Your First Community

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Your community is installed and the wizard is complete. This guide walks you through what to do next, from organizing your spaces to inviting your first members, so your community is genuinely ready for people on day one.

Community home page showing spaces organized by category

What You Will Learn

How to organize spaces with categories
How to create your first real space and choose the right type
How to send a test email before you invite anyone
How to invite members with a shareable link
How to customize the look and feel
How to import from bbPress or wpForo if you are migrating
What the community frontend looks like for your members

Create Categories to Organize Your Spaces

Categories are the top-level groupings in your community. Every space belongs to a category. Before you create more spaces, take a moment to plan your category structure - it is much easier to do now than to reorganize later.

To create a category:

Go to Jetonomy → Categories.
Enter a name and optional description in the form on the left.
Click Add Category.

Your category appears in the table on the right. Drag rows to reorder them. The order here is the order your members see on the community home page.

Jetonomy Categories admin: the add-category form on the left and the drag-to-reorder category table on the right

Tip: Start with two to four broad categories. You can always add more later. Common patterns: “Support / General / Announcements” for a product community, or “Ideas / Questions / Showcase” for a creator community.

Create Your First Real Space

A space is where discussions happen. Each space has a type that shapes how members interact with content.

Choosing a Space Type

Type	Best for	Key feature
Forum	General discussion, announcements, support	Threaded replies, newest/popular sort
Q&A	Technical help, knowledge bases	Votable answers, accepted answer highlight
Ideas	Feature requests, roadmaps	Status lanes (Planned, In Progress, Shipped, Declined) with roadmap view
Feed	Status updates, introductions, sharing work	Card feed with optional title and votes

To create a space, you can use either the wp-admin form or the front-end Create Space page. Both produce the same result.

From wp-admin:

Go to Jetonomy → Spaces and click Add New.
Enter a Title and optional Description.
Pick a Category and the space Type.
Set Visibility: Public (anyone can find and read it), Private (anyone signed in can find it, only members can read it), or Hidden (only members can find it, invite only).
Set the Join Policy: Open, Requires Approval, or Invite Only.
Pick an icon from the visual Lucide picker (16 defaults plus a search field).
Click Create Space. When you edit a space later, the button is Update Space.

The Add Space form showing the Lucide icon picker and the visibility and join-policy selectors

From the front end (so non-admin owners can create spaces too): visit /community/new-space/ while signed in. The form is identical and is available to any role you’ve enabled under Jetonomy → Settings → General, in the Front-end space creation field.

Your space is immediately available on the community frontend under its category.

Send a Test Email Before You Invite Anyone

Jetonomy emails members for verification, replies, mentions, join approvals and more, all sent through WordPress’s own wp_mail(). Before you invite anyone, confirm mail actually leaves your server:

Go to Jetonomy → Settings → Email.
Scroll to the bottom and click Send Test Email. It sends a test message to your WordPress admin email address, confirming wp_mail() works and that your From name and address apply correctly.
While you’re on that screen, click Preview next to any notification template to see it rendered with sample data before a member ever receives it.

If the test email does not arrive within a few minutes, install an SMTP plugin (WP Mail SMTP, FluentSMTP, or similar) - most shared hosting cannot reliably send mail without one. See Email Settings for the full reference.

Invite Members

You do not need to wait for members to discover your community organically. Jetonomy gives you a direct invite link you can share anywhere.

Generate an Invite Link

Go to Jetonomy → Spaces and edit your space.
Open the Members tab and find the Invite Links section.
Set Max uses (0 means unlimited) and an Expires date, or leave Expires blank for no expiry.
Click Generate invite link.
Copy the link and share it via email, Slack, social media, or anywhere else.

Space admins can also do this from the space’s Members page on the community front end.

The Invite links panel on a space Members page, with Max uses and Expires fields and the Generate invite link button, above the member list

When someone visits the link, they are added to the space immediately after logging in or creating a WordPress account.

Note: Invite links work for any WordPress user registration flow you have configured. If you allow open registration, new members can sign up and join in one step.

Existing WordPress Users

Anyone who already has an account on your WordPress site can visit yoursite.com/community/ and join public spaces by clicking Join Space. Their existing avatar, display name, and email are used automatically.

Customize the Appearance

Jetonomy inherits your theme’s fonts, colors, and border radius automatically via WordPress theme tokens. If you are using BuddyX, this integration is immediate. Jetonomy reads BuddyX’s design tokens and matches your brand without any manual work.

To adjust further:

Go to Jetonomy → Settings and open the General and Advanced tabs.
To override specific templates, create a jetonomy/ folder inside your active theme directory and drop in any template file from wp-content/plugins/jetonomy/templates/. Jetonomy always checks your theme folder first.

Tip: You do not need to copy all templates. Only override the ones you want to change. Unmodified templates are served directly from the plugin.

Importing from bbPress, wpForo, or Asgaros

If you are migrating an existing community, Jetonomy includes a built-in importer for three sources.

The Jetonomy Import screen showing a card for each detected forum plugin with its record counts

Go to Jetonomy → Import.
Jetonomy auto-detects your existing data and shows a card for each source it finds, with the number of forums, topics, and replies.
Back up your database. The import cannot be automatically reversed.
Click Import from bbPress, Import from wpForo, or Import from Asgaros Forum.

The import runs in batches from your browser, with a progress bar. Keep the tab open until it finishes. If it is interrupted, return to Jetonomy → Import and click Resume Import to continue from where it stopped.

The browser import has no preview mode. Only the bbPress importer can preview, using WP-CLI: wp jetonomy import bbpress --dry-run. See bbPress import for details.

What gets migrated:

Source	Jetonomy
Forums	Categories + Spaces
Topics	Posts
Replies	Replies
Users	WordPress users + Jetonomy profiles
Inline images and attachments (1.8.0+)	Media library + Jetonomy attachments

The Community Frontend: A Quick Tour

Once you have content, here is what your members will see.

Community Home (`/community/`)

The home page lists all categories with their spaces. Each space card shows the post count, member count, and a recent activity indicator. Badges on the card show the space type and whether it is private or hidden. For a space you belong to, a badge shows your own role there (Member, Moderator or Admin) instead of how others join. Members can sort by activity or browse by category.

Space Listing (`/community/s/space-slug/`)

Inside a space, members see a topic list with vote scores, reply counts, author avatars, tags, and time. They can filter by Latest, Popular, or Unanswered. A New Post button appears in the top right for members who have permission to post.

Single Topic (`/community/s/space-slug/t/topic-slug/`)

The topic view shows the full post, vote buttons, and all replies. Replies are threaded up to three levels deep. For busy topics with many replies, Jetonomy loads the first 10 and last 10 replies by default, with a gap-loader button in between to fetch more. This keeps page load fast regardless of reply count.

In Q&A spaces, the accepted answer is pinned to the top and highlighted with a green checkmark.

The community sidebar (where the theme layout places it) shows active members, trending tags, and recent activity. The exact sidebar layout depends on your theme.

Note: All community pages are server-side rendered. There are no JavaScript-only pages, so every URL is indexable by search engines out of the box.

What’s Next?

Now that your community is live and populated, learn how to organize it further with spaces and categories, including visibility rules and per-space permissions.

Spaces and Categories →

Have a specific goal in mind? The How-To Guides walk through the most common ones step by step: launching a support forum, running a members-only community, restricting a space to paying members, collecting feature requests, adding moderators, and more.