phpFox Blog: Social network and online community building insights

Many students are experiencing isolation and a lack of connection, particularly with their classmates, as we are in the midst of a period of social distancing and many schools will be closed for the remainder of the year. People and collaboration, on the other hand, are frequently the most enjoyable aspects of the classroom. Collaboration and connection are critical to our academic and social success. They can happen more naturally when we are confronted with the environment, which is why we must be more intentional in allowing this to happen when we are far away. Here are 5 ideas to build an engaged online learning community to connect students and teachers. Make use of activity feed When students access an online learning community, the first thing they see is the activity feed. As a result, it should be the location where important information such as general announcements, event updates, upcoming courses, offers, and more are posted. Learners can easily keep up with everything around them. They also receive timely notifications, ensuring that they do not miss anything important. Utilize Instant messaging feature A friendly approach to communication always yields the best results. That is why, if you want to create an engaged online learning community, you should make use of instant messaging to increase communication efficiency. Private messaging enables professors to communicate with students at their leisure in order to share their knowledge and answer questions. The instant messaging function should be used because it allows you to respond quickly when needed. If you are or will be creating an online learning community using the phpFox platform, this is the time to keep an eye on ChatPlus. Categorize groups A community is a place where students with similar interests can come together. For example, if your community is centered on digital marketing, you might have a separate group for Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing, etc. You should make a separate group for each course. Make certain that these groups are formed based on the interests of the students. Having different groups is also beneficial for sharing resources and promoting learning among participants. Activate forums You can activate forums that allow for discussion in your online learning community. One simple strategy is to share a text, a quote, or a question for discussion with the entire class and provide a brief overview and guidance before assigning them to discussion groups. Even if information follows its own pace, that doesn't mean your learners should limit sharing their knowledge or perspectives. Forums are arguably the most popular way to establish communication for an engaged online community. Ability to give feedback Building an engaged online learning community where students can give each other feedback is a practical way to connect learners and make it easier for teachers to manage their work. This is just as important for their academic success as it is for their emotional bond. While students can do this on their own, facilitating the teacher will provide more networking opportunities. It is important to build an engaged online learning community A well-invested and built online learning community will bring a lot of great benefits to both students and teachers. Hope these 5 ideas to build an engaged online learning community will help you in implementing your plan. If you are planning to build an online learning community, phpFox can help. We are the leading online community platform that can help you kick start your plan quickly and easily. Along with free consultancy, we offer an optimal package while setting up and other services for your ideal online community. Do not hesitate to contact us for further discussion or drop us a message at hello@phpfox.com

In our last blog, we have shared how to monetize your online community. There are many ways for you to start making money from the community, such as charging membership,  advertising fees or earning from the marketplace, etc. You can go back here to read again. Today, we're going to dive into how to monetize phpFox with subscriptions. The riches are the niches Have you ever heard the saying “The riches are the niches”? It appears a lot on youtube videos, social networking sites, or blogs. And the truth is, this is a very, very true statement. While a lot of businesses struggle with the generalities and non-specifics, other companies have started creating their niche communities to increase profits and create real value for users. Obviously, specialization will lead to success in the fastest and most effective way. That's why more and more membership sites, private communities, and online courses are popping up. In particular, to access these sites, you need to pay a recurring fee to maintain the account. You spend money, you get value, you succeed. Indeed, the riches are the niches. First, let's start with the most basic concept. What is a Membership/Subscription site? This is a website where access to specific content is secured. To be able to view the content within the website, members need to have a valid account on the site. Now let's dive deeper into how membership sites work. It is a free site or paid site for members to log in. Depending on the specific level of content users want to access, there will be different subscription packages. Users are required to pay a fee to access the contents within the website. So, how to create a niche community? Never try to create a one-size-fits-all community like Facebook because it takes a lot of time, money, and effort. Instead, create a niche community that attracts people with similar interests and hobbies. In a large market where your business operates, do your research and segment it. A niche market can simply be understood as a subset of a broader market category. Take grocery stores as an example. Subsets of this huge category will be vegetarian stores, health food stores or shops specializing in hair care products, etc. If you want to build an online learning community where you can monetize offering courses, identify a specific topic and value. It could be a gem-learning community, a yoga class, a baking class, or a community for skincare. Always remember that your niche down your community specifically. Then, build engaging and valuable content to get members involved from the start. Then divide the content into several levels. The more valuable the content, the more likely it attracts members to pay to use it. How to monetize phpFox with subscription? Surely after rekindling the idea, you are very eager to kickstart your membership page. Don't worry, we will show you how to create a membership/subscription page from phpFox. Enable subscription First access to the AdminCP  Go to Subscription from Members menu After accessing the Subscription setting page, Click Setting Enable Subscription Packages: Set to Yes to enable or No to disable subscriptions. (Default is No) Subscription on registration is required?: Set to Yes to require a subscription choice on registration or No to not have subscription choices on - registration. (Default is No) Create subscription packages After accessing the subscription setting page, click New Package Input the information after the form open Title: Put a title so that you and your users will know which subscription package is. (Silver, Gold, Platinum, Business, Pro, etc...). Description: Describe to your users what is in this package Image: (Optional) You can choose a small icon for the subscription package. Approximately 130 x 120px. User Group on Success: User group the user will be moved into upon successful payment. (If this is a free subscription, they will automatically move to it when they select it) User Group on Failure: If the user doesn't pay, this is the user group they will be placed in. Add to Registration: If you want this on the registration, choose Yes. Is Active: Set to Yes if you want this activated or No if you want it to be inactive. This is helpful if you want to set up subscriptions to use at a later time. Subscription Costs: Set to True to show the price of the subscription package. Price: Set the prices (unless free) for each currency you have active on the site. Remember though, if adding currencies later, you need to update this to add the rate for any currencies you add later. Recurring: (Not available for free packages) Set to True if you want the user to pay a recurring fee. This will be set in their Paypal subscriptions and that would be where they cancel it when they want to cancel. Recurring Price: This can be different from your first initial price set at #9. Perhaps you want a low introductory rate and then charge more. You can also make it the same as the initial fee. Recurring Period: If setting this as recurring, you can choose from Monthly, Quarterly, Biannually, and Annually. Background color (for the comparison page): (Optional) This is to set colors for your backgrounds of each subscription if you want to make them stand out. These would show at yoursite.com/index.php/subscribe/compare(or with short URLs yoursite.com/subscribe/compare) once you've set up the comparisons. Here's a good site to find colors, W3 Schools. Hit Submit when done. That's it! It's really easy to monetize phpFox site with subscriptions. We hope you've found this blog useful. Building an online community can feel overwhelming sometimes. That's why we want to share some information to at least help you kickstart your plan easier. Do not hesitate to tell us your concern whether you're already a client of phpFox or not. You can leave us a ticket at our Client Area or shoot us an email at helo@phpfox.com. We're here to help you create your ideal community.

ChatPlus 4.1.4 and Live Streaming 4.1.1 are finally released. These releases come with a bunch of new features and improvements to improve the user experience for your community. Let’s buckle up! ChatPlus 4.1.4 New features/Improvements Users on one side can delete chat conversations can while the other users are still able to see the message. This feature makes it more convenient for users to decide if they want to keep the conversation themselves or not. Their action will not affect others' chat data. The new version supports showing the typing status in the chat room when someone triggers the typing action. Moreover, it also displays the user's status (online/away/busy) and “seen” status below the last message of the conversation if users on the other side have already read it. Therefore, users will be able to communicate more effectively as they could know well the status of others. [gallery columns="2" size="large" ids="9582,9578"] Users will be no longer worried about not be able to send multiple photos with low resolution. In ChatPlus 4.1.4, we have improved to allow people to send multiple photos with their full resolution at once. We hope this improvement will help you to enjoy the best with your conversation.  The chat room gallery is now available. Users can use this to find sent attachments of the conversation such as photos, videos, files instead of digging into a lot of old messages. No more wasting much time just to find a photo, a video, or file that you are looking for. Sound great, doesn't it? And other improvements we've made such as: Improve performance to load many chat conversations and messages faster. Automatically using default earpiece output for audio call and speaker output for video call. Enhance for better call connection. Fix other minor issues. Live Streaming 4.1.1 New features/improvements  Improve for better live video connection while streaming Fix interruption working flow to make sure live video would not be deleted (unavailable to playback) when get interrupted by the network, accepting calls or other unexpected actions. Improve performance to prevent crashing when loading mass viewers, comment and reaction Fix other minor issues Upgrade ChatPlus 4.1.4 and Live Streaming 4.1.1 today You can open a Mobile Build ticket in our Client Area to request us to upgrade your mobile apps. There are more details for your information in the ChatPlus Release Notes and Live Streaming Release Notes. Don’t hesitate to submit tickets or report immediately for any issue. We’re constantly working to improve your phpFox experience. We always appreciate any feedback to make phpFox better, hence please feel free to share with us your ideas.  

How's it going? We would like to announce the phpFox 4.8.5 Official Release. This minor version is mainly to solve the issue of incompatibility which happens when installing apps/themes in AdminCP on some latest versions of Chrome, Safari browsers. As you may know, Chrome and Safari browsers have recently updated to enforce using the "SameSite=None" attribute on browser cookies for 3rd-party usage. Thus, you may experience the issue that the login form displays when installing apps in AdminCP. Right after receiving feedback about the issue, our team has been working very hard and decided to have a quick release of phpFox 4.8.5 as soon as possible even though phpFox 4.8.4 was just released a few weeks ago. Upgrade phpFox 4.8.5 today You can upgrade your phpFox site to phpFox 4.8.5 to fix the issue from now. To upgrade your phpFox site to version 4.8.5, you will need to run the full upgrade routine as our Upgrade Instructions. Please don't forget to back up your site and database before proceeding the upgrade. And, check with 3rd-party experts about the compatibility of all the apps/templates you are using. If your phpFox site is using 3rd-party apps or has customizations, please see our recommendations.   It is important to note that the phpFox site needs to support SSL in order for the "SameSite=None" attribute to work properly because of the requirement of browsers. Running the web applications on HTTPS is always highly recommended so that client-side user data is encrypted before sending the server. Fortunately, many hosting providers support free SSL of Let's Encrypt by default. In case your phpFox site doesn't support SSL at this time, you can follow this solution to install apps in AdminCP with Chrome and Safari browsers.   Have any issues with this version? Please don’t hesitate to submit tickets or report immediately to our GitHub Tracker or Client Area for support. We always appreciate any feedback to make phpFox better, so please feel free to share with us your ideas.   Meanwhile, we are running the Promotion for ChatPlus and Live Streaming coming versions with a 20% discount on purchasing. Please go HERE to know more