The Power of a Nerd Hug

You know you’re getting old (and need to exercise) when you do yard work over the weekend and… you’re sore.

And yes, as I sit here in this chair, I feel like I just worked out. Yet, all I did was work on catch-up yardwork over the weekend. I guess it gives me an excuse not to exercise today.

Last week was super busy with client projects and some new clients of Concierge. I knew it would be a busy one since it was my first week back from England, and I don’t expect this week to look any different. I just looked inside Basecamp and…. yeah, there’s a lot to get done this week.

But, before I dive into that, let’s kick off with the newsletter. I want to talk to you about the power of a nerd hug. Well, more like… just being a human being. And then, let’s talk about how I will be using Fluent Community. It is a little different than some.

OK, let’s go….

The Power of a Nerd Hug

As you may know, I do Roadmap Calls with potential clients so I can answer questions and gauge out working together. These are free calls… and usually they last 20-30 minutes.

I am anything but salesy on these calls, but a majority of people I talk to end up working with me and coming on as Concierge clients. But frankly, even when they don’t, I find these calls to be invaluable.

Whether people sign up as a client or not, it enables me to keep my ear to the ground and stay tuned to the needs/wants of my market. Nothing will EVER beat real, personal conversations with your market to learn what people really want and how you can best help them. No form, no email – nothing. A personal conversation is always the best.

Last week, I did a Roadmap Call with a very nice lady out on the west coast. And her call was definitely an outlier in that I allowed that call to take about 2 hours.

Yes, about 2 hours on a free call!

But, she was SOOOO clearly overwhelmed with the tech side of pulling off her dream. She had a mission… a mission incredibly important to her. And she was frustrated and confused about all the tech stuff…. literally to the point of fighting back tears as we spoke together.

So, I answered her questions. But, more importantly…. I listened. I empathized with the frustration she was feeling because… it was VERY real. I helped alleviate a lot of concerns she was having that was preventing her from launching her dream.

I could feel the weight coming off her. I felt like she needed a good hug. A good nerd hug. And it is why I let that call go for 2 hours. It was the HUMAN thing to do.

And yes, she became a client. And she may be reading this right now. Hi Eva.

But, here’s the thing…

In this business, it is all too easy to get stuck in a mindset of thinking of people as anonymous blobs. As mere pixels on our traffic graphs.

Site owners sometimes imagine themselves speaking to…. a mass.

And, it is too easy to forget that we’re all dealing with individual human beings. It is also all too easy to forget or not even think about what you’re TRULY providing to them.

See, in my business, what I provide is way more than just hosting, site updates, plugins and tech crap. No… under all that, the REAL product I provide is TRUST and CONFIDENCE. And TRUE COMMUNICATION.

In this world and in this business, so many companies make it obvious in their support departments that you’re almost a nuisance when you ask for help. Too many tech service providers talk down to people like they’re idiots…. or try to hide behind AI bots. And when people go out to try to find help, they don’t even know who to ask.

The amount of RELIEF you provide by just being easy to talk to, answering questions, and being a confident authority…. cannot be overstated.

There’s a real power with never forgetting to consider your customers and clients to be…. like family members. Like friends. And treat them accordingly.

To have real conversations. To actually care.

But not only that, to not lose sight of what you REALLY provide with your product or service. It is not just about features and deliverables. What people want is somebody who CARES. Somebody who will talk to them and provide confidence in an area where they don’t have it.

Competence. Confidence. And a friendly hand.

In the end, it is always a people business. Always will be.

And these are things, BTW, that AI will never be able to do. And the more you go down the rabbit hole of trying to automate human interaction, the more you’ll lose. Keep that in mind as you build your sites and determine the tools you will use in it.

You shouldn’t be trying to hide behind tools or over-automate. In fact, you should be looking for opportunities to get more personal with the people you serve.

Concierge Client Update

Brand New Client Center (w/ Community)

There’s still some things to button up, but over the weekend I decided to kick things off with a brand new Client Center.

Now, instead of the “My Account” area being used as a central dashboard, I’m re-working things to be powered by Fluent Community. You’ll now see the new link to the Client Center at the top of the website. This is where you will now view/manage your account, including appointments, credits, and more.

But, since I’m doing this within Fluent Community, this means I’m bringing community functionality back to the website again. This will provide a platform for shorter updates and posts during the week… without feeling like I need to justify an entire video or blog post. It will also allow clients and members to ask questions and crowdsource feedback.

For all Concierge clients, I will be adding you guys to the new Spaces specific to Concierge. I’ve still got some details to work out.

Along the way with putting this together, I’ve learned some things about working with Fluent Community. I’ll need to share some of that with you guys. It is a pretty nice platform.

WordPress News & Updates

WooCommerce MCP. According to this post on X, the next version of WooCommerce is going to include MCP. MCP stands for Model Context Protocol and, in short, provides a way for AI models like ChatGPT to interact. Things are moving quick, but it will come soon where you can…. ask WooCommerce questions in plain English?

Shopify For WordPress. In a big move, Shopify has released a WordPress plugin that will now integrate a Shopify store right into WordPress seemlessly, allowing you to turn any WP site into a store without any coding. Manage your store through Shopify while using WordPress for the content. This is pretty huge news for the WordPress ecommerce space.

2025 Theme Is Huge. Brian Gardner (from WP Engine) points out on X that the default Twenty Twenty-Five theme is about 8MB in file size. Yes, that’s big. For one, the bulk of that is fonts and images that only get used in certain instances. Secondly, let’s be real…. barely anybody uses that theme. For most, it is theme you leave there in case you nmeed to revert to it for debug purposes. That’s about it. ‍♂️

Ollie Menu Designer. Mike McAlister has released his free Ollie Menu Designer plugin to allow users to create content-rich dropdowns and mega-menus. It is designed to work with block themes, so it is not compatible with every theme out there.

AI Won’t Kill Premium Plugins. More and more people are using AI to vibe code snippets for WordPress to make it do things. Some even vibe code full plugins. But, on WP Product Talk, Darrel Wilson opines that he doesn’t believe AI will kill off the need for premium plugins. In the end, snippets can’t replace trust, support and security. I will also add, too, that AI. solutions can often be janky because the person using AI doesn’t know any better. You’re going to get a signifantly better product by paying for a premium plugin.

Buy It In ChatGPT. ChatGPT raised some eyebrows last week with this post about agentic ecommerce. Short version is…. enabling people to buy products within the context of a chat with AI. Shopify has already jumped on this. But, WooCommerce sites are not being left in the dust. Not only is WooCommerce going to have it’s own MCP (see above), but plugin developers are coming at it fast. W7S, for instance, is about to launch their own plugin for WooCommerce specifically to allow people to browse and buy products from ChatGPT.

Fluent Community 1.8. Fluent Community 1.8 is being a deemed a “major update”, with the big reveal being a new Follower module. Essentially, users can follow other users (similar to X). They’ve also really buttoned up the BuddyBoss migration so you can reliably migrate even very large BuddyBoss communities into FluentCommunity. Read the full announcement here.

FluentCart Update. FluentCart released a new beta last week, including things like tax/VAT calculations, order bumps, enhancements to Gutenberg editing, support for Paddle, and other changes. Hard development and testing is under way, so they’re not setting a firm release date quite yet. No link for ya on this one since the whole beta process is for a private group, but I’ll keep you informed.

WordPress 6.8.3. It rolled out last week and pretty much everybody’s site auto-updated to it. It is a security release without any major feature additions. If your site hasn’t been updated to 6.8.3, I recommend you manually do it as soon as you can.

Groundworx Testimonial. Groundworx has released a new plugin for managing your testimonials on your site. Essentially, it creates a custom post type for testimonials then provides a dedicated block to integrate those testimonials dynamically into your site. I built this exact thing using ACF and a Kadence Query Loop, but I imagine this plugin provides some nice designs and convenience.

Elementor Gets New Stuff. Elementor 3.32 was released, providing transitions, transform and size variables. Honestly, stuff most people won’t even use, but it does show that Elementor is advancing further toward the more CSS-first styling that will be coming in Elementor 4.

FuseWP Moving Quickly. When I checked out FuseWP back in April as a potential WP Fusion competitor, I determined it just wasn’t in the same league. Since then, the FuseWP team has been developing quickly. Their changelog shows a ton of new integrations added…. and most recently version 2.1.23 now builds in integrations with FluentCommunity, WSForm, SureForms, AffiliateWP and SliceWP. They’re moving quickly!

Running Doom In WordPress? Let’s end off with something fun. Remember the video game Doom? Well, can it be run within WordPress? Well, yes. Not only that, but if you’re just itching to try it, there’s a plugin on Github which adds the Doom Block to WordPress. It uses the JS-DOS emulator, so it isn’t as if WordPress itself is running Doom. But, still some nerdy fun.

Thinking About Community Plugins A Bit Differently

I know a lot of membership site owners think of having a “community” as a big, public thing. They picture this bustling community with tons of activity and active members all paying subscription fees.

And as I’ve said before many times, I don’t think this is something you want to rush into. In fact, I’ve seen too many memberships where they launched a community platform far too early and what ended up happening was that it looked…. dead. And there’s nothing that makes you look dumber than a community that nobody is using.

But, let’s also consider other uses for community software aside from the big ones.

I am a big fan of Fluent Community. And I wanted to use it to re-introduce community functionality to Blog Marketing Academy again, but this time in a way which was more in line with my current business strategy.

What if I could use Fluent Community to build a custom/client area with some interactive components? Something more targeted versus feeling like I need to do some big community platform for everybody (which I don’t want).

I wouldn’t touch BuddyBoss. I have several clients using BuddyBoss and I know it is the “big one” in the WordPress community space right now. But, it comes with so much freakin’ overhead that anybody not already embedded in that ecosystem I would highly recommend avoiding it. FluentCommunity is so much faster, lighter and streamlined.

As you can see in the Client Update above, I have moved forward with building a new “Client Center” using FluentCommunity. Here’s some of why I went this route…

• It provides a platform for quick updates and smaller posts…. without the feeling of the blog where you feel you need to justify a post with a big article.
• While it provides that platform for me as the site’s owner, it also provides the same capability to my customers. And I am definitely looking at ways to enable my Concierge clients and maybe potentially a broader community to have that kind of capability on my website again.
• It does really nice email notifications. This gives a platform for quick news and updates and tips throughout the week… and not just in this weekly newsletter which is currently the only email I send.
• It is integrated into my site. While the community portal has a decidedly different look, FluentCommunity does have the ability to bring pages from the rest of the site into the community portal. So, depending on the setup, you could literally use FluentCommunity as your core platform.

Some people have mentioned that they don’t like how Fluent Community looks so different than the rest of their site. This is one of the many reasons the platform is much faster and lighter than BuddyBoss, though. But, not only that, if you embrace the difference, it actually tends to lend itself to usage as a “Client Center” (or whatever you may wanna call it). When people go in there, they KNOW they are in that section of your site and you can avoid the confusion.

For me, the key benefit is to have a platform for posting smaller updates – similar to social posts – without the expectations of full blog posts. It will be the client hub.

A place for service announcements and quick updates for clients.

A place for smaller tips and things that don’t warrant a full post.

A place for questions and answers.

I could bring the client portal (like the knowledgebase) into the FluentCommunity portal. I could put SOPs and other client documentation in there. FluentCommunity happens to have a pretty streamlined online course setup, too.

See, there are smaller, more granular uses for community software…. beyond just the big public communities people usually think of.

A portal for clients. For coaching clients. Things like that.

Something to think about for YOUR website.

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The WP Edge is the official weekly newsletter of the Blog Marketing Academy.