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LearnDash Developer Advice, “Memberium & LearnDash Go Together Like Wine and Cheese”

As a LearnDash developer having worked with LearnDash and Memberium since they were both invented, my team and I have developed a lot of experise with these tools. I've done a lot of work to establish myself as a crack  LearnDash developer. So I get a lot of questions from clients. Recently I've been getting the question, "Should I build a Memberium/LearnDash site?" They say it as if "Memberium/LearnDash was a single thing. The are wanting advice and see the two tools as one single thing.

Memberium and LearnDash certainly work well together. The provide two very complimentary features. but they play two very different roles. Let me go over the two of them so you you understand:

  • what function they provide,
  • what roles they play relative to each other, and
  • when this Memberium/LearnDash combination are right for you.

This should be useful in decide on the right platform for your online course building project when you are comparing them to other possibilities.

LearnDash Developer Explains What LearnDash Does

LearnDash is a learning management system. This LMS, as we like to call it, is for course building. LearnDash calls the components that make up a course:

  • Courses
  • Lessons
  • Topics

The form a hierarchy with Courses at the top made up of Lessons which are made up of Topics. LearnDash gives you the option to rename these two whatever you like. You can call them Modules, Chapters and Sub-Chapters. That's up to you.

You can configure your course to allow students to move from lesson to lesson in whatever order you like. You can enforce having students take lessons in the order they are listed keeping members from moving ahead until they have finished all the lessons before it. You can build quizzes casually to test people's understanding of the course and lesson or you can require students pass a quiz by a grade higher than 80% in order to proceed with the following lesson. All these options and more are available.

I rarely run into customer requirements that cannot be met with LearnDash. It has it all and what it doesn't do gets done by many addons built by third-parties to fill in the gaps.

We've been very happy using it.

LearnDash Developer Explains Where Memberium Fits In

Memberium is NOT a learning management system. It's job is to connect Wordpress and Customer Relationship Management (CRMs) like Keap (formerly called Infusionsoft) and ActiveCampaign. It enables you to build memberships or access levels using tags you assign in the CRM. Our team is best with Keap so I'll focus my discussion here on Keap, but everything included here works with ActiveCampaign as well.

You can use Memberium to keep members from viewing a page. You can configure it so only people who have requested access or paid for access can see it. You can use it to give members access to only sections of a page. You can create dynamic content on a page so members of one membership level see one thing and members of another see something else. Honestly, the sky's the limit on what you can do.

When used with LearnDash, Memberium can be used to enroll members in a course. It can be used to prevent members from even seeing a course or set up so non-members can see only parts of it to serve as a teaser enticing them to buy.

Since Keap has e-commerce features, students can purchase a course, Keap assigns them membership access and Memberium works with Wordpress to implement the rules configured in Keap.

LearnDash Developer Explains How Else Memberium Can Be Used

Used correctly, Memberium can help you do the following:

  • It can help you drip lessons out based on a variety of ways.
  • It keep people who shouldn't see content from seeing it and can instead redirect them to sales pages telling them how they buy it. (This is a really nice trick.)
  • Content can be controlled using a very sophisticated set of Memberium shortcodes to accomplish all sorts of things.

This LearnDash developer recommends you select a tool that is best-in-breed. LearnDash is clearly a best-in-breed LMS. Memberium is a best-in-breed membership tool which is even more capable because it integrates some well with backend CRMs. This gives marketing and operational automation to your solution which opens you up to so many options.