Episode 3 of WordPress and Membership Sites
In our third episode in our series on membership plugins for WordPress, we dive into WooCommerce and Groups for WooCommerce and WP Courseware.
Jonathan has a great blog and the show notes are in more detail.
WooCommerce/Groups
You can get Groups and WooCommerce both for free on WordPress.org. However, you need a micro-plugin for them to work together and this is not free (see prices below). I have built a couple of websites using this system, and it has its strengths and weaknesses. I could write a whole article on just this, but I will only be covering the key points here.
Good Points
1) It’s part of the WooCommerce family, so you get integration with WooCommerce. So if you are considering building a membership section of an existing website that already uses WooCommerce, it’s probably the right direction to go.
2) The number of micro-plugins developed for this platform, from WooThemes and from third party developers, is impressive. One of the main ones you probably will need to get is WooCommerce Subscription Download plugin.
3) WooThemes has a secondary plugin called Sensei, which is built to help organize online courses.
Bad Points
1) With all the micro and other plugins, it can soon become one of the most expensive solutions on this list.
2) Like with WishListMember, there a lot (and I mean a lot) of configuration options.
3) The basic documentation looks very extensive; however, after you start working with the code base, you soon realize that the official documentation is not correct. I understand that this situation has recently been improved, however, and there are a lot of third party advice and blog articles to help you.
https://www.woothemes.com/products/groups-woocommerce/
Price: Single site license $79, 5 sites $99, 25 sites $199.
