We built a membership site for early childhood education.
This is How We Helped An Award-winning Educator Build A Membership Site For Early Childhood Learning
Playful Learning serves as an online resource for Early Childhood Education since 2008. After encountering some growing pains, Mariah Bruehl and her team decided 2022 was the right time for a change. Playful Learning had evolved greatly over the years and now needed a more capable platform to serve the parents, teachers, and children it supports.
Playful Learning, as a whole, was divided into two separate domains and now needed to be unified. Additionally, online educational materials needed to be migrated from a simple theme-based learning management system to a more capable and robust platform, in this case.
At the same time, course access was to be administered through a membership plugin, Paid Memberships Pro, as it was done since Playful Learning Was born. This plugin helped them manage their subscriptions, as members can subscribe to a membership box containing educational activities young learners can complete at home, along with the other online resources they offer.
Enter the WooNinjas. Mariah’s team reached out to our team of WordPress developers and LMS experts in the search of a solution that would solve all of their roadblocks.
Here’s what we came up with. But first, let’s look at the specific challenges our team was entrusted with resolving.
The Challenges:
- Merging Playful Learning’s two separate WordPress sites into a single domain with renewed web design.
- Creating three different educational resource types including Lessons, Kits, and Workshops.
- Migrating eLearning content from a simple theme-based LMS to a more powerful learning management system - LearnDash LMS.
- Migrating users and their membership data to a new Paid Memberships Pro WordPress site and integrating the membership plugin with the new LMS
Our Solution:
Finding the ideal Learning Management System
After carefully studying our client’s platform, its current shortcomings, and its requirements, the Wooninjas team proposed using LearnDash LMS to host their online courses. In order to integrally transfer data in a safe and efficient manner, our team developed a custom migration plugin. This tool allowed us to migrate the old site’s theme LMS data to the new LearnDash site.
Here is a little more information about what this migration entailed:
- The migrated data was mapped with LearnDash’s course structure, in order to keep the Lessons and Courses (called Units on Playful Learning’s site) intact.
- In order to format the lesson’s content, a custom script was developed, adding the required CSS classes to the content.
Finally, customization was done for the LearnDash, in order to categorize content according to the three different course types required by Mariah’s team – Lessons, Kits, and Workshops. Using a custom widget for Elementor Pro, instructors creating new pages on the site can easily select which course or courses from each course type will be displayed.
Other customizations we did on the site to take the learning experience to the next level were:
- Adding a new meta box on the course page allowing teachers to add Lesson Excerpts that can be displayed to students and their parents under the Lesson title on the course page sidebar
- Creating a new “Books” post type which can be added to any page using a shortcode, in order to display education information.
Customizing Paid Memberships Pro
To get started our team worked on migrating all of Playful Learning’s users and user data into their new WordPress installation. Migrated users were added to their corresponding, updated membership level. In order to make this process more straightforward, we completed data import using an import CSV add-on and custom-coded script.
At this time, we also worked on updating membership levels and subscription pricing according to the client’s requirements.
Since Playful Learning supplies both digital and physical educational resources, we integrated a shipping solution to their site to keep track of shipping information for their users’ subscription boxes or “kits”.
Summary
Finally, we configured Paid Membership’s Pro Mailchimp add-on to allow Mariah’s team to add the users that have joined their membership program to their Mailchimp list, and easily reach out to them with additional information and offers.
We built an amazing eLearning and membership-based platform for young learners and this is what we used to get there:
After carefully studying our client’s platform, its current shortcomings, and its requirements, the Wooninjas team proposed using LearnDash LMS to host their online courses. In order to integrally transfer data in a safe and efficient manner, our team developed a custom migration plugin. This tool allowed us to migrate the old site’s theme LMS data to the new LearnDash site.
Here is a little more information about what this migration entailed:
- The most amazing Development team
- LearnDash (with customization)
- Buddyboss Pro
- Elementor Pro
- PMPro
- PMPro Add-ons (with customization)
Quick Launch: FAQs
Can you really take a site from drawing board to domain in 30 business days?
Yes, we can. No, it’s not a gimmick.
If the goal were as simple as going from “zero to one”, then we’d be out of business.
Anyone can just log on to an SaaS platform such as Shopify and set up a website in under an hour or so, but our experience has shown that our clients are looking for something a bit “more”.
Most often, our clients are looking for a suite of curated solutions that, when configured correctly, addresses their immediate needs and allows for future expansion.
In contrast to SaaS products, it’s no secret that WordPress has a bit of a learning curve, and that comes in part from the responsibility that each site owner has to take on for every structural aspect of their installation.
However, most of our clients already have day jobs of their own. They are teachers, healthcare professionals, community leaders, technical specialists, and small business owners that are looking to make good use of the best that WordPress has to offer, but also appreciate a little extra guidance.
We’re confident in the package we put together for our clients, and we’re pretty good at what we do.
How did you come up with 6 phases?
The phases of the Quick Launch are, in many ways, an amalgamation of best developmental practices and time-tested experience building sites and pages for clients.
We’ve worked with hundreds of business owners to build all sorts of things: web pages, custom plugins, entire LMS setups – you name it and there’s a pretty good chance we’ve done it (or configured it for LearnDash LMS).
As time went on, we strove to optimize many of our own internal processes in order to improve as a company and provide our clients with the best experience we can.
That’s why the Quick Launch’s phases reflect how we generally do business. We didn’t have to reinvent the wheel when designing the Quick Launch – we just focused on making one really nice universal wheel.
