WooCommerce Archives

How to Create a Members-Only Store on WooCommerce

July 29, 2016 by Sagar Sheral Leave a Comment

A members-only store on WooCommerce is an exclusive entity where only registered users can view content and make purchases.

With online business booming on WooCommerce, creating a store where you can selectively decide what products ought to be shown to whom can be a great asset. In addition to controlling product display, you can also offer free trials, coupons and other discounts to premium users.

Members-only stores not only give customers the satisfaction of belonging to an exclusive group, but are also useful for generating funds.

Why do we need a Members-Only Store?

There are several reasons why opting for a members-only store on WooCommerce is a better option instead of developing a public one. Building separate public and private areas of your store can be beneficial if your site hosts products that you sell exclusively to members.

Consider an online learning course or a college website for that matter. While everyone might be able to view a particular course on your site, only a member with a particular membership plan can enrol or even avail of discounts for the said course.

With some information generally available to the public and the rest to logged-in members only, it is possible to reach users in a more targeted manner.

Creating a Members-Only Store on WooCommerce

There are three different ways to convert your WooCommerce store into a members-only store, viz.

Without the use of external plugins
Using a Membership plugin
Using a Pricing Plugin

Let us discuss the pros and cons of each further.

WooCommerce Store without External Plugins

After creating your store, you add products to product pages as usual and add a password-protection field for user access.

This can be done by changing the privacy settings while editing the page and publishing it.

Perhaps the most trivial way of limiting product views for users, this ensures that you need not download and install any other plugin for hiding your products.

This functionality can be extended to Product Categories and Posts. Several WordPress themes from WooThemes and ThemeForest are compatible with WooCommerce and provide various display options for product images and layouts.

A drawback is that this is suitable if your product list is small or clientele limited. Handling a large number of products becomes tedious when every page has to be encrypted, managed and accessed separately. Also, data access is only limited to a password, the sharing of which, can’t be controlled.

Using a Membership Plugin

Membership plugins are the most logical choice for setting up a members-only store.

Plugins like WooCommerce Memberships and Paid Memberships Pro let you create several membership tiers, each with its own set of perks and prohibitions.

With varied content visibility and access as per the membership plan, you can effectively control what your members and non-members see. This can range from an exclusively all-member store where it is mandatory to purchase a plan before any content can be viewed or product purchased, to an open site where all products are visible and freely purchasable for everyone.

A good option is to offer free trials for new users for, say a fortnight, with additional access possible only on the purchase of a membership.

The drawback here is that it is fairly difficult to grasp creating membership plans, adding products to these and assigning members, immediately. The process takes a while and even then is not completely manageable.

Also, membership plugins are immensely useful for mega-stores with a lot of subscribers, but for smaller stores, having a limited clientele, too many functionalities can be largely useless. The plugins are also priced rather steeply and though the service is worth the cost, investing in them is economically feasible only after your store has established a decent profit margin.

Using a Pricing Plugin

Membership plugins allow for restricting content access and purchase according to the membership plan purchased. However, to assign special discounts to premium users or specific clients, a separate plan needs to be created and assigned every time.

To avoid this hassle, we can use a pricing plugin like Customer Specific Pricing for WooCommerce to decide distinct product costs for individual customers, different user roles or for groups.

The way the plugin works is that, you can add as many products as you want to your store and then assign different product values for individual customers, roles or groups.

Product prices can be updated by importing bulk values rather than updating them manually.

The advantage of setting up a members-only store with a pricing plugin rather than a membership plugin is that specific prices can be allotted without having to create membership plans and adding members to it. User roles can be employed for this purpose. Special prices can be offered to certain customers.

A more compact solution, it is ideal for small to medium stores alike, though it falls short of advanced functionalities that a membership plugin might offer.

Conclusion

If we have to lay down a rule of thumb,

Password protecting products is suitable for a personal website or blog, where you sell a handful of products
Using a membership plugin is suitable for high-end stores where you want track member purchases and want to award member rewards
A pricing plugin is for small to medium scale businesses which want to offer member-only access while still maintaining pricing flexibility for certain users

Well, these were my thoughts.

I’d like to hear yours. What path would you prefer?

WooCommerce Gravity Forms Product Add-ons: The Heart of a Smashing Trio

July 7, 2016 by Vinita Lobo Leave a Comment

Image Courtesy Google

Gravity Forms is by far the most popular forms plugin on WordPress.

Originally developed for advanced contact forms, it has since allowed site owners to conditionally build forms to collect all kinds of data from its users.

WooCommerce– the leading e-commerce plugin on WordPress- has all the functionality you need to build an online store.

And these two plugins are brought together using the Gravity Forms Product Add-ons.

WooCommerce Gravity Forms Product Add-ons Plugin

Built by Lucas Stark, what this plugin does, is link custom forms to any product in your WooCommerce store, to request additional information from the shopper. As the store owner, you can either request shopper information or product customization specification depending upon your product or service.

You can build advanced product configuration forms using Gravity Forms and link them to any product in your WooCommerce site.

These forms can contain mandatory or optional fields. Form fields can be created to gather information about the quantity and pricing, associate services, or set parameters, while choosing the product. The information can be then used to generate a total purchase amount for the product.

Additionally, multiple Gravity Forms one for each product individually can be built or you can assign a single standard form to all products.

Side-note: Gravity Forms Add-On vs Product Add-Ons for WooCommerce

While the Product Add-Ons extension for WooCommerce is seemingly familiar to the Gravity Forms Add-on extension, there is a fair amount of difference.

Product Add-Ons provide simple add-on fields. With the Gravity Forms add-on plugin, you can create advanced forms with conditional pricing. Also, form entries are saved in backend and can be easily accessed if needed.

Exploring the WooCommerce Gravity Forms Product Add-Ons

Once you install Gravity Forms and the add-ons plugin on your WooCommerce store, you’ll notice a ‘Pricing Fields’ section in Gravity Forms.

These are additional fields which can be used when creating a form that is linked to a product.

Regardless of how your Gravity Form is set-up, you need the ‘Product’ and the ‘Total’ fields to be present, when using any of the Pricing Fields.

Product Field

You can use the field to mention the name of the product and also enter the base price (keep it $0 if you don’t have a base price). This field will not be shown on your WooCommerce product page, but will still be processed during purchase.

The Product Field comes with a ‘single window’, ‘drop down menu’, ‘radio list’ features to let users determine product quantity or variable product options.

Quantity field

Quantity field is always tied to the product field and you have to select the product you want to link it to, in case you’ve added multiple products. Field Types include ‘Number’, ‘Drop-down’ or ‘Hidden’.

Number- Use it to let customers determine quantity while setting a limit using ‘Range’.
Drop Down menu- Set predefined quantities using the ‘Drop-down’ menu.
Hidden- Useful when setting a quantity without it being visible or editable by the user.

An interesting Gravity Forms feature that can be coupled with the ‘Quantity Field’ is ‘Conditional Logic’. With conditional logic, you can choose to display or hide this quantity field based on values of other fields.

Option Field

The Option Fields are usually applied to provide options in products. They have the ability to add costs for add-on services to the product on sale. Options like a variation in color, size etc. or customization services can be listed using this field.

For example, if you’re selling a basic spa package, you can add services like manicure, hot stone massage etc. to your package according to your needs, and the associated cost will be added to the total.

Shipping Field

Product delivery prices are something that cannot be discounted.

Shipping field adds the amount associated with shipping, to the total price of the product during purchase.

This could be set as a standard rate for products or you could go for a drop-down menu or radio button field, where customers can pick their shipping options, and set a varying price. This field can be integrated with the WooCommerce Per Product Shipping Add-on.

Total field

Another mandatory field for the Gravity Fields add-on is the Total Field. It automatically calculates the total price of the product, including all the options prices, shipping rates, quantity etc. This field then displays the total cost of the product after which it’s added to the cart.

Adding a Gravity Form to WooCommerce

Adding the form to a WooCommerce Product is a rather simple process.

You create a form in Gravity Forms and add the needed fields
Under a WooCommerce Product, you should notice a ‘Gravity Forms Product Add-ons‘ section. Use this section to select a form and link it to the product
Update the product, and you’re set!

The Catch?

Gravity Forms has several options which might confuse a newbie user. Since Gravity Forms is a premium extension, the price of the plugin $39 and the add-on $99–$199, make this extension one pricey package!

But given the benefits it brings to your store, the expense is nevertheless worth every penny.

Apart from such minor issues, this trio (WooCommerce + Gravity Forms + Add-on) has no major drawbacks, only numerous benefits!

Also, the add-on ensures that no matter how complex your product form, only unique configurations are added to the cart and duplicates are incremented in quantity.

Endnote

Gravity Forms is a handy extension for most WordPress websites, and with this add-on, they can be integrated into WooCommerce stores as well. Commercial sites that sell made-to-order products would benefit immensely from this extension, as it allows them to accept custom values from shoppers.

Got anything more to say about this plugin?! Leave your comments in the section below!

Designing Custom Products with WooCommerce Product Designer

June 10, 2016 by Tarun Rai Leave a Comment

Customers today are spoilt for choice.

There are at least ten different permutations of the product one intends to buy, yet that is not enough.

Buyers love it if they can add a personal touch to the product, something that makes it uniquely theirs!

In WordPress, there are two ways of managing this functionality,

The customer sends you the changes or additions that are to be made to the product; you create a virtual copy of how the product would look like and send it to the customer for approval.
You let the customer decide for himself the changes that are to be made and send the final, customized product to you, leaving you to handle only the manufacturing and shipping part of it.

The first method is ideal for select stores, where a lot of major and minor modifications are to be incorporated. The buying cycle in this case is longer.

However, if we speak of making minor changes to generic products like t-shirts, mugs, shoes, phone covers, business cards and such, assessing every client requirement and then drawing up a suitable solution is not always feasible.

The latter option is preferable here, since the customers themselves can come up with a satisfactory product as required.

So much for the method, now for the medium. 🙂

A simple yet effective extension that allows your customers to add self-designed logos to your products on WooCommerce is the WooCommerce Product Designer.

A product customization plugin developed by ORION Developers, WooCommerce Product Designer empowers the buyers to make whatever modifications they wish to make to simple/ variable products , prior to placing their order in a woocommerce shop.

The process is simple:

The customer chooses the product he intends to buy
He then begins designing from the beginning or chooses an existing template or uploads his pre-processed content
Once that is done, he can print out the PDF file for the final product and sends it to the vendor
The vendor manufactures the product and dispatches it

However, these seemingly simplistic tasks involve a lot of work for which the many features of the plugin need to be leveraged.

Here is a look at some of those.

Plugin Features

User Templates

Users can select a blank product to begin with and modify it along the way. Vendors can add as many products as they want, for user customization.

In addition to letting the customers design the product modification from scratch, WooCommerce Product Designer also provides for setting up templates which can be used by the customers as a point of reference.

An infinite number of templates can be added, which the customers can pick and choose from and build upon.

Fonts and Filters

The plugin has an integrated Google Fonts uploader which allows you to select Google Fonts and add them for customer use. WooCommerce Product Designer has a very simple user interface so changing fonts, font colors, font sizes and more is pretty straightforward during text customization.

For the image processing part,customers can choose to blur, sharpen, invert, emboss or choose from a number of tones and filters available to edit the available images.

The image is the users’ playground!

Product Editor

Apart from the individual text and image edits, the product can be personalized as a whole, using custom color palettes built into the plugin. Clipart images can also be inserted and categorized here for customer use.

WooCommerce Product Designer allows purchasers to create and upload their own logos to the product, however, it provides you with the option for limiting the minimum and maximum file size for the same.

Vector Graphics Integration

Vector graphics have become an indelible part of the e-commerce industry and the web-to-print sector is no exception.

WooCommerce Product Designer supports vector graphics integration during product customization and allows the customers to upload and modify the SVG vector files from the editing panel itself.

Variable Pricing

WooCommerce Product Designer has a dynamic pricing policy which lets you specify a price range for a given product. Starting with the base price, it adds fixed charges (that you’ve specified) as per the modifications made to the product. Different prices can be set for text, image and clipart add-ons.

Social Network Integration

The product modification plugin integrates with social networking sites like Facebook and Instagram for importing pictures. These can be then used to be imprinted on t-shirts and the like.

Order Output and Order History

The final, customized product can be configured to display in high-definition with a maximum width of 15000px. These can be printed out as PDF files in landscape and portrait file formats too.

One of the strengths of the WooCommerce Product Designer plugin is that it allows customers to save their work so that they can begin from where they left off, the next time they log in. Also, current designs can be duplicated and stored for later use.

Conclusion

WooCommerce Product Designer is a vendor-and-customer-friendly product customization plugin that is responsive and easily manageable. The drag-and-drop editor used makes editing designs a piece of cake; and you can always upload your own, previously created one if need be. You can checkout a demo of the plugin here.

The functionalities themselves are pretty straightforward, so accessibility and operation isn’t very difficult.

WooCommerce Product Designer is configured to work with all themes of WordPress and all versions of WooCommerce.

The basic features of the plugin are available for free, and the more advanced features like configurable color palettes, custom price settings, template generation and more are available in the premium version, for $34.

Prepped with all the tools necessary to help your clients personalize their purchases, WooCommerce Product Designer is a great option for product customization.

What are your thoughts about the WooCommerce Product Designer? Are there any other plugins you would recommend for this functionality?

Let us know your thoughts and questions in the comments section below!

How To Set Minimum Cart Amount For User Roles In WooCommerce

May 20, 2016 by Nirav Mehta 1 Comment

As a software developer who often deals with support requests of all shapes and sizes, a satisfied client is my ticket to a good night’s sleep. But a loyal and a recurring customer is what makes me get up the next morning and strive harder, learning and bettering myself in the process.

Customer loyalty is sign of confidence that what you’re doing is right, and the people who you’re doing it for, they like and trust your work. And expect you to keep doing it. Shep Hyken was absolutely on point when he said:

Image Courtesy: Pinterest

WooCommerce is an exceptional e-commerce platform when it comes to tapping into features that build trust amongst your customers, and bring returns in the form of recurring customers and of course, more sales.

One way to do this is to price your products differently for customers belonging to varying membership levels or groups, the principle that led to the creation of one of our most successful products. This actually works on two levels:

Setting low prices for recurring customers ensures more conversions; a customer would be more than happy to buy a product at a much lower price than his peers.
Advertising that such a scheme exists on your WooStore acts as an incentive for fresh customers to turn into loyal shoppers and thus avail the low price scheme.

Set Minimum Order Amount for User Roles In WooCommerce

As an extension to this practice, you may also want to set different cart value limits for customers belonging to different user roles. This is particularly useful for when your store sells products in wholesale, and you only want to allow a user to go through with the purchase if the order amount exceeds a predefined value.

Conversely, you may let the users of select user roles to purchase products on your store, no matter the order amount.

Here’s how you can map different user roles to a minimum purchase cart amount on WooCommerce.

Step 1: Cart Page Validations:

Go to wp-content/plugins/woocommerce/templates/cart directory and look up for cart-totals.php file
Copy this file and go to your theme/child theme, create a folder woocommerce/cart and paste cart-total.php file here.
The structure will be something like /wp-content/themes/{Your-theme-name}/woocommerce/cart/cart-totals.php
After copy pasting the file, open the file in the editor and look for the code line:

<div class="wc-proceed-to-checkout">
      <?php do_action( 'woocommerce_proceed_to_checkout' ); ?>
 </div>

Replace the above code with the lines below.

   <div class="wc-proceed-to-checkout"> <?php
   //Get current user and check the user role.

   $current_screen_user = wp_get_current_user();

// In my scenario “wholesale_buyer” is the user role for which I want this validation. You can add your user roles.

    if( in_array( 'wholesale_buyer', $current_screen_user->roles ) ) {

      $minimum = 50; // Set the minimum amt.
      $cart_amt = WC()->cart->subtotal; // cart sub_total, this is actual total excluding discounts and shipping.

                if ( $cart_amt < $minimum ) {
          if( is_cart() ) {
        //Added notices for cart page.
              wc_print_notice(
                  sprintf( 'You must have an order with a minimum of %s to place your order, your current order total is %s.' ,
                      wc_price( $minimum ),
                      wc_price( $cart_amt )
                  ), 'error'
              );
          } else {
        //Added notice msg for checkout page.

              wc_add_notice(
                  sprintf( 'You must have an order with a minimum of %s to place your order, your current order total is %s.' ,
                      wc_price( $minimum ),
                      wc_price( $cart_amt)
                  ), 'error'
              );
          }
      } else {
          do_action( 'woocommerce_proceed_to_checkout' );
      }
    } else {
      do_action( 'woocommerce_proceed_to_checkout' );
    }
    ?>
   </div>

Step 2: Checkout Page Validations:

From the above code snippet, we hide the Proceed To Checkout button on cart page and add validations on cart page.

For the purpose of fool-proofing, we will also have to add the validations on checkout page, since a users with a little technical background could simply type in the URL of the page and bypass validations.

To do this, place the below code snippet in your themes -> functions.php file.

<?php
add_action( 'woocommerce_checkout_process', 'wdm_wu_minimum_order_amount' );

function wdm_wu_minimum_order_amount() {

    $current_screen_user = wp_get_current_user();
    if( in_array( 'wholesale_buyer', $current_screen_user->roles ) ) {

      $minimum = 50;

    if ( WC()->cart->subtotal < $minimum ) {
       if( is_cart() ) {
           wc_print_notice(
               sprintf( 'You must have an order with a minimum of %s to place your order, your current order total is %s.' ,

                   wc_price( $minimum ),
                   wc_price( WC()->cart->subtotal )
               ), 'error'
           );

       } else {
           wc_add_notice(
               sprintf( 'You must have an order with a minimum of %s to place your order, your current order total is %s.' ,

                   wc_price( $minimum ),
                   wc_price( WC()->cart->subtotal )

               ), 'error'
           );
       } } } }

And that’s about it. Every user belonging to the specified user role will now be restricted to a minimum cart value while shopping on your website. Here’s how it would look in practice:

What’s amazing is that this needn not be limited to a single user role; play around with the code a bit and you can assign a minimum cart limit, and even create a settings page on the back end that would let you map user roles to minimum cart limits.

Found this article helpful? Let us know in the comment section below. Your feedback is what keeps us going. 🙂

The Truth about WooCommerce Maintenance

May 6, 2016 by Namrata Leave a Comment

WooCommerce is one of the most popular plugins on WordPress, and the most popular e-commerce platform powering over 29% of online stores.

WooCommerce is both store owner and developer friendly, and contains a large amount of functionality. The team at WooThemes maintains the plugin well, with constant fixes and tweaks. But this also means more updates for the WooCommerce user.

Now, I know updates are good, but WooCommerce seems to roll out updates more often than I would prefer. The minor updates are okay.

It’s the major updates that worry me. They come packed with a warning and a lot of stress!

But you see, I can’t ignore these updates.

Maintaining Your WooCommerce Store

Updating your WooCommerce plugin is part of maintaining your WooCommerce store.

Sure the features are something to look forward to. But updates also make your store more secure.

Of course maintenance does not end at updates, there is a lot more. You have backups, security checks, product inventory updates, handling out of stock products, fixing broken links, and so on.

Maintenance not only wards off malicious attackers but helps improve user experience.
Keeping product information updated, reinforces customer trust.
Uptime monitoring helps track how well your hosting is working out for you.
Regular backups come to rescue in code black situations.

What is WooCommerce Maintenance

Similar to maintaining your WordPress website, WooCommerce maintenance involves performing a regular set of tasks on a timely basis.

#1 Backup, Backup, Backup

Your WooCommerce store contains a lot of important information. You have product details, customer details, order details and so on.

Imagine if a hacker or an erroneous update deleted these details.

A regular backup of your WooCommerce site (the files) and the data can save your store from such a situation.

A plugin like BackWPup or BackupBuddy can be used here to schedule regular updates. Make sure that the content is saved off of your server on an external file hosting or storage service like Dropbox or Google Drive.

#2 Updating WooCommerce, Plugins, Theme, WordPress

Updating your WooCommerce, plugins, theme and WordPress are a way of ensuring that you are running the latest version of the software. And if you’ve heard of the Mossack Fonseca case, you’ll know how important software updates really are. Every improved version of the software contains security fixes to ward off attackers.

Ideally updates should not break the rest of your site, but this isn’t always the case. Since the plugins you use might not be by the same author or might not be tested with each other, a conflict could arise.

So are auto-updates a ‘no’?

WordPress provides an automatic background updates concept. This enables you to allow WordPress to update the core, plugins and themes on its own. I’d say for a WooCommerce website, auto-updates might not be the best option. However, minor updates can be automatically enabled by adding the below line in wp-config.php:

define( 'WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', 'minor' );

To avoid this the recommended steps to updating WooCommerce, WordPress core and other software on your site, is to first test your updates on a staging site and then update them on the live site.

(A staging site is a replica of your live site, and is used to test and review newer versions before the changes are moved into production.)

What if you don’t have a staging site?

Backup the older version of the plugin/theme, and update them one at a time. Remember, updates introduce a newer version of the software. If this version breaks your site, a backup can help you roll back to a stable version.

Do you update WordPress first or the plugins?

Although there is no fixed rule here, I recommend updating the core first, then WooCommerce, then the supporting plugins and the theme.

#3 Updating Product Information & Inventory

Product information is key to the success of any e-commerce store.

Let’s take the example of WisdmLabs’ store. We sell premium WordPress and WooCommerce plugins. We update these plugins quite regularly, and the only way we can communicate new features to interested customers is by updating the feature lists of these products. We update the documentation as well to improve an existing customer’s experience.

Keeping information updated ensures customers that you take care of your products and will care for their interests too.

Updating product information involves:
Updating product description and attributes
Adding available variations
Updating stock information
Handling out of stock products
Updating product images

How to delete products from a WooCommerce store?

Say you have a product in your store, you no longer sell. It’s been out of stock for weeks, and now during your maintenance routine, you decide you want to remove it from your store.

Now ideally, you’d just have to delete the product from your admin panel and all would be well. But this would mean the original product URL would now not exist. Customers who visit the URL would get a page not found error. Or if the product was linked from any other page, the link would now be broken. Broken link errors on your site, would affect your search engine ranking.

To prevent this from happening:

You could always, add a notice on the product page, and set the catalog visibility to ‘Hidden’.
Or, you could redirect the URL to another page using a plugin like Simple 301 Redirects.

#4 Uptime Monitoring

Shoppers can only make a purchase from your WooCommerce website, when they can access it. So you need to make sure your server functions well and can handle your website traffic, by monitoring server uptime.

There are several external uptime monitoring services like Uptime Robot and WordPress plugins which connect your website to such services which you can use to monitor server uptime.

Remember search engines penalize websites with considerable downtime. So if your server’s not performing well, it might be time to change your hosting plan or find a new host altogether.

#5 Handling Security Breach Notifications

Using plugins like Wordfence Security or iThemes Security handle security monitoring for you. But what happens when you receive security breach notifications?!

Usually a plugin handles most of attacks, but as a general security practice you could change your admin passwords, and prompt customers to change their passwords as well.

It’s quite astounding that several users still use older versions of the WooCommerce plugin and are at risk of an attack!

WooCommerce Versions and the Percentage of Users

Letting a Professional Handle Maintenance

WooCommerce maintenance is not a one time task. You’d have to dedicate time and effort to perform the needed tasks on a regular basis.

And if you’d rather spend this time on growing your business, then you can always hand over maintenance to professionals.

Letting WooCommerce maintenance specialists handle this can result in long term improvements. You see, experienced professionals not only do what’s needed, they also suggest improvements.

How do You Handle Maintenance?

Do you maintain your WooCommerce website yourself or have you employed a maintenance service? Are there any maintenance tips and tricks you’d like to share with our readers?

WooCommerce Memberships: A Comprehensive Membership Plugin for WordPress

May 2, 2016 by Akshaya Rane Leave a Comment

WooCommerce Memberships- a membership plugin developed by SkyVerge– essentially integrates your WooCommerce shop, WordPress website and memberships into a harmonious whole.

The core of WooCommerce Memberships plugin revolves around successfully protecting your content and WooCommerce products, by restricting access to it.

To this end, one can create several kinds of memberships which can be sold or granted manually to customers.

WooCommerce Memberships – Plugin Features

The plugin is imbued with a lot of features, extensions and integrations that provide everything you require for setting up a full-fledged membership system.

Here is a look at some of these:

Flexible Membership Plans

WooCommerce Memberships lets you create unlimited membership plans, each with different incentives. These can be multi-tiered, free or paid entities, wherein you can assign rules to control access to the content for each level.

Memberships can also be tied to various products, as a part of the purchase, on your WooCommerce store. Members-only products can be created which necessitate the customer to become a member before product purchase can be enabled.

Memberships granting access to your site can be bought by customers for a fixed amount of time or can be subscribed to (more on that later), on a monthly basis. Additionally, special membership plans, with an invitation-only functionality can be created using WooCommerce Memberships.

The best part is, once you have created the perfect plan, you can duplicate it multiple times and add new rules without losing any of those already prescribed for it.

Content Access Restriction

Based on the membership plan purchased, content visibility and access can be varied. WooCommerce Memberships lets you decide which posts, pages, custom post types, feeds and products can be seen by viewers with a given plan. Moreover, you can limit access to all the content added under taxonomies like ‘Categories’, ‘Tags’, etc.

Restrict Product Access

There are flexible options for showing only an excerpt or part of the product description to non-members, withholding access to the complete article. At the other end of the spectrum, you can completely lock your site to non-members, with an exclusive members-only approach.

And if you wanted to capture leads from non-members, a plugin like Product Enquiry Pro can be used for interested customers to get in touch with you.

An added advantage is that drip feeding of content is enabled. This lets you control how often content is to be dripped out to members, whether immediately on joining, a week later or after subsequent upgradations.

This can be further customized so that some content can be made available during the trial period of the plugin, while access to the rest is approved after purchasing a more permanent plan.

Variable Discounts

Memberships is not merely store owner friendly, it helps you keep your customers happy too. It empowers you to authorize differential discounts for customers according to their membership plan, which can be calculated based on percentage or a given, fixed amount.

These can be enabled for individual products or entire product categories. Furthermore, existing members can be gifted rewards and bonuses which can be redeemed at your shop.

You can also gift trial memberships to customers, offer discounted rates for continuing members during membership renewal or bundle discounts with specific product purchases!

Members Area

The Members Area is where the member sees all of his accessible content, products, discounts, rewards and subscriptions. This is accessible only for current memberships and not for paused, expired or cancelled ones.

Time Bound Membership

On the store owner’s end, you can manually change a member’s plan or alter their tiers from the Members Area. Also, apart from displaying the contact information available in your database, WooCommerce Memberships allows you to add Membership Notes wherein you can record specific information pertaining to the member.

These notes can be shared with the member via e-mail.

Plentiful Integrations

WooCommerce Memberships has several integrations like:

Subscriptions Integration
bbPress Integration
Groups Integration
Product Vendors Integration
User Switching Integration

Integration with WooCommerce Subscriptions

The integration of WooCommerce Memberships and WooCommerce Subscriptions requires a special mention because this combination increases the power of your membership system manifold.

The WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin allows you to enable subscription-based registration for your members. This includes using recurring membership schemes instead of those for a fixed time period.

Free trials can be made available to customers and drip feeding content can be enabled too, so that newer avenues open up gradually once the trial period starts.

Members can pause or cancel subscriptions on their own, which in turn affects the memberships associated with those. Note that once a subscription is paused, the membership is too, which is why members cannot access any restricted data which was previously available.

Also, generally if a subscription is cancelled, the membership is too, unless you code membership and subscription lengths to be different.

WooCommerce Memberships avails the WooCommerce Subscriptions functionality to upgrade or downgrade membership plans by using subscription switching. You can also prorate membership costs while switching. Note that if the end-user changes the subscription, the membership is changed automatically too, but if you are changing the subscription manually at the administrator end, you will need to change the membership plan separately.

That said, WooCommerce Memberships is a relatively new plugin and consequently has a few areas where it could be better.

WooCommerce Memberships- Plugin Limitations

Though few and far between, these shortcomings need to be taken heed of.

Heavily Dependent on Subscriptions

WooCommerce Memberships depends on Subscriptions for functionalities like free trials, recurring billing and membership upgrades and downgrades. Although this might not be a problem as such, the cost factor does feature, since WooCommerce Subscriptions is also a premium extension.

Import/Export Member Lists

There is no inbuilt functionality for importing or exporting contacts directly into WordPress Memberships, a separate plugin needs to be installed for the same.

Conclusion

The features provided by WooCommerce Memberships certainly outweigh its limitations.

Memberships is an excellent plugin for creating and managing all kinds of memberships. Essentially used to sell memberships to customers on your WooCommerce store, the plugin lets you associate membership with all kinds of products, content, courses, data, basically anything and everything under the sun!

Priced at $199 for a single site license (currently $149 per site) for a year’s worth of updates, might seem a little steep, but it is worth every cent.

Built for WooCommerce, it has robust extensions and integrates efficiently with payment gateways for smooth transactions. With a simple, easy-to-understand user interface, I believe managing multiple memberships using the WooCommerce Memberships plugin is easy and straightforward.

Your thoughts?

How to Setup a Restaurant Online Ordering and Delivery Service

November 19, 2015 by Praveen Chauhan 2 Comments

So, you’ve got an idea, and you think it’s good! So what’s stopping you from building it?!

Ah yes!

You don’t know HOW!

We all want the success Box8 or HolaChef has achieved. But there is a difference between conceptualizing an idea, and converting it into a sustainable business.

And that’s what you’re here for. To bridge that very gap! The road is long and winding, but I’ll try my best to help you out here. 😀

So, without further ado, let’s begin.

Setting up Shop: The Components of a Restaurant Ordering and Food Delivery Website

A restaurant website or an on-demand food delivery website, in terms of features is quite similar to an actual restaurant. You’ve got:

the restaurant’s name – which is the domain name,
the location – which is the hosting,
the menu with items and prices,
the daily specials
and the orders

Here, attendants can be added as virtual assistants. And your maintenance crew, is the website maintenance and support team.

Now, for online food delivery, the customers are virtually present, and food has to be delivered to their doorstep. For this, you need:

a shop or cart,
secure payment gateways,
a shipping and delivery module, (or a pick-up option)

Considering you’re of course interested in using WordPress and WooCommerce to build this Restaurant and Food Ordering website, let’s continue.

Creating the Foundation

For any WordPress website, a theme provides a solid foundation. You need a light-weight and stable theme to build your restaurant website. If you have the time and the resources, you could consider creating your own theme. A custom theme gives you complete control over it.

However, if you’re on a budget or are short on time, you can pick a readily available theme. Picking a suitable theme can save you heaps of effort. What you should be looking for is a theme especially built for restaurants, with sufficient theme options, support for a virtual menu, and is WooCommerce compatible.

A theme I recommend is ROSA – An Exquisite Restaurant WordPress Theme. It’s got a great design, has several customization options, and is responsive (you certainly can’t ignore mobile users).

Creating Top-Level Pages

Once you’ve installed the theme, you can go ahead and create the pages. You’ll need the following:

Home Page
Menu Page
Shop Page
Contact Page

Additionally you could add ‘About Us’ and ‘Terms & Conditions’ pages. These pages would have to be linked to the primary navigation menu on your site, and you could optionally add some content in the footer.

Now, most readily available themes provide demo content, which provides you a one-click setup of pages. If not, you can use a page builder plugin to create them.

Setting Up Your Shop with Menu Items

The restaurant’s menu is obviously the most important section on your website, and is the easiest to create. I’m not talking about the virtual menu, but the actual shop with menu items which an interested customer can purchase.

Since WooCommerce is your cart, each menu item has to be added as a WooCommerce product. A brief description about the dish can be added as the product description, and a high-quality picture has to be set as the product image.

Categorizing Menu Items and Adding Specials

Just like every restaurant menu is divided into categories, such as appetizers, entrees, desserts, etc, you can categorize your menu too. You could add several categories as ‘Product Categories’ in WooCommerce.

Lunch or Dinner specials can also be added as categories.

Adding Restaurant Service Hours

Now, once you add your menu items, WooCommerce by default will make the items available for purchase at all times. But if your restaurant is open for a limited time, or offers different items for lunch and dinner, your shop would need to reflect the same.

For example, when a customer visits your site during lunch hours, say 12:00 to 4:00, your menu should show lunch items available. And if a customer views your site from say 7:00 to 11:00, your menu should show items available for dinner. And after 11, it should say that the shop is closed.

Managing your Menu based on Restaurant Timings

To display daily specials, you can use the WooCommerce Product Scheduler plugin. This plugin allows you to schedule products or in your case menu items for a particular time and on certain days as well.

For example, you can schedule an item for purchase from 12:00 to 16:00 hrs, and another product from 19:00 to 23:00 hrs from 10th November to 01 February. You can also pick the days on which the item should be made available for purchase.

You can also schedule products belonging to a particular category all at once. So, if you have a category ‘Lunch’, you can schedule all products categorized under lunch to be made available for purchase from 12:00 to 16:00 hours.

And what happens during the time in between? Or when the restaurant is closed?

You would need to add a custom store-wide notice, indicating the same, and the WooCommerce Opening Hours plugin, to add open hours for your restaurant.

Setting Up Payment Gateways

The next step is to set up secure payment options. Ideally, you’ll need to provide the following:

Card Payment Option
Cash On Delivery
Local Pickup

WooCommerce provides PayPal by default, and also has a gateway to handle credit card payments directly on your store. All you need to do, is setup the needed payment gateways.

You also have the ‘Cash On Delivery’ option (a must have payment option for any restaurant delivery service), which allows you to create and dispatch an order which will be paid for by the customer upon delivery.

Developer Tip: Enforcing a Minimum Amount on the Order

A minimum order amount, can be set for your home delivery customers, adding a condition on the ‘woocommerce_checkout_process’ hook.

add_action( 'woocommerce_checkout_process', 'wc_minimum_order_amount' );
function wc_minimum_order_amount() {
    global $woocommerce;
    $minimum = 10;
    if ( $woocommerce->cart->get_cart_total() < $minimum ) {
        $woocommerce->add_error( sprintf( 'You must have an order with a minimum of %s to place your order.' , $minimum ) );
    }
}

Alternatively, there is also a plugin available, Minimum Purchase for WooCommerce, to help you with this setting.

Allowing a Pick Up Option

The Local Pickup Plus extension for WooCommerce allows customers a take out option of purchased menu items. That is to say, a customer can come to the restaurant location and pick up his/her order. This extension also allows you to offer a discount on local pick-up/take out orders. You need to use this extension to provide a local pickup option.

Managing Orders and Delivery

Last but not the least, you need to manage the orders and take care of delivery. As far as managing orders is concerned, the responsibility lies on WooCommerce’s shoulders. But WooCommerce handles the task well. It maintains a record of orders in the backend and also sends order emails at every step.

The delivery of the food is of course managed offline. But a great plugin you can add to the mix, would be Twilio SMS Notifications to send SMS notifications to customers when their order status is updated.

Ready to Get Started?

But these were just the basics!!

Now I’ve given you a simple recipe to get your restaurant and food delivery website up and running. There’s a lot you more could add. For example, you could allow customers to create their own salad or pizza, offer them free beverages or free delivery when their order exceeds a certain limit, and more.

Surely, I’d recommend you to take the help of a developer (if you aren’t one) to ensure that everything works smoothly. And if you’re looking for a trusted developer, this is right up a Gold WooCommerce Expert’s alley (*ahem* *ahem* that’s us :D).

What are your thoughts on this? Are you looking to add a certain unique feature I’ve missed? I’d like to hear your thoughts, so feel free to comment in the comment section below!

WisdmLabs is now a Gold WooExpert!

October 27, 2015 by Rishabh 1 Comment

It all started with our fixation of WooCommerce. As a web development company specializing in e-commerce services, incorporating a solution as comprehensive as WooCommerce in our offerings was not just an option, it was a mandate, and so we did.

Before we knew it, we were swearing by WooCommerce as a top notch ecommerce plugin for WordPress, even going to lengths of recommending the same to our clients who were looking for ecommerce solutions for their businesses. Practice is the only route to perfection. While we weren’t really perfect at what we did, we bettered ourselves to the point when we were pretty good with WooCommerce developments.

We loved working with WooCommerce, and WooThemes, the creators of the plugin, loved us right back and listed us an Affiliated WooWorker on their website.

It was a momentous accomplishment, knowing all the hard work you put in has paid off. That it is appreciated and showcased by the front runners in the industry, for the world to recognize.

The kind that leads to bigger and better things.

What transpired next was 300+ Projects that involved WooCommerce, 15 Woo-powered Services and 8 Extension Plugins that run on top of – yep you guessed it!

And here we are today, grinning ear-to-ear every single time we look at this screen right here:

Notice the badge in gold? That’s right; WisdmLabs is now accredited by WooThemes as an expert of the highest order i.e a Gold WooExpert! We’re one of the only 5 companies to be titled as such, and the only one based in Asia!

What the future holds is uncertain, but one thing that’s certain is it definitely involves a lot more of WooCommerce for us. This is just the beginning, and the road to perfection is a long, bumpy joyride filled with codes.

We’ll keep you posted!

The RIGHT Way to Hide ‘Add to Cart’ Button in WooCommerce

October 16, 2015 by Varun Shanbhag 33 Comments

Yes.

There is more than ONE way to hide/remove the ‘Add to Cart’ button in WooCommerce. It is after all a button, so you can hide it via CSS, JS or PHP.

The go-to approach, in most of the scenarios is to hide it via PHP. But not all WooCommerce developers know how to hide the button the right way.

While working on the WooCommerce Scheduler plugin I came across the need to selectively hide the WooCommerce Add to Cart button. I was relatively new to WooCommerce. So, the obvious approach I took was to do a search on Google.

No harm done there, right!….. right??

Well, turns out Google did not have the right answer.

I’ll explain.

**Search Results Can Guide You… But Not Always in the Right Direction**

Here’s what a quick search on Google for, ‘remove add to cart button woocommerce’ had in store for me:

The first few results looked pretty good. They were from credible sources, like wordpress.org, WooThemes, Themelocation and PootlePress. All of these, in a sense asked me to do the same thing; and that was to remove two actions:

woocommerce_template_loop_add_to_cart
woocommerce_template_single_add_to_cart

Here’s the code for the same:

remove_action( 'woocommerce_after_shop_loop_item', 'woocommerce_template_loop_add_to_cart' );
remove_action( 'woocommerce_single_product_summary', 'woocommerce_template_single_add_to_cart', 30 );

The reason being that the ‘Add to Cart’ button is displayed on these two actions.

This sounded perfect. It was just what I needed.

I didn’t give it another thought, and went ahead and used it. The add to cart button was removed from the needed WooCommerce product pages.

Now, in my coding rule book, there’s one rule I always follow: ‘Test any changes before you proceed’. So I did, and…..

Uh oh!

My changes had affected another plugin on the site. 🙁

I had to investigate the reason for this. And while doing so, I realized the approach I had chosen to hide the add to cart button was incorrect. But luckily, I found the right solution.

**When Re-using Code… Understand What Every Line Does Before Using It**

More often than not, developers like you and me turn to Google, for an answer. We think the same way- “I can’t be the only one who’s faced this problem”, “Surely there are others who’ve solved this”– And you try to search for an answer, to save time.

I’m not against re-using code.

But you’ve got to investigate the code, and test it well before using it.

The problem I faced was not critical. But the two lines of code which were seemingly innocent, packed some ammo I didn’t know I was unleashing.

You see, these actions (which are functions), fire additional hooks. For example, the woocommerce_template_single_add_to_cart function which resides in includes/wc-template-functions.php, contains the following piece of code:

function woocommerce_template_single_add_to_cart()
{
    global $product;
    do_action( 'woocommerce_' . $product->product_type . '_add_to_cart' );
}

As you can see, it calls a method based on the product type. So, if the product type is ‘Simple’, it will call woocommerce_single_add_to_cart, which calls another template function.

So at the end removing the hook leads us to remove template files, for each WooCommerce product. And while the intention of removing the hook was to hide the add to cart button, it ends up removing a lot more than that.

The Right Solution is Often Officially Documented

Now as mentioned, further investigation did lead me to the right answer. And with a plugin like WooCommerce, the right way to remove the add to cart button was using a simple filter.

If you look at the code single-product/add-to-cart/simple.php, you’ll notice a simple filter:

global $product;
if ( ! $product->is_purchasable() ) {
    return;
}

Quick note by WooCommerce on what this hook is used for:

The above code is run before any other functionality is checked. If the filter is_purchasable is set to true for the product, the ‘Add to Cart’ button is displayed, else the button is hidden.

And there lay the answer.

So, you just need to add the following:

add_filter( 'woocommerce_is_purchasable', false );

This small line of code will render the product unpurchasable and do it in a pretty simple way, and no hooks or templates will be removed, thus no incompatibility issues would creep up.

Quite often than not, we turn to Google (or Bing if you would prefer to do so), to look for an answer. But there isn’t a guarantee that the most popular answer is the right answer.

As a general guideline, always remember to do the needed research before implementing the solution.

That’s all from me for now! Until next time, happy coding 🙂

Is WooCommerce Booking & Appointment Plugin Worth $119?

August 25, 2015 by Tahseen Kazi 2 Comments

Any new product takes time getting used to. However, once a comfort zone has been reached the newness wears off and the product sticks around until there arises a need for something new.

WisdmLabs faced a similar situation with respect to the product booking functionality for WooCommerce. We had been recommending the WooCommerce Bookings plugin by WooThemes to clients for some time now and frankly, we as well as our clients had been satisfied with the plugin.

Recently though something changed.

A client to whom we suggested the WooCommerce Bookings plugin had two specific issues with the plugin.

The first is that it comes with an extremely steep price tag.
The second is that they needed the option to export a list of all booked products as a document.

While the first is a limitation that we usually overcome (we don’t like compromising quality for the money, so we usually convince the client on this front) the second point was hard to argue. I mean what are we supposed to do. If the client wants something we gotta give it to him. No questions asked.

Now that WooCommerce Bookings was no longer an option the next thing that we thought of was the WooCommerce Booking & Appointment Plugin by Tyche Softwares. Honestly, we had heard of the plugin but hadn’t explored it much until now. But now that we were tinkering around, it actually turned out to be a fairly comprehensive alternative for the WooCommerce bookings feature.

Interestingly enough, $119 was also a bit steep for the client.

Actually you know what? I don’t blame him. In a day and age when plugins are available for as little $9 and a lot of times even for free, I wasn’t surprised by the reaction. In my opinion, however, to know the plugins worth you actually need to know what it is capable of.

On that note here’s an inside look of the WooCommerce Booking & Appointment Plugin.

A Quick Look at the Plugin

Setting Up The WooCommerce Booking & Appointment Plugin

Once you have installed and activated the WooCommerce Booking & Appointment Plugin a menu item labelled “Booking” appears in the admin menu. The menu is minimal and doesn’t overwhelm the user with too many options. This in my opinion is a good start for seasoned WordPress users and a very good start for amateur users.

You will have to navigate to ‘Booking’ –> ‘Settings’ to configure the plugin and set it up for use. All the configuration options have been aggregated under the ‘Settings’ sub-menu making the plugin setup process extremely simple. Once you have reached the ‘Settings’ most options will be available in the ‘Global Booking Settings’. These settings are fairly self-explanatory and supported by ‘Help tooltips’ alongside every field should you not understand.

Let me take you through all the settings quickly and you’ll understand why I’ve been harping about the plugin’s ease of use. Also, if you have your doubts about what you can or cannot do with the plugin the next section is sure to address most queries

The plugin provides settings to choose a language of your choice. You can also select the date format, time format, first day on the calendar, and the number of months that will be displayed at the time of booking a product.

Also, the plugin gives a unique option to give customers access to a copy of the ICS file either by directly downloading it after the booking process has been completed or by sending it as an attachment in an email.

The global settings tab also provides an option to choose a calendar theme (from a list provided) which can be previewed in the dashboard before saving the selection. Apart from that if you wanna disable booking for a few select dates that can be done from the ‘Global Booking Settings’ tab.

The next group of settings are more specific and might not be needed by many. But just in case you do then right there for you to use. These settings allow you to round off booking prices, duplicate booking dates from the first product in the cart to other products among other.

A very important setting here though is that of enabling the display of a product availability on the product page.

The next tab i.e. the “Booking Labels” tab allows you to set custom labels for all fields visible in the front end. The custom label will be displayed in the front end If you add your own string to the textbox against a particular label. Otherwise, the default value is what you will see.

And hey don’t forget to save your settings once you have configured the plugin based on your requirement.

Making a Product Bookable

Once you have set up the WooCommerce Booking & Appointment Plugin the next step would be to create bookable products. To make a product bookable, a user will have to navigate to the single product page. Once here a “Booking” metabox is made available to the user lower on the page.

The list of options provided at the time of creating a bookable product is extensive and well thought out by the developers. Not only have they paid attention to detailed customer requirements but they have also incorporated these options well into the user interface making it easy for the user to navigate through them.

The various options here have been segmented into the following tabs.

Booking Options

This is the main tab and is used to enable a booking date. Apart from that time specific and day specific booking can also be applied to the product that has now been made bookable.

Settings

This tab actually has me impressed at the level of detail the plugin architecture has gone through. The settings tab provides the option to hide the calendar on the bookings page and allows customers to book a product without choosing a date. This is especially helpful for advance bookings of tangible products which are extremely popular and call for a pre-booking.

Bookable Time Period

With the settings provided in the ‘Bookable Time Period’ tab, you can choose the time during which each product will be available for booking.

Manage Dates, Time Slots

I have been tinkering around with the plugin for around 3 hours now and this has been my first road block in so long. Until now I did not find the need to refer the documentation but this option has changed that trend. But just as the page started to load it dawned about me what this tab was all about.

So basically, here all the booking date and time options that you have set in the previous tabs has been aggregated in a tabular form here. I’m not sure if not understanding the tab was a momentary overdose of the WooCommerce Booking & Appointment Plugin or what but the fact that I needed to refer the documentation made me wonder why I had to do that. That’s when I noticed there wasn’t any information bar or tool tip in this section.

Special Pricing

As the name suggests the special pricing tab allows you to set a specific price for select days and dates.

Fixed Block Booking

This type of booking mainly will allow you to offer products which are available for only a fixed number of days. So if your product is a registration to a weekend event then the WooCommerce Booking & Appointment Plugin is exactly what will fit your requirements.

Price by Range of Days

Again as the name suggests, the settings provided in this tab will allow you to set a price based on the number of days a booking has been made. Awesome right?

Want to take a look at the product page settings for the WooCommerce Booking & Appointment Plugin right here. Browse through the slider below.

Viewing Booked Products

Last but not the least, I LOVE the ‘View Bookings’ submenu.

Why?

Well because it give an option to do all of the following things without having the need to navigate to the page.

View all bookings as a list.
View all bookings in a calendar
Create a new booking.
Export a CSV file of all the bookings. (yeah this option was what convinced our client about the plugin.)
Print all product bookings.
Filter bookings based on ‘Bookings From Today Onwards’, ‘Todays Check-ins’, ‘Todays Check-outs’

So coming back to the main question, is the Woocommerce Booking & Appointment Plugin worth $119?

Well, I definitely think it is!!

It’s plain logic. Should I have to assume that the plugin took only 50 hours to develop (which definitely is not the case) you would still land up spending a minimum of $1500 at $30 an hour (mind you $30 is way on the left side of payment scale). Also, 50 hours is the best case scenario.

Now apart from that you are freed from the hassle of communicating to your developer, your impression of the plugin which mind you can be an extremely exhausting task. Apart from that you get support from the makers of the plugin. So should anything go wrong you know you have someone to help you. Lastly, the free updates along with the detailed documentation of the plugin are just an icing on the cake.

So yes, for the long list of features it gives the WooCommerce Booking & Appointment Plugin is definitely worth every penny spent!

Interview with Joel Bronkowski, Business Development Manager – WooThemes

July 23, 2015 by Deepen Shah Leave a Comment

Joel Bronkowski, Bryce Adams and Me at WordCamp Mumbai, 2015

This year in March, I attended my first ever WordCamp in Mumbai and it was an experience I wish I had, had earlier. It was fab to say the least. Meeting so many people and getting to learn from them was absolutely enriching for me as a business development professional in the WordPress industry.

Joel Bronkowski (Business Development Manager, WooThemes) was one such individual I had the opportunity to meet with and I am glad I did 🙂

My first impression of Joel was that of a down-to-earth guy and it remained that way throughout our conversation. Right from his suggestions to me on business development to his revelation about his love for sports (especially NFL and MLB) he was candid and spoke his heart!

The guy has many feathers in his cap. Many colourful ones at that. Business development is just one amongst them. Apart from that he also is also speaks at WordCamps and likes travelling the world. His love for helping people took him to South Africa where he dedicated a significant amount of his time towards the study and implementation of sustainable development models for underprivileged sections of society.

Ok, I think I have blabbered enough. Now I think it would be best for you to get some bytes from the man himself, Joel Bronkowski!

Tell us something about yourself, and what it is like working with WooThemes.

I am originally from California. I lived at home until I was 23 before taking a year to live in South Africa as a volunteer for a non-profit and have lived there ever since.

WooThemes has had a tremendous impact on my life. It’s provided me the opportunity to meet people all over the world. I love the idea of creating amazing products that help people all over the world. If I ever get discouraged I just have a look at some of the businesses using WooCommerce and get all excited for them.

Being a people’s person, mainly focused on business relationships is not always easy in an organization full of more techie/developers. Being able to work out of WooHQ in Cape Town has helped me with this, though. It’s really nice to be able to share life with my co-workers. Since January this year I’ve been travelling with my wife doing the nomadic thing which has been a big change, I really miss my co-workers and sometimes struggle doing everything online via slack, trello, p2’s..etc.

How does a Post Grad. in Philosophy get into Sales and Marketing? (or should the question be the other way around?)

I always describe my life since I was 16 as a mix of ‘helping people’ and ‘being an entrepreneur’. The golden thread between it all is a quest for doing something of significance and making an impact.

There was a 3-year window where I stepped out of the business world and went to South Africa to work in the nonprofit sector. Following 2 years at the non-profit I did a postgrad degree in Sustainable Development, a very enlightening field and life changing in terms of shaping my worldview (esp as an American studying in Africa). This course led me down some crazy trails, namely studying how poorer communities can lead their own development process. I lived in a slum for one month to do ethnographic research on this particular community.

The truth is, I loved the people and loved learning, but the experience made me realize I do not want to make a profession out of the development sector. Following this experience I launched my own WooCommerce store and got back into sales and marketing – something I had been doing since a young age.

Your business development mantras are?

Create win-wins. The most popular phrase I use is a triple dip where about we can help our users win, partner companies win, and of course, remain profitable while doing so.

I also firmly believe in doing business with like minded people that get it.

To me life is all about people, I do what I do because I genuinely love people and want to make an impact.

What role does the WordPress Community play in business development?

The community is everything to WordPress and WooCommerce. We would not be able to be nearly as successful without the stakeholder ecosystem we’ve built. WooCommerce and WordPress would not be what they are without many people buying into the vision. It’s been really incredible for us to see WooCommerce Meetups take off.

Why are WordCamps important?

WordCamps bring users together and encourage people to help each other. I think what is often not emphasized is that relationships formed at WordCamps bring a feeling to WordPress that is hard to put your fingers on. All you can really say is, it feels good to be part of a community. I think these events mean a lot to a lot of people who might not otherwise have met good company, friends and it helps people feel good about whatever they are doing with WordPress.

How important is volunteering to Joel Bronkowski?

It’s key. Tough to explain but I’ve always felt the most fulfilled when I’ve let go of what I want and helped others. This is not an easy place to get to, I mean tons of people volunteer for the wrong reasons. The purest form of volunteerism is doing things for others out of a place of compassion without telling anyone about it. That’s the kind of stuff I want to be involved with. There is nothing worse for me than people that brag about all they’ve done or given. 🙂

So that was Joel Bronkowski, straight from the heart!

It was a pleasure meeting you Joel. Thank you so much for your time and for doing this interview with me. I do hope we cross paths again. And if we do I’m not letting you go without giving me some WooThemes swag 😉

If you have questions for Joel you can use the comments section. Better still follow him on twitter!

How WordPress Moodle Integration a.k.a Edwiser Bridge was Born

July 8, 2015 by Tahseen Kazi 2 Comments

Edwiser Bridge – The WordPress Moodle Integration Plugin

Small beginnings can sometimes lead to great ideas and that’s exactly what our solution for WooCommerce Moodle Integration led us to.

Can’t figure out what I’m saying? Predictable!

Me in philosophical mode = You not understanding anything.

So let me just shake off the philosophy, get into the skin of my character (which is Tahseen the Bloggerati) and give you a lowdown on the complete “WooCommerce Moodle Integration Story”

How It All Started

Predominantly, WisdmLabs is a WordPress Development Services Provider. Ask us anything WordPress and we’ll wield out our weapons (relax! I’m talking about development weapons 😉 ) to provide the most optimum solution for the task at hand.

In one such situation, a client came to us with a unique requirement. He needed a SIMPLE means to start selling his Moodle courses.

Being the WordPress aficionados that we are how we read it was ‘He needed a WordPress Moodle Integration’.

At that time (more than a year ago) we had already done ample and diverse work in WooCommerce and won ourselves the WooCommerce Expert badge. This combined with the fact that WooCommerce is one of the most popular and constantly evolving eCommerce plugin in the WordPress domain made it our logical choice while scavenging for a solution.

And that is how ladies and gentleman the WooCommerce Moodle Integration was born!

WooCommerce Moodle Integration – The Plugin

An elementary solution that integrated WooCommerce with Moodle was developed as per the given requirements and delivered to the client. So the client got his Shopping Cart for Moodle along with the gold mine of features provided by WooCommerce. We however, were not done with the WooCommerce Moodle integration just yet!

While researching for the project, Bharat, our go-to guy for all LMS development related queries, realized the inherent need for a shopping cart for Moodle among many Moodle users. In fact there were some users that wanted to take the Moodle route (Moodle is one of the most developed and feature rich online learning management system) but shied away due to the lack of options to sell Moodle courses.

Further, the skyrocketing costs for Moodle development make it a not so appealing option to customize and include the required functionality, that of a shopping cart.

That’s where the availability of an out of the box shopping cart for Moodle seemed relevant and it is precisely what led us to continue development on the WooCommerce Moodle Integration. We added features to the plugin and introduce it as an off the shelf extension for WooCommerce.

The plugin allowed users to sync Moodle courses to WordPress as products and sell them from the WooCommerce store. Further, it worked as a seamless interface between WordPress and Moodle automatically registering WooCommerce users who purchase courses on Moodle with the same login credentials.

What Led to Edwiser Bridge – The WordPress Moodle Integration Plugin?

As expected the WooCommerce Moodle Integration plugin was received well in the Moodle circle as well as outside of it. At $55 it stood to be one of the most economical and easy to use solution available in the WordPress domain.

Along with increasing sales, we received a sizeable number of customization and feature requests too for the plugin. A single sign-on option being one of the most prevalent requests.

Now you would wonder why would we want to redo a plugin already doing well?

Well, these customization requests brought us to our next problem. While our plugin provided a solution for a very important issue that of selling courses for Moodle users it also brought about a challenge for us to make it fitting for a larger user base.

It’s integration with WooCommerce restricted its reach to users with a requirement for a WooCommerce store and prevented us from expanding the target audience!

Bharat was totally against further development of the WooCommerce Moodle plugin the way it was. Rightfully so, he had his reasons!

The WooCommerce Moodle Integration plugin restricted the shopping cart to WooCommerce.
The plugin did not allow the association of one course to more than one product. Not cool! Especially when bundling courses might be an option you might have in mind.
Further, he had his reservations from a development perspective too. He wanted the code to be more modular and developer friendly than it already was.

That’s how the focus shifted towards providing users with an option to sell courses with a WordPress Moodle Integration.

What can you do with Edwiser Bridge?

On that note we started with the makeover process of WooCommerce Moodle integration to WordPress Moodle integration, the end result of which is now called Edwiser Bridge. It is a FREE plugin available for download on wordpress.org

So what can be done using the Edwiser Bridge plugin? Well, in a word you can do LOTS. If I have to elaborate though here’s what you will be able to do.

1. Import Courses from Moodle to WordPress

Courses created in Moodle can be imported to the WordPress end in a custom post type called ‘Courses’. When I say that courses are imported, it does not mean that the course data is imported. That still remains in Moodle and students will take courses there. Basic course information such as Course Title, Course Description, & Associated Images are transferred to the custom post type. This data is then used to sell courses from the Moodle end

2. Sell Moodle Courses from WordPress

Courses that have been imported from Moodle can be sold on WordPress with PayPal.

3. Automatic Registration of WordPress Users on Moodle

All students that purchase courses from WordPress for the first time will get automatically registered to Moodle with the same login credentials as that of Moodle. Which means no hassles of memorizing two separate set of credentials.

4. Multiple Synchronization Options

Based on past feedback from users we have incorporated various data synchronization options. For example, courses as well as course categories can be synchronized. Apart from that previously synchronized courses will only be updated if the option has been selected.

Apart from that user’s course enrollment status can be synchronized. Users can also be enrolled or unenrolled in a course from the user profile page in the WordPress back end. Lastly, user account in WordPress can be linked or unlinked to Moodle account using an option provided in the ‘Bulk Actions’ drop down on the ‘Users’ page.

5. Translation Ready and Developer Friendly

Finally, the plugin has been built keeping in mind the diverse audience that might want to use it. So, if you want it in a specific language it’s possible. And if you want to customize it yourself that’s possible too using the hooks provided in the plugin.

Don’t wanna get your hands in the deep end of the code? No worries. Get in touch with us. We’ll get it going for you!

It Get’s Better with WooCommerce Integration for Edwiser Bridge

Now for those of you might prefer the WooCommerce Moodle integration over the WordPress Moodle Integration we have something for you too! To start using the awesomeness of WooCommerce with Edwiser Bridge you will have to install the WooCommerce Integration for Edwiser Bridge along with the base plugin. (Which is Edwiser Bridge)

Want to know what the WooCommerce Integration for Edwiser Bridge does? Take a Look

What About Existing WooCommerce Moodle Integration Users?

With the new plugin coming in we have discontinued further development on the old version of the WooCommerce Moodle integration plugin. So, if you are an existing customer you should not expect any new updates on that plugin. (Of course we’ll not stop providing support for the plugin.)

BUT, wait a minute! It’s not like we’ll stop caring about you. You are extremely important to us and we’ll definitely like you to enjoy the benefits of the new system. We’ll soon be coming up with a migration plugin that will help you export your data from the old version of the plugin to Edwiser Bridge. Along with that existing users will also be given a copy of the WooCommerce Integration for Edwiser Bridge using which they can seamlessly start using the WordPress Moodle integration on their website.

You don’t have to necessarily migrate though. You can continue using the legacy plugin if you’re comfortable using it.

Migration Plugin Released (Update – 08 October 2015)

We’ve released the Migration plugin for WooCommerce Moodle Integration plugin owners. You can get it from here.

This is Just the Beginning

From where I am seeing it Edwiser Bridge is just the beginning. We have an extensive development plan lined up for the future and we’re excited to bring in new modules for the WordPress Moodle Integration!

Sneak Peek into the Development Plan

1. Single Sign On for Edwiser Bridge

The Edwiser Bridge provides users with an option to login to WordPress as well as Moodle with the same login credentials. With the single sign on extension we’ll be taking this feature a notch higher. A user logged in to WordPress will be automatically logged in to Moodle without the need of entering their his login credentials.

Single Sign On Extension Released (Update – 03 August 2015)

We’ve released the Single Sign On extension for Edwiser Bridge. You can purchase it from here.

2. User Profiles for Edwiser Bridge

Currently when a user is created on WordPress only the login credentials for both the websites will be replicated. With the User Profiles extension various fields in the user profile page on WordPress will be mapped with fields in user profile page on Moodle. This mapping will be used at the time time of user registration to export user data from WordPress to Moodle.

So that was a low down from my end on our journey from WooCommerce Moodle Integration to Edwiser Bridge – The WordPress Moodle Integration plugin by WisdmLabs. I’ll keep revising this post to keep you updated on the development plan for Edwiser Bridge. You can also take a look at Edwiser to see more details on the plugin.

If you have any question feel free to use the comments section at the end of this page. I’m here to answer your queries for you.

Adios 🙂

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How It All Started

WooCommerce Moodle Integration – The Plugin

What Led to Edwiser Bridge – The WordPress Moodle Integration Plugin?

What can you do with Edwiser Bridge?

1. Import Courses from Moodle to WordPress

**Search Results Can Guide You… But Not Always in the Right Direction**

**When Re-using Code… Understand What Every Line Does Before Using It**