Help with ccap vs more membership levels

#1

Hi guys, I have a real dilemma:

I use thrive apprentice to deliver courses. They can restrict access to a course based on roles. However, the course page and lessons do not allow ccap.

I then thought it would be great to look at just setting up a course on a normal page, then lock it down with S2, but then I lose all of the bells and whistles of an LMS (course progression, menus etc).

So then I looked at learnpress. It allows ccaps and level restrictions, but I don’t want to switch to yet another LMS.

So, my question is. If I create more levels and sell each new course as a level to work with thrive apprentice then, if someone is level 3 or 4 and wants to buy another course, how would that work? They would lose access to the other course they had purchased? Can you be a member of multiple levels?

I understand that the way ccaps works is that all people could be level one and then you create a proform with ccaps for each course giving only users who purchase that course access.

I’m getting confused between membership levels, ccaps and how this will all work in practice.

#2

Hi Andrew.

lock it down with S2, but then I lose all of the bells and whistles of an LMS (course progression, menus etc).

That’s odd. I don’t know how that LMS implements or tracks it. I’m not sure how the user could have s2 access to the page, but not get the course progress.

I’m guessing you’re using a level restriction, did you test using the s2If condition to protect the content instead? Maybe the LMS won’t mind that so much.

I’m getting confused between membership levels, ccaps and how this will all work in practice.

See these:

The ones here are level restrictions: WP Admin > s2Member > Restriction Options

The custom capability is as you said, but you’d apply its restriction from the s2 box in the page editor, or with conditionals in the body of the page.

Does that help. :slight_smile:

#3

I forget the Thrive Apprentice terminology, so I’m using generic LMS language here.

Did you set the Membership level and ccap on each piece of content?

Main course, each lesson page, etc.?

That’s actually how LearnDash acts with whatever membership plugin they integrate and how Sensei works with Woo plugins.

It’s really tedious to set it all up. Point is you can’t just protect the course unless (maybe) you’re using an all-in one like LifterLMS (and just guessing here–might be impossible too).

s2 doesn’t support multiple levels per user and each level is supposed to get more access than each previous level.

I’m also guessing that, since s2 won’t enroll your users into your Apprentice courses, they’ll probably have to click on some button to enroll for the progress to be tracked or else they’ll be viewing the free content (or for registered users) because it has to be set that way for the integration with a membership plugin to work.

In summary:

  1. Protect each piece of content.
  2. Prefer a “reguire registration” option rather than “free” for the course, if available. That way they can’t see content unless they register which, if they are logged in should be a button press if Thrive Apprentice allows that.

And, as I recall, Thrive Apprentice is integrated with a SAAS payment system. In the long run, it might be easier to just use that (but I haven’t used it so can’t comment—also haven’t used Thrive Apprentice in production).

#4

Thrive apprentice is integrated with Sendowl payment gateway. But I want to use S2. S2 works well and I want to avoid on-going subscription payments for sendowl. Thrive apprentice lets you lock content based on membership level (role). I have sold one course with S2 and thrive and it works fine, the user gets access to the course as they have the correct “role”. The issue will be down the line when I want to sell multiple course access. In the end I am going to create my own course pages and lock them down with ccaps. This is the most flexible option.

I will also look at Learnpress, however I am not sure how to integrate S2 payments and access to the Learnpress course.

Does anyone on this forum sell courses via S2 and an LMS?