Your Thinkific Community is a dedicated space where you and your members can connect, share, and engage. This article explains how to navigate your community and how communities are structured using spaces.
New to communities and want to learn more? Start with this article: Get Started with Thinkific Communities.
Applies to
- Role: Site Owner, Site Admin
- Platform: Web
Access Your Community
Follow these steps to create and set up your Thinkific community: Create and Set Up Your Thinkific Community.
Once you have created and saved your community, you can access it:
- Go to Products
- Select Communities
- Click on the Community card
How are Thinkific Communities organized?
Each Thinkific Community can contain multiple spaces for different types of conversation. Within each community, members post, reply, and react in dedicated spaces. Learn more about spaces here.
The left-hand sidebar is your primary navigation tool - it lists all communities and their spaces, and lets you move between them instantly. Communities can be live (published) or in a draft status while you prepare them before launch.
As a Site Admin/Owner you will see all of your communities (even if they are in draft) and all of your spaces. Your learners will only see communities and spaces available to them.
To navigate between communities and spaces, click on the corresponding community/space name or search for the community name by clicking on the search icon at the top of the community navigation sidebar.
What are community spaces?
On a basic level, Spaces are containers for Community posts and activities. They are a simple but powerful tool that allows you to shape the experience you want for your members. Think of spaces as virtual rooms within your overall community, where you can manage posts, curate topics, and create different areas of the community for different conversations. This makes it easier for you and your members to find the content they are looking for, and keep things organized as your community grows and becomes more active.
Every post must live in a space, and a post can only live in one space at a time.
Learn how to create and customize community spaces here: Customize and Manage Your Community Spaces.
Types of Community Spaces
There are three main types of community spaces:
- Standard space: anyone in the community can access, post, and reply.
- Private space: only selected members will have access to this space: Create a Private Space in a Thinkific Community.
- Read-only space: only admins and moderators can post and reply.
Learn how to enable each setting here: Customize and Manage Your Community Spaces.
Navigate the Sidebar in a Community
The sidebar on the left side of the Communities page is how you and your members can navigate between different communities and spaces. It gives you access to every community and space on your site.
- Communities list: All communities on your site appear in the sidebar. Click a community name to expand or collapse its spaces.
- Spaces: Each community contains Feed and default spaces like General, Announcements, Introductions, and Questions, which can be removed. Click a space name to open it in the main content area.
- Community search: Click on the search icon at the top of the community navigation sidebar to search for a community you want to access.
- Feed: The Feed space aggregates recent posts across all spaces in that community. It is the default view when you open a community. It surfaces recent posts so members can see what is happening without having to check each space individually.
- Draft status: Communities labelled "Draft" are not visible to your members and are only visible to you. You can set up spaces and content before publishing.
- Three-dot menu: Appears next to each community name. Use it to access community settings options.
Navigate a Community Space
Each community space will have a similar structure, making it easier for your members to orient themselves when switching between communities and spaces.
At the top of the space, you will see the following options:
- Space name
- Featured panel (pin icon): Select the pin icon to open a featured panel that contains all of the pinned posts from the space, alongside the live events available for members of this space.
- Member list (humans icon): Select the humans icon to open a members list.
- Space settings (cog icon): Select the cog icon to open the space settings. This option visible to Site Admins/Owner only.
- Search (magnifying glass icon): Select the magnifying glass icon to open a search that searches posts and replies across the community it is triggered in.
Each space will have the following:
- Space banner image and description
- Member list: a list of members in a community.
- Post box: this is where you and your members can create posts in specific communities
- Post feed: a continuous feed of posts in a space that can be sorted by the most recent or by trending posts
Related Articles
- Prerequisites: Create and Set Up Your Thinkific Community.
- Related: Customize and Manage Your Community Spaces.