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We often use WooCommerce Memberships, but every project is a bit different and which Membership plugin is right for you can vary a lot!

There's definitely a lot of overlap between CRM tags and Memberships, and generally speaking you can achieve a similar outcome with either one. We sometimes use both on the same project. One difference between the two is that tags are binary, they apply or they don't. Memberships are more complex objects that can have more metadata associated with them and more than 2 statuses (off or on), and you can cause things to happen based on those other statuses. Memberships systems, if built well, can also better handle multiple access scenarios. For instance, if you have a customer that buys access to a membership 2 different ways, and one of those ways expires, they would retain their membership thanks to their second method of access. With tags, unless you carefully map out some complex logic, would likely be removed when one of the ways they were obtained expires. Tag-based systems also often tend to run at the moment a tag is applied, which can sometimes cause issues when a new perk is added after a tag has been applied depending on how that's set up and coded. Beyond the functionality, there's also an ease of management aspect that comes with Memberships, because a Membership is a more feature-rich object that can be more easily centrally administered. It's much easier to see and manage everything a Membership does and applies to at a high level, whereas a lot of tag-based stuff tends to sprawl out and it can get difficult to understand all the side-effects adding/removing a tag might have once it's used in a bunch of different automations and perhaps applied to a bunch of different posts and plugin settings throughout your site instead of via a single Membership Plan edit screen. Tags put the pressure on you as the site administrator to be very well organized and think through all the possible edge cases, and ideally keep some kind of planning document or map of your system to refer to, whereas Memberships handle most of that for you out of the box. This makes it a lot easier to collaborate in situations where you have many different people working on the site, not all of whom would understand the complexity of your tag system. Where tags shine in my experience is personalization or more granular access control to an individual resource. If you want two users with the same level of access to experience content differently based on unique characteristics or actions they've taken, applying tags to represent those things and then varying the content or unlocked resources based on that is a great use case for tags. They're especially great in scenarios where you're unlikely to have to un-apply at tag as a result of something expiring, where they represent something more constant about a user. One way you can bridge the gap between the systems is to apply memberships via tags, which gives you the benefit of being able to grant memberships via CRM automation while retaining the easier management and more sophisticated access control benefits of Memberships. At the end of the day, if you're really comfortable with CRM tags & automations, you can accomplish nearly the same thing either way and just going with what you know is a perfectly fine strategy.

We use Woo Memberships most of the time, which of course is compatible with Woo. It mostly just comes down to choosing the right plugin for the job.

there's Stripe

The exact steps are going to be different for each Membership plugin, but the amount of products doesn't change the steps. In general, you create a membership that include whatever content you want people to have access to, even if that's just one thing, and then you create a product that grants the users that buy it that Membership. You don't have to call it a Membership on your site if your users would be confused by that, it can just look to them like they're buying a traditional product.

If you don't know how to do this, you'll probably need to hire a developer to build you an integration with any APIs you need. In theory you might be able to DIY it with a plugin like Uncanny Automator, but that could get pretty complex too.

Speaking about the WordPress LMS ecosystem specifically, the two that have decent traction and ecosystems are LearnDash and LifterLMS. The others have much smaller market share, so even if they might be great there just tends to be fewer 3rd party integrations/addons and fewer available experts to rely on.

@@tangibleincand what outside the the WordPress environment? What about tools like Skool, Kajabi, Teachable and Thinkific?

@@impactangels We think any of those can be a fine tool to get started on (which one to pick depends on your unique circumstances), but generally aren't suitable for cases where your courses are the core of your business. Building on tools you can fully own and have access to all your data, as well as the ability to customize to your needs, is really crucial if the value of your business is tied to them. In other words, if you build on a "rental property" like the services you mentioned, you're adding value to their business not yours. If you own your LMS on WordPress, everything you invest into your LMS increases the value of your business or organization. Rented software is great if you're just getting started and want to test the waters before trying to build something of your own, or if it's a small side project to your main business. The main advantage with those is that your options are limited and on-rails, so all you really need to do is input your content and hit publish. That's much better than spending months trying to figure out how to set up a bunch of plugins if you're going the DIY route and can't afford experts to build it for you.

We tend to go for Woo Memberships because it works really well with Woo and doesn't add as much redundant functionality as other Membership plugins when you're using it with an LMS. Most LMS plugins have a lot of functionality that overlaps with Membership plugins to some degree, so something lighter that just focuses on access control works best for us in that scenario. Some LMS plugins also have an integrated Membership solution of their own which can be worth considering.

You could consider using Woo Memberships + Woo Teams to give teachers teams they can invite students to that would include access to courses. Many LMS plugins also have some kind of team/group enrolment system you might be able to directly use.

That's absolutely how we use it internally as well, though increasingly we drop the page builders in favor of L&L on large dynamic data-driven projects where flexibility and performance is more important than drag-and-drop. Where we still find it useful even when a more advanced builder is available is making things client-proof since the advanced query blocks are too complicated for typical clients to manage themselves. Instead we make L&L based blocks for the page builder being used that only have the options that make sense for clients (and may include several queries and dynamically driven elements in the same block). We're looking forward to rolling out those block building capabilities to a wider audience in the future!

You'd give the webflow guy a run for his money that's for sure

Every custom table has a unique structure that we can't predict, so we have to manually make integrations with individual CCT providers. Looping over post types works because the posts have a predictable structure. In our upcoming pro version, we already integrate with a few custom tables. For instance, Gravity Forms & WooCommerce make use of custom tables and we integrate with those. If you want to add your own loop types to L&L via custom code, that is already possible and we plan to provide more extensive support for that in the future. If there are specific custom content types from 3rd party plugins you want us to integrate, feel free to send those over and we can consider it if there's enough demand.

@@tangibleinc No integrations to any specific plugin.. What I meant was just like your CPT name and CPT fields are parameters in the loop tag attributes, your loops tag should allow custom table name, and column names as parameters in the loop tag attributes for fetching, filtering or ordering data.. Basically Loop your tags should be able task of performing a Select query on a custom sql table.. This is be very useful as a SQL Datatable feature

It's not for everyone, but we agree that for client handoff blocks are a better experience than giving clients access to some kind of HTML editor. That's why we've created Tangible Blocks, a system that allows you to use L&L syntax to quickly make configurable blocks without having to learn PHP/JS. You can even run these blocks without having the L&L editor on the site, so client admins can never see and mess up the L&L code powering the blocks. This is particularly interesting in cases where a client might even mess things up if given a generic loop block given all the options they could potentially touch. The L&L block can have just the options that the customer should be able to change, and can even have restrictions around acceptable values for sizing/colors to enforce a design system (yes there are other ways to do this with their own pros & cons). Is hand coding everything from scratch "better" in some ways? Sure, but in real life things are more complicated. We tested getting some experienced WP devs to make some custom blocks vs a brand new L&L user and the new L&L user was 10X faster at creating an equivalent Gutenberg block. Beyond that, the L&L block system creates a Gutenberg Block, Elementor Widget and Beaver Builder module at once from the same L&L template, ensuring we can have the same capabilities in many different stacks. Is using native WP stuff "better" than 3rd party builders? We think so, but we also know that when we work with clients their sites may be large complex monstrosities with years of history and we might not have the option of spending months to rebuild it. L&L allows us to have as much power and flexibility as we need in every stack, even if the client's 3rd party builder plugin has limited dynamic data and loop editing support. At the end of the day, since we've adopted this system, the frequency at which our frontend team members have to use up backend time has dropped dramatically and we're iterating faster than ever. L&L syntax is a lot more expressive than a loop block can ever be, so we use it for all kinds of things like creating complex reporting views, calendars, mixing non-post data from plugins that store things in Custom Tables that can't be accessed at all in loop blocks, etc. If you're a highly skilled full stack developer and are exclusively working solo on small projects where you have tight control of the entire stack, this probably won't help you. If you work with a team with mixed skillsets on more complex projects, we think it's worth a look and have a lot of internal data that proves to us it's a massive productivity boost. Sometimes we use L&L to quickly prototype a solution and iterate through different changes before then coding a custom plugin from scratch. This allows a client to get very quick turnaround on a feature and benefit from a prototype that is 80% of what they need while we work on the fully custom version. In terms of being dependent on a 3rd party vendor, L&L is free at the entire codebase is on GitHub for anybody to fork or contribute to so hopefully the risk is somewhat mitigated there, but most people are in the WP ecosystem because of the strength of 3rd party plugins in the first place.

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It would be great

L&L templates need to be rendered before they get displayed to a user, which means that the markup itself always needs to be written inside a template. Other plugins and browsers probably won't know how to render/interpret the L&L language so you can't write your markup just anywhere on your site. I'm not familiar with LiveCanvas myself, but a quick Google search indicates that there's a LiveCanvas shortcode block. So you could theoretically write an L&L template and then render it in LiveCanvas using the [template] shortcode that's mentioned in the video. - Ben

@@tangibleinc need to get an integration so they render with LC. That would be something.

We do plan on expanding our support for page builders (currently we support Gutenberg, Beaver Builder & Elementor along with WP Grid Builder to a lesser extent), but each one requires serious effort and consideration so we have to do it on the basis of popularity and ease of maintenance. We're working on some systems to make it faster to integrate new ones but I don't think we'll add anything outside of the top 5 in the next few months. That's not to say that those we don't currently have time to integrate aren't good builders, it's just that with the amount of builders out there we have to prioritize by popularity. Each builder also has its own unique 3rd party ecosystem and people always want us to make it work with whatever addon packs they have installed so once you add a builder the work doesn't end there haha.

Thanks! A lot of it was just styles that already existed in the global stylesheet of the site I was working with, but if you download the pack of pre-made demo templates (linked in the description) you'll get the one I showed in this video with all the CSS/SASS baked into that Style tab. Should be easy to spot but the template is called "Advanced - Styled blog post grid." - Ben

​@@tangibleinc The styles editor supports sass in daahboard? That's nuts if it does.

@@VoicesOfTheRepublic It does indeed!

Second!

You need to download and install Lifter Elements in order to use Lifter Elements. You can acquire a copy here: tangibleplugins.com/products/lifter-elements/