And then that’s on stage. Uh, I personally would want maximum control, so I would look at WordPress.


[00:21:02.910] -Jonathan Denwood
Right.


[00:21:03.150] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, and the other thing to think about, Jonathan, is we’re having this conversation about community. But there’s a good portion of our listeners that probably already have a website. And so then stands to reason, okay, 43% of the internet is on WordPress, so is your website already on WordPress? If your website’s already on WordPress, if your blog, your marketing site, your business storefront site, your e-commerce site is already in WordPress, then we don’t have to convince you to use WordPress. Now what we need to do is say, What is a functional— what’s a functional option that you could add to your WordPress website for, for a low capital investment that would get you up and sampling a community vibe? And I think Jonathan’s got a great answer for that coming up.


[00:21:49.880] -Jonathan Denwood
Yep. So we’re going to go for our middle break, folks. And then when we come back, we’ll be looking at the main options to build a community on WordPress in 2026. We’ll be back in a few moments, folks.


[00:22:02.340] – Speaker 4
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[00:22:39.450] – Speaker 1
This podcast episode is brought to you by LifterLMS, the leading learning management system solution for WordPress. If you or your client are creating any kind of online course, training-based membership website, or any type of e-learning project, LifterLMS is the most secure, stable, well-supported solution on the market. Go to lifterlms.com and save 20% at checkout with coupon code PODCAST20. That’s PODCAST20. Enjoy the rest of your show.


[00:23:16.190] -Jonathan Denwood
We’re coming back, folks. I just want to point out I do a newsletter. Um, I do an individual video just for the newsletter where I talk about some subject that’s come on my radar, and then I have a transcript of the video also available. And then I also find some other supporting materials that is around the subject, and I put it all in the newsletter and You get it for free. And, um, how do you get it? Go to wp-tonic.com/newsletter. wp-tonic.com/newsletter. And I say that you want to keep the newsletter as much control as you can as well. A lot of people build newsletters on other platform— other platforms And you really need to make sure you can export the list that you do, export it regularly, um, because it can be painful with that as well. Um, well, let’s look at, um, let’s start off with the one that I like the most at the present moment. It’s Fluent Community. What do you see as its strengths and weaknesses, Kurt?


[00:24:45.670] – Kurt von Ahnen
Fluent Community as a strength to me is the lightness of the plugin. And I say the lightness of the plugin because we’ve sampled other stuff before that was heavier, right? That was more burdensome on server resources. And so Fluent Community seems to be lightweight. It can adopt the kind of the theme, the look and feel a little bit better than some. And setup I thought was extremely easy. So, and if you’re using a CRM and a form tool and all those things, it integrates really well. And Fluent Community Pro also integrates directly like with LifterLMS. And so on these heavy dynamic websites that my agency has a tendency to build and WP-Tonic as well, Fluent Community is a really good fit. And as far as using it, the user interface is modern, it’s clean. There’s a lot of positives to Fluent Community. One of the negatives I think is if you’re not familiar with how these tools work, there’s a little ambiguity in how do I set this up so only certain people access it? Like when you first upload it, everybody that comes to your website can go to it, right? And so you have to figure out how do, how do I restrict this tool so that only members see it or only certain user roles see it?


[00:26:12.530] -Jonathan Denwood
Or certain membership levels.


[00:26:14.680] – Speaker 1
Yeah.


[00:26:15.320] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah.


[00:26:15.570] -Jonathan Denwood
That’s what, that’s what most people do, don’t they? They, they, they not always do they, but some people want it at a certain membership level, don’t they?


[00:26:25.420] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, and that took a little finagling, right, to really understand how you meter the people coming into that tool. But once that was identified, it was fine. The one other questionable thing I will say about Fluent Community is it lists that it is an LMS as well, that it offers courses. I do have a course in one of my sample Fluent Community sites just to show that I know how it works and I use it.


[00:26:56.370] – Speaker 4
Yeah.


[00:26:56.920] – Kurt von Ahnen
It’s not robust. It’s not like what you would picture a real LMS being. It’s a really good, like, if you’re gonna host your course on school, you might as well put it on Fluent Community. Like, it’s that level of LMS.


[00:27:11.230] -Jonathan Denwood
Well, which I think is appropriate. Appropriate, really, isn’t it? Because, yeah, right. But it’s powerful. It’s fast. It gives you almost 80 to 90% of everything you probably want. Um, just really like it, folks. We provide— if you host with WP-Tonic and you want a community, that’s what we provide, um, on all our plan levels if you want to do it. Next one, um, BuddyBoss. Um, Powerful. Um, it’s got some quirks. There’s been some major changes. They’ve added membership. It used to be— I’m not sure if they— because the company that owns it also owns MemberPress. I’m not sure if they’ve developed their own or they’re just bundling it with MemberPress. I don’t— I haven’t had time to clarified that, but they have been adding and changing what they’re offering. And you also, you do have the flexibility of that app as well. You’ve got the app’s got to be hosted with them, um, compared if you want a white label app, it’s a lot more competitive than, um, what Circle wants if you want a white label. Um, which most people do in my experience. Um, um, if they’re going to go down that route, and like I said in the first half, you really want— you don’t really have to go there unless you, you really need push notifications.


[00:28:58.250] -Jonathan Denwood
And most people think they need that and they don’t. Um, but it is a powerful beast. So what do you see? Is it strengths and weaknesses, Kurt?


[00:29:09.650] – Kurt von Ahnen
I think BuddyBoss does an extraordinary job in the thing that is what some people would say is a weakness. So, uh, let me be more specific. When you put in BuddyBoss, you should also use the BuddyBoss theme. The BuddyBoss theme gives you access to different menus and stuff that’ll be on your, um, different pages, a horizontal menu, a vertical menu, all these things. And you want to use the theme to get the best use of those tools that the BuddyBoss community, uh, you know, application provides, that theme kind of takes over your website. And so you end up with a BuddyBoss website. They look great.


[00:29:49.530] – Speaker 4
I think they look great.


[00:29:50.270] – Speaker 1
You can—


[00:29:50.810] – Kurt von Ahnen
when you see it, you go, oh, that’s a BuddyBoss website. But it worked like— so it reformats the way your blogs look, the way your lessons look, the way your courses present on course pages. But I’m gonna go and say this again, like, I think that’s a positive. I think too many people get lost in the design aspects of projects rather than launching their content. And the BuddyBoss platform is a really good-looking platform that you can put your content into and then not get lost in the design, you know, netherworld. So, so I like that part of it. I think that’s a really strong part. The negative Jonathan, is just the weight and size of it. It’s, um, it’s a beast and it takes some server resources and it’s, it’s heavy and there’s a lot of features. The learning curve is a little steep, which is all part of the size and the heaviness of it. But it does work well. I have a working project of BuddyBoss that I manage as a personal project. And I’ve used, you know, groups and private groups and, you know, you can exchange pictures and photos. You can, you can have like a document library that people can store for themselves.


[00:31:01.860] – Kurt von Ahnen
I mean, there’s all kinds of cool things that the platform does, but you have to recognize that all of those cool things come with a certain amount of weight or drain on your resources. And so you just have to be aware of that as you’re building out your project.


[00:31:17.420] -Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, you just got to know what you’re getting involved in. And I’m not sure that BuddyBoss, they have extensive documentation. How’s Fluent Community doing on their documentation and their support documentation? Is it— are they building it out? Is it pretty good?


[00:31:33.790] – Kurt von Ahnen
They do an extraordinary job with tutorials, video tutorials. So the whole WP Manage Ninja team for all of their projects has a complete playlist on YouTube for each of their products. And they’re really well done. So CRM, Fluent Forms, Fluent Community. For my clients, I generally refer them to those playlists for training because it seems to be the quickest way for them to learn how to do something from scratch. But to your point, documentation. So my use for documentation is different. Like, the YouTube tutorials are great to learn how to use something from scratch. Documentation for me is like, I want to find the answer to something specific quickly.


[00:32:14.980] -Jonathan Denwood
And you want to search for it.


[00:32:17.760] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, I want to go to a paragraph, and I think BuddyBoss is stronger in that department. Um, but I’m spoiled because, you know, the LifterLMS crew, I don’t think there’s a better documented platform out there than LifterLMS.


[00:32:31.670] -Jonathan Denwood
Um, the thing is, it causes— because I’m not— because they’ve re— they’ve done a— they’ve done a recoding recently Um, so I don’t know how out of date I am, but it’s a— BuddyBoss is a strange mixture, folks. It’s a hybrid. It mixes— it’s a theme and a plugin, but it’s back to front because traditionally the traditions of WordPress is the plugin has the functionality and, um, and a theme is styling. Well, they did it back to front. The theme had actually a lot of the code and the plugin was the freebie. Um, it was a bit back, so you had to explain that. And because of that, um, you could— you can buy third-party themes that will have different looks. The more you change, the more you change BuddyBoss. through adding a lot of additional code and that, the more headaches you’re going to have when it updating. Because you’re— you could do update, update, but if the person, the company you bought the third-party theme from hasn’t updated their theme, you can, you can have problems. Um, if you add a lot of additional plugins, you know, I’m not saying you can’t add anything, but You really add, and it’s similar to WooCommerce.


[00:34:05.320] -Jonathan Denwood
If you really go at it and you add a ton, that has consequences with support. And they’ve got a demo site, but if you just install the theme and we, we don’t offer, we offer it on some of our plans and we set it up as the demo looks. But if you install it yourself, it won’t look anything like their demo. I don’t— I’m not sure if they’ve changed that. Um, but if you want an app and you want maximum control and you want something really powerful and really slick, it’s the business. Um, it’s, you know, a lot of hours have gone into it. Let’s look at something else, something I don’t know too much, but Actually, on my other show, the WP-Tonic Show, the, the founder of PeepSo is coming on to have a chat with us, Kurt. Um, and it’s the kind of alternative to BuddyBoss. Um, in price terms for one site, it seems to do a lot of what BuddyBoss does. Um, but obviously initially it’s probably There’s a lot more to it, but it does seem to do a lot of what BuddyBoss does. And it’s— for one site, it’s quite competitive, very good value.


[00:35:32.090] -Jonathan Denwood
And they also supply an app as well, which is a lot more competitive than BuddyBoss, a lot more competitive. And they’ve been around for over 10 years. I don’t know if you know anything about them.


[00:35:46.990] – Kurt von Ahnen
Never, never, never used them. I’ll tell you, when I saw the pricing, I was a little bit surprised because it says the mobile app is included with that, you know, $21 a month, $249 a year. I mean, let’s be real, that’s what I think BuddyBoss was charging, like $249 a month to have a mobile app. So, um, in just looking through the documentation and the stuff that’s here, I was like, this is unique. But I noticed that they integrate with like MasterStudy LMS and Tutor LMS, and I didn’t see LifterLMS listed, which I thought was kind of odd.


[00:36:24.600] -Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I thought that was odd as well. So we’ll be able to quiz him about that. But it does look—


[00:36:34.650] – Kurt von Ahnen
We can change his mind.


[00:36:36.180] -Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. Or you can. I doubt if I’d change anybody’s mind. And then last, LifterLMS and Social Learning Addon, which they have built out, they have recently updated. Um, tell us about this, Kurt.


[00:36:54.730] – Kurt von Ahnen
This is not community the way you think of community. Um, this is- remember, at the beginning of the show I said community to me is when members can communicate with other members and stuff like that. Remember, LifterLMS is a learning management system. So when you add their learning social add-on, everyone gets a profile page and a newsfeed. So it feels very Facebooky, right? Like everyone has a profile, everyone has a newsfeed. Everything you do ends up in your newsfeed. There’s a general newsfeed, which is cool. You know, you see what everyone’s kind of up to and what they’re doing. But what’s really cool about it, again, if you have a learning product, so it’s really great if you have a learning product. Because if you have a learning product and you implement social learning, it creates a discussion group for every membership and course that somebody is enrolled in. So if you have a course and 25 people sign up, all 25 people will have access to that discussion group. And it’s isolated to just the 25 people in that course.


[00:38:01.490] – Kurt von Ahnen
It’s not like everyone else is pitching in their opinion about something they haven’t done. Everyone that’s in that course is in that discussion group. That, to me, works really, really, really well. When you have your profile page in social learning, there’s a— when you go to your own profile, you’ll see on the left-hand side a list of all the, you know, all the discussion groups that you’re a member of. You can access your discussions, your newsfeed, and connect with other members and direct message them through the system, which is kind of cool.


[00:38:34.760] -Jonathan Denwood
Right, final conclusions. What, what, what, how would you end this conversation, Kurt?


[00:38:41.670] – Kurt von Ahnen
Use case, baby, use case. Think about it first. Um, Jonathan, I, I think you feel the same way that I do on this. I think most people want community in their project way too early in the process. I think it’s best to add it as a feature once you already have a tribe, momentum, and people in it. Like, you have 500 students, and you go, “Hey, we just launched this new community thing.” And you got 500 people that can go in there and give this thing life. If you’ve got 5 people on your website and you try to launch a community, you’re just gonna have 5 people staring at each other, not doing anything. No one’s gonna post, nothing’s gonna happen, and it’s gonna die on the vine. And then you’ll wanna blame the product instead of blaming yourself. It was just bad timing. So I think it’s really important to wait. And I think the other thing that Jonathan and I really tried to communicate here is use case. Familiarity with these products helps us make better decisions, but, like, Fluent Community is great for X, Y, and Z.


[00:39:46.100] – Kurt von Ahnen
BuddyBoss is better for, you know, something different: A, B, and C. PeepShow might be better for M, N, and O, but we have to know the platforms and the use cases of each client. To be able to associate the best tool with the best situation.


[00:40:02.150] -Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think that’s great, Paul. So we’re going to wrap it up. So what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to, Kurt?


[00:40:10.480] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I’m on LinkedIn quite a bit, so if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, I welcome that. I’m the only Kurt Von Ahn in there, easy to find. My agency is Mañana No Más, and mañananomas.com is the site, and Mañana No Más is the tag on all the socials. So that’s good. Or just hit up Jonathan at WP-Tonic and he’ll connect us.


[00:40:29.670] -Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. And if you’re looking for a great hosting provider and agency services as well- the full gamut- have a look at what WP-Tonic’s got to offer. We provide an integrated solution and really fantastic value, and just, we’re just great, basically. Um, we’re gonna wrap it up now. We will be back next week with another topic. We’ll see you soon, folks.


[00:40:56.740] – Kurt von Ahnen
Bye.


[00:40:58.160] – Speaker 1
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