Forma Edtech LLC
Industry
Location
Project Scope
Project Duration
School of Evolutionary Herbalism, founded by Sajah Popham, is a growing online platform that teaches herbalism and natural medicine through a holistic approach. It integrates traditional healing systems with modern insights, offering courses that focus on physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.
The business emphasizes transformation, community learning, and plant-based healing practices for a global audience. Its unique approach blends science, spirituality, and traditional wisdom to create a comprehensive system of natural healing.
“This project was less about building and more about untangling a fragile system. We had layered dependencies across LearnDash, BuddyBoss, GamiPress, and Ontraport that were breaking core learning flows. What made this different was the Ontraport-to-WordPress subscription thinking — it wasn’t just migration, it was rethinking ownership of the entire user lifecycle.”
AkshayJain
Tech Lead, WisdmLabs
Client Journey
The platform’s membership, access, and billing logic had become too dependent on Ontraport and adjacent tools.
Customer information, payment behavior, access control, and affiliate workflows were spread across different systems. LearnDash handled course delivery, but key business logic lived outside WordPress. That made even routine updates riskier than they should have been.
At the same time, the WordPress side of the experience was already under strain:
So while WooCommerce migration emerged as the bigger architectural direction, the immediate challenge was clear:
Before the platform could move toward a cleaner WooCommerce-based setup, the existing learning experience had to be stabilized first.
The Challenge
The platform relied heavily on Ontraport and AccessAlly for memberships, billing, and access control, splitting core business logic across multiple systems. This fragmented setup caused the WordPress LMS to fail in key areas:
Learners experienced confusing navigation, incomplete courses, and disrupted learning flow.
Breadcrumbs were missing parent relationships on submodule pages, and their sizing was inconsistent across mobile and desktop. This created a poor learner experience, where users could access content but struggled to understand:
The client had a custom visual state system for lessons and modules, including status ribbons such as completed, in-progress, and locked.
However, BuddyBoss theme-level CSS was overriding the custom styles, causing all states to render with the same visual treatment. So while the logic still existed in parts of the setup, the frontend no longer communicated those differences to learners.
That meant users lost key progress cues, and locked or restricted states no longer stood out clearly in the interface.
Bonus modules were supposed to be unlockable with points through GamiPress, but some pages incorrectly showed content as open instead of displaying the “purchase with points” state.
The issue appeared to be caused by custom template overrides that were still pulling LearnDash access logic instead of the GamiPress Restrict Content add-on settings.
The client faced a BuddyBoss app compatibility issue due to unsupported blocks. BuddyBoss support suggested a potential solution involving:
Membership and account logic were too dependent on a fragmented Ontraport setup, with customer data, billing, course access, and affiliate behaviour spread across multiple tools. Ecommerce wasn’t running natively through WooCommerce, prompting discussions about a more unified future stack that includes WooCommerce, subscriptions, and AffiliateWP.
Key issues with the current setup:
We treated this as a stabilization-first, migration-aware project.
The immediate work focused on repairing the LMS and customizations already in place. At the same time, the broader system was evaluated through the lens of a future WooCommerce migration, so the platform would not continue investing in a fragmented architecture.
1
Result: The client gained a clearer migration path away from an external dependency-heavy setup and toward a more unified WordPress architecture.
2
The existing “Sub-Lessons” customization needed debugging first, because the backend values were saving but the template logic wasn’t applying correctly in the user experience.
The intended result was to rename the layer to Sub-Modules and make the full structure behave as:
Course > Module > Sub-Module > Lesson
This also required updates to:
Result: The course architecture would align with the client’s teaching model instead of forcing their content into LearnDash defaults.
3
The colored flag customization already existed, but BuddyBoss styling was overriding it. The fix required adjusting CSS specificity and restoring the intended display logic.
Result: Module and lesson states would become visually meaningful again, instead of every state appearing identical.
4
The bonus module access issue needed code-level debugging because the frontend templates appeared to prioritize LearnDash access behavior over the Restrict Content add-on.
Result: Bonus content could correctly reflect point-based unlock behavior, which was central to the learning/product model.
5
The client also wanted previously available UI cues brought back into the learning experience, including:
Result: The platform would feel more guided, clearer, and easier to navigate for learners.
6
The app-related error required working from BuddyBoss support instructions, including code repository setup and code-level modifications to the app integration layer.
Result: A possible path to app compatibility was identified, with scope honesty preserved around the fact that app development was outside the team’s main expertise.
Result
Where the platform stands today
👉 Identified a clear WooCommerce-led migration direction for the platform, moving the long-term commerce, subscription, and customer management path away from an Ontraport-dependent setup and closer to a more unified WordPress stack.
👉 Clarified that the existing membership and account flow was too fragmented across Ontraport, AccessAlly, PilotPress, LearnDash, and other customizations, helping define why a WooCommerce-based structure would be a more maintainable long-term fit.
👉 Stabilized the LMS foundation that would be necessary before any future WooCommerce migration could succeed, including work on course hierarchy, breadcrumbs, sidebar behavior, navigation flow, and content counts.
👉 Re-established the intended 4-level learning structure — Course → Module → Sub-Module → Lesson — so the frontend experience could better reflect the client’s actual teaching model instead of a partially working customization.
👉 Reduced frontend confusion for learners by addressing broken visual and navigational cues, including breadcrumb behavior, lesson and module titles, status flag visibility, pagination clarity, and previous/next navigation improvements.
👉 Restored the intended gated-content behavior for bonus modules by fixing the conflict between LearnDash template overrides and the GamiPress Restrict Content add-on, helping the platform move back toward the points-based access flow the client wanted.
👉 Created a more practical roadmap for future platform consolidation by recommending WooCommerce for orders, payments, and subscriptions, along with AffiliateWP for affiliate management, instead of continuing to extend a heavily layered Ontraport-based setup.
Impact
And when we looked at the data, the improvements were clear.
Subscription orders migrated
Completed orders migrated
LMS Hierarchy restored
Total Hours
We specialize in WordPress development that goes beyond the ordinary — crafting tailored digital experiences your audience won’t just remember, but love.
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