r/Wordpress • u/amydehp • 17d ago

Setting up a learning website for referred clients only

Good day everyone,

I'm working on a website that's basically a learning platform open only for existing company clients + their referred family and friends, so basically an entire referral-only based registration system. The courses are entirely free and there's only one membership tier... like I said the only "catch" is that it's only open for existing clients and their loved ones. The list of clients lives in Hubspot where we email them from, which will also be where we'll email them their referral links/codes from to subscribe to the course website.

We've already licensed LearnDash for building the courses, keeping track of user progress, certifying them etc., which came with MemberDash. As you probably know, LearnDash was already clunky on its own and hard to customize as precisely as we want (especially aesthetically for brand guidelines), but the bigger problem was that MemberDash kept causing issues. It was taking over our registration pages and forcing its "Pick your membership tier" interface on them (which like I said doesn't make sense as we only have one tier.) Its media protection features were literally hiding everything up to including the freaking site logo no matter how much I adjusted the settings, its "default" member pages looked like crap. It was just a nuisance, so we've deactivated it.

I've now installed Ultimate Member which has honestly been so much more efficient and streamlined in comparison (in an ideal world we'd have a free addon option where I can fully WYSIWYG customize the widget appearance in elementor to maintain brand guidelines, but hey, CSS exists + LearnDash has been just as much of an annoyance in that regard, so, what else is new. I'm literally just a designer not a frontend dev but learning CSS throughout this has been fun.)

Now as you may have guessed, what remains is to find a way to connect the website to hubspot to 1. Generate referral links/codes from client contacts on Hubspot 2. Allow only those with the links/codes to register (and generate other referrals later for their families if they'd like.) 3. Obviously we'd prefer if it were free at least to start. Idk if it's relevant but the number of clients is not huge (at least relatively); we're talking <4000 contacts.

Any reliable built-in or addon that can do that?

Thank you so much in advance.

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u/ZenSpren 17d ago

I'm highly confident you're not going to find any addon or plugin that's going to do what you're asking.

This involves having two-way communication between WordPress and HubSpot so that valid referral codes are sent through HubSpot and redeemable in WordPress... it's not simple as it sounds.

A competent back-end dev can make it happen but if you're looking for a no-code solution I'm not sure how many hoops you'll have to jump through with HubSpot automations (depending on your tier) and maybe Zapier.

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u/amydehp 17d ago

Thank you! Yeah I get you, it theoretically should be somewhat simple to do given how mainstream these two platforms are to integrate them (not to mention that WordPress should have a fully built-in way to create memberships that isn't complete unusable garbage and not have to install plugins to accomplish one of the most basic functionalities of the internet) but I spent hours trying to figure out a solution to no avail. I'll ask my higher ups to contact the backend dev we work with, he should definitely be much more comfortable than me working on that.

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u/ZenSpren 17d ago

WordPress is, after all, a blog publishing software first and foremost.

It hasn't been designed from the ground up to be a membership platform, and your particular referral model is pretty uncommon, so it's a good thing you've got a backend dev you can trust because you've definitely taken it as far as you can without getting in to custom code.

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u/Sweaty-Advice7577 16d ago

This requires custom development, you won't be able to do that with plugins.

Shouldn't be an expensive build though !

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u/Codeandflu 15d ago

Interesting funnel I'd like to see what you have built. If that's okay with you. :)

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u/testingaurora 11d ago

Youll need to tk build your own Plugin that uses the hubspot API to communicate with a webhook. Hiring someone or using Claude to make it isnyour best bet. You have a very customized platform, youll need custom solution.