WIX Forum Tutorial – How to Create an Online Community with WIX

hey guys how’s it going it’s Alan and welcome to today’s video first of all I’m gonna show you guys something absolutely mind-blowing can you believe that we can actually build an online community that allows people to create accounts use the social factor of commenting sharing harding which is liking a post the ability to allow you or others to actually post content in different categories and start a conversation right away yes this is
actually possible we’re gonna be able to build an online community which we’ll be doing right now together in Wix comm with absolutely no code the craziest thing is a couple years ago I actually did build a developed and worked on an online community it was a dating website think POF think about their online dating web sites although that web site specifically didn’t blow up and hit the mainstream market it still took so many hours but I’m gonna
show you guys how you can create your own online community to to basically serve whatever whatever I do you guys have and I’m gonna show you guys how you can build it to look like a mobile app it’s gonna look absolutely amazing guys and I’m so excited to show you it so I’m gonna show you guys how to basically recreate again this website if you haven’t already do remember that gifting techcom actually just launched the new developer community
session so if you come to the gifting techcom web site top right hand corner we create a community just for you guys and I’m gonna actually show you how to create that community automatically so click on developer community it’s gonna ask you for a password once you enter that password if you are on the desktop version so sorry if it’s gonna ask you for the password go ahead ask Lisa for the password or you might have already got the email
regardless go ahead and click on that button and you’ll be introduced to the community page here you’ll have categories so I’ll give you the live example on mobile which is honestly the pride of joy of what we’ve been doing here click on all categories and you can go into any category and learn about that specific section so start a conversation sorry in that specific section so general discussions you can go in and right anything that’s general
like welcome to the forum you can create a new post etc etc community support if you guys have any questions about how to do something definitely put it in the community support will be very active on on helping the community grow how to build this is really interesting if you have a website on the internet that you really really like and you want to know how we can build this in Wix post that article or thread or post into how to build this you
can learn about the Wix editor overview the mobile overview introduction to SEO introductions to Wix code which we’ll get into and let’s create a website which will I’ll showcase different websites we can build every single week so this is how basically on mobile you can come in and filter what content you want to see right when you land it’ll say hi there you will automatically have a profile okay because you you logged in if you log in through
social media at the Gmail or Facebook it’ll automatically build your account for you if you log in through email you’ll have an account if anyone decides to comment on any of your content you’ll have a little notification bell and you will get a notification right away and you’ll also get an email hey Allen for example reply to your post because you made an account you’ll automatically be able to add content by clicking create a new post or if
you’re just here to learn something new and browse simply scroll down and you’ll start seeing the latest content so 21 hours ago I uploaded a video how to create a stunning website using Wix calm if you don’t want to actually go into this specific post you can just click load the video and you can actually watch the video outside of it in the mobile feed so you never actually have to go into each post what’s really interesting is that when you
actually go into a post or if you create a post story you’ll notice that people can come in and simply heart your heart your your post they can hurt your post so it’s really cool I had a nice little animation here for you guys you can see how many people viewed your content and how many people commented again this is gonna be community driven so I really encourage you guys to come in and start posting content I think one of the most popular
content pages is probably how can we build this that’s gonna be really awesome and community support now if you guys have a specific question about what you see in front of you you can actually come in and write a comment and be like hey how did you blah blah blah if we click on sent right away you’ll notice that the cardi comment actually gets sent right to the video so I get a notification saying hey so-and-so just commented on your video then
I can go in and actually reply it so I can reply I can add I can also attach a video or an image so it’s it’s really really interactive and honestly it is a complete social it brings us the social element to an online community so I’m gonna show you guys how we can build this with no code my blowing I know I know so let’s go ahead and get right into it I guess really the best way to do this would be to really build it in a blank template right oh
yeah so if you guys liked what you saw and again you can always reverse the video rewind the video and Andry watch it again so let’s go ahead on how to actually start this development actually how to build an online community so Wix calm a login if you don’t have an account make an account okay number two what we want to do is we’ll be introduced to our dashboard again top right hand corner create a new website or work within a website that you
already already like so I’m going to go ahead quick create a website click on other choose a template and let’s get started what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna go ahead and select the art of food and I’m gonna go edit I’m gonna lo let the editor load and once this loads I will show you guys how to quickly be able to start your online community so this website is a template it’s art of food so it’s really a one-page or just basically a photography
website but we want add a community to this page you could add a community to a church page to pretty much a lot of nonprofits but let’s go ahead and I’ll show you exactly how to do it so first thing you want to do is click on the Add button on a left hand corner and I believe you wanna you want to go under members the members section and you want to scroll down and load them behold Wix form that’s it literally just just click the add little
button and welcome to the Wix form you’ll see a really cool animation and Wix will automatically install the Wix form for you where you can now have members ability to login sign up create new content get followers and pretty much everything you can think of in regards to a form will automatically be installed for you literally you don’t have to do much so welcome to the forum so let’s get started first of all they add a login button right here
for users to be able to log into their account and I kind of see it personally I’m not here today to really show you the the how to design your website I will leave all the creative work really to you on on what kind of template you chose and etc etc so I’m just gonna ignore this and I should delete this for now users can actually log in directly to the forum so if you guys have questions write them in the comment box and I’m now going to throw
detail on why I chose to delete that for now so you’ll notice that in our menus and pages lo and behold here’s the forum so the forum as you can see in our menu on the top right hand corner in our menu there it is whole profile about books blog contact and forum we can go into our pages rique double click this and call it community so we can really rename this to whatever we like so now that we’re here first of all what you what what the step
backwards first of all if you guys want to make this form specifically for Members Only or want to add a password to this form we simply click on the pages menu click on the three little dots go to settings and go under permissions so we are working specifically on in this page we clicked on the three little dots which is right here we landed on page info we simply want to hover over permissions and here we have permissions we can have it where
we users who click on community which is our form need a specific password and if you set the password to for example awesome they will now need a password when they click on community just remember to always have published on your website ok top right hand corner always is published now when they’re on the live version they could they’ll have to enter that passer or members-only which is really interesting about what’s really interesting about
members only is that who can access this page all members we can do something even more than this for example and we can choose whether we have to approve the member or whether we don’t want to approve them and we just accept them all we also have the option to select members who are paying only so if you are building a subscription-based website and want your content to be viewed as paid content you can choose exactly with this little button to
allow users to come to your website that are paying only that view that content of pain only the very last thing we want to do guys is go under members sign up right here and click on the little gear box and basically if you click on that little gear box who can be a member everyone or people I approve that’s really the only thing we need to do we need to basically go into the site menu we can rename our form we click on the three little dots go
to settings go to permissions and make sure we other choose either everyone can come either they need a specific password or it’s members only once we selected members only we go to the members sign up we hover over my to sign up for and click on the gear box here who can be a member everyone or people I approve basically if you click people who I approve you’ll get an email saying John Doe would like to join your community if you click on
approve John Doe will then get an email saying hey the owner of this form has approved you go ahead and log in you can also choose what shows first sign up or login so something is so so if you want them to if you live I think it’s pretty self-explanatory actually if you’re on the website and we select depending on which we select I here what shows up first which option I’d either see sign up first or login first so either our social community
here’s really really cool here’s something really cool we can allow them to sign in through social media so with this option they can sign in through Facebook and this option they can sign in through Google+ and then this is allows I’m kind of like a check mark say hey join our community rules which you can create your policies right here your terms of use etc etc so that’s just the back end and that’s it as long as you set that foundation on the
back end with just those little options you’re good to go and now actually design your form how do we go about just designing this form to look like look like our examples so let’s go ahead and go into gifting tech and check out how it’s gonna look like on mobile and well you know we’re not gonna go to gifting tech we’re actually gonna stay on this website and I just want to show you if we switch to mobile if we switch to mobile we’re gonna skip
this introduction if you haven’t already saw the video on how to create a mobile website go ahead and watch that video okay it’s really it’s really awesome so you’ll notice by default the example that I showed you it’s already somewhat looks like this so the form is actually pre optimized for mobile so you literally don’t have to do anything when it comes to mobile it’s it’s done for you out of the box you can go ahead and see some options here
and delete your first post so let’s go ahead and go back one step before I get into the mobile again and let’s go ahead and start designing the form let’s start adding categories let’s start playing with some of the stuff so all you have to do is click on the form and go to settings that’s it welcome to the form settings okay guys you can either click manage categories or just click categories on the left here general discussion we can go here
and add it so at the bottom it allows you to add multiple categories these categories will then be able to be shown once you kind of fill them out okay so general discussion we can name this community support the header is community community support and what we’re going to do is we’re going to rename this how to how to and I’ll show you what this means by the header and then this one is a stunning kant’s Tunney videos so cetera videos okay cool
so now that we have some category I’ll start showing you guys how it’s gonna start looking so now that we actually have the categories here if we go to mobile and go to preview you’ll notice that load them behold they’re right here it’s already eight categories already in play so let’s go ahead and see what kind of design options I have to kind of display my layouts in in regards to my my online community so let’s go back into desktop again
everything is so as you can see it’s already starting to come together everything regarding the form is is click base click on the form click on settings and once I set up multiple categories by default right away users once we set up the categories are gonna be able to log in and post content to those categories it’s automat it’s an automatic thing you don’t have to do anything else as long as they log in they can comment right away let’s go
into settings so you can this is just for your own personal and you can choose what your category is about and that’s pretty much it main display personally there’s two type in this place there’s the normal display or there’s the all post speed display this is my favorite and I’ll give you an example of what this actually looks like if we go to gifting techcom and I’ll show you so normal and then the all posts feed which is the feed which is my
favorite so I’ll click on community I believe the password is correct and this is the feed basically as you write content you’ll have these boxes here that kind of indicate oh it’s a full article for article full article versus landing to the website where users have to log in to general discussion and then see the feed so you either have it where it’s it’s grid base or it’s it’s full post full post so you can choose which one you like and once
you start adding content you’ll actually be able to see it in action so add content you actually start seeing in action so let’s go ahead and leave this right here and then you can even sort your calling your post by most recent what the newest is so when users come to the website they will see what whichever wants you you basically sort first so if it’s the most recent activity at the top is always the most recent activity or it’s the newest or
the most comments etc etc customizing the toolbar this is interesting because if we go to gifting techcom and create a new post okay so we’re gonna log in through Facebook see if it works continuous Allen’s so this is actually it in action bold and behold Here I am I’m gonna click create post so I’m gonna give this a this is so awesome and hey let’s test this feature so the feature I’m talking about is add an image add a video add a divider or
add HTML so if you actually look at our customized toolbar section right here customize the toolbar this is in regards to actually creating the post section right here at this little toolbar so if we choose HTML now we can then either hide or show the HTM so you can choose what type of content so whether if you want the double-o videos images dividers etc honestly give your community the most so I would just unable at all personally spam words
okay so I’m not gonna make this video rated anything but I you guys can choose and right just as long as you separate them with comma a comma no comma and then anyone who types in those specific words they will not be able to post their article or their post or their video if those words if those words are in there so you can be you can be a moderator in a sense and actually you know not have Sam on your website layouts is my absolute favorite
tab you have classic and then you have cards cards is basically the different way to show display your your your community okay and when it comes to this so this is in regards to the main so you’ll notice that main page classic and cards so with cards if you actually add content you’ll start seeing you’ll actually start seeing the content underneath it and then post page the post I always liked it as cards personally so that when they come to my
website I’m gonna click on cancel I’m going to discard so when they come to our website sorry they can see the video just like they can see the content laid out in a nice way and this also to mobile so if you wanted to look like what we had in our original example I would I would make sure that you go ahead and select cards as as your main primary okay but in regards to design I’m not here to tell you how to design your website I’m just showing
you some of the options all the options are pretty much in regards to the design under layout and display and design of course so I’m going to go ahead click here and I’m gonna go ahead and to mobile so with a little bit of play in regards to the design and in regards to kind of the options that you started select with this form you can ultimately recreate this so you can choose the file you can choose the etc etc so let’s go ahead and kind of
just go through everything else so you have the main category how it’s gonna look you have the post category how it’s gonna look small medium large you have the header high show header or na so if I click on show header or high header I’ll actually remove the header if you go to display basically you can either choose members can log in from the menu what I mean by that is as you can see right here login from them from the menu so remember that
little profile that they added at the very very top of my face that I delete it well the reason why I delete it is because I like to I like to have people log in right through the forum and it’s it’s pretty good because as you can see the login is right at the top and in my community I’m actually logged in right there so if I preview there I am right there so there’s no need to have a duplicate login so just unable it right here it’s pretty
enables for you and that’s all you need in regards to the login section should what shows in your feet view count hashtags and social sharing that’s literally just these three little icons right here but a boom better pane views comments etc okay so you can choose what you want to show in your main feet and then design you can choose post for example and you can go to say hey my title font is gonna be let’s say have Villach alight so you have
multiple options in regards to how you want your actual posts to look like and as long as you add your very first post you good idea of the styling of it so you can choose a title the description the color the description in the background again I’m not gonna rebuild a website cuz it’s gonna take a long time I’m so OCD I want my website and my post look perfect but as long as you guys know that you can click on the forum click on settings and
basically select and work with these little options on the left hand side you can go into every single section of your website and customize it to feel and look like how you want your website to look like what’s really really interesting by default this is absolutely epic by default if you go ahead and click on an article so let’s go ahead and click on this article and scroll down to the bottom um you know what never mind I was going to show you
guys something but uh maybe I’ll create another video for it so I won’t get into it too too much right now what you can do also is where you have add-ons right here guys you can actually create a add-on so we’re gonna have the add-on show in this current page and what its gonna do is it’s gonna allow you to for example add a slider of the most recent post so what you could do is let’s say for example you had three recent posts they would
basically be created right under here so if we go settings and go settings we can basically show in a custom feed so this little custom feed we can show only show content from general discussion that were most liked for example so we can really customize the mobile of the specific feed we can choose vertical and horizontal so that it shows content either sliding or going up and down and we can choose the amount of posts that show in this custom
feed so yeah it’s it’s pretty pretty interesting so as long as you know that we can start building an online community by simply selecting a template and clicking on the plus button going to members scrolling down to members and clicking the forum once you’re on the forum click on the forum and go to settings and that’s pretty much it you have all the options in the world to create categories to custom choose what type of settings you like choose
the layouts for both the main feed and the post feed choose the design of what your post wanna look should look like and then choose the actual text design styling etc etc and then the add-ons allow you to add the most recent post is for example okay so as long as we do understand that that’s how we get into the actual editing of the form and as long as we know that all we have to do is select it the actual form rename it to whatever we like and
go to settings go to permissions select it as members only or if it’s available for everyone or if it’s password lock then finally member settings let’s figure out all our social elements who can be a member everyone show them as existing members only and then I label my social media logins with that you can have a stunning forum that looks really really cool just like this so we’re gonna preview out let them behold that looks really awesome
doesn’t it guys it really came along so I’m actually gonna be uploading this directly to the forum and you can watch this video on the forum ok guys so I hope you guys enjoyed this and yeah I look forward to making more content with you guys okay so definitely comment if you like and let me know what your thoughts are cheers guys