Does anyone have any experience of using https://thinkific.com/ with Rapidweaver ?
I dont know how to start combining them!
Thinkific offers a āget started for freeā but these learning platforms can be expensive for providers. However itās perfectly possible to replicate what they do in RW/Stacks. Stuart created a great LMS (Learning Management System) for Source using his own stacks ā itās well worth looking at. Basically youāll need a membership and payment system (Vibralogixā Sitelok and Vibracart Pro are the go-tos for the RW/Stacks community), a good slider (Iād recommend Stuartās āSpliderā but there are various other good products out there), a video player (lots of choices here ā I like dooboxā āVideoā), a testing-system (of which Stuartās āQuizzerā appears to be the only one for Stacks), and some kind of community software (which is currently a bit more problematic, as some of the popular choices of the past such as Vanilla and Tribe seem to be struggling in this economic climate). A less full-featured posting system like Disqus (Joe has a stack for that) or Willās āCommentStackā would probably do the trick. There is of course an upfront outlay of money and time to build oneās own LMS, but Iāve seen various friends and colleagues fold their learning offer because the monthly fees on the platforms are onerous, at a time when business is not exactly brisk.
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Hi
Thanks so much for all this information. I will definately use it in the future.
For this site though my client has already gone ahead and set up video tutorials for sale through Thinkific.
(We had been selling them using vimeo and cartloom)
I just wondered ā¦ I cant seem to figure out how I conect the BUY button on my site to the video courses. Im hoping its as simple as just adding a link! But have been recomeded to iuse Zapier. Not sure why!?
Was hoping someone here might have set up something similar.
The simple solution would just be to change your āBUYā button to a āFind out moreā button and have that link to the product page on Thinkific. Though i am assuming that you perhaps want to control the payment process yourself?
If you have the technical know-how then you can use the Thinkific API to programatically create/enrol users onto courses after the user goes through your own payment process. Zapier would be the easiest way to achieve this but would depend on your payment system being able to generate a webhook that you would then catch and process in Zapier.
I know it is no use to you but for others reading this that may want to create their own LMS in RW/Stacksā¦I have a system set up on my Academy site that takes payment through Paddle payment system. I have set Paddle up to send a webhook to a custom page (that I built as part of the Academy site) that then interfaces with Sitelok to create a user (if required) and to then enrol them on their chosen course. Definitely not as easy as using an off-the-shelf LMS but certainly possible (and way cheaper in the long run).
p.s. Poster 2 by @Jannis is a key component of my LMS that @jamessouttar missed out from his list. It is this that is used to create the actual course pages. I even have Sitelok set up to remember progress etc. Our Source Lawyer course is free for anyone that wants to see all of this functionality in action.
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In addition to that, Sitelok can be expanded with quite a few payment provider plugins that require new users to pay a fee when they create an account and/or when they sign up for a user group that they werenāt previously a member of.
If youād like to charge existing subscribers for different courses, you could put courses under their own user groups and then charge a user if they sign up for one of those user groups. You could set up an expiry date on the user group membership if needed.
Cheers,
Erwin
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This is a great topic and the Stacks examples from @jamessouttar and in particular the Accademy example built by Stewart is perhaps the best ever example of using Stacks to build a complex CRM system entitely from existing Stacks solutions.
Looks like @Domino needs help integrating an already chosen and setup https://thinkific.com/ installation.
I havenāt used Thinkific, but have used similar accomodation/holiday booking, real estate type systems and they all seem to follow the same type of approach toallow you to integrate their system into your site. You either use their Wordpress Templates or add their ācodeā to your site.
Usually, you log into their maze of help and configuration and if you find it, you usually set up colours, button stlyles, font and text sizes, etcā¦ Then you usually get a URL to go to a Thinkific page, or open a Thinkific modal or copy and paste some code into your site.
You are usually responsible for positioning and sizing this code. If your are using Source just add it into a Coder stack.
You may need to create and add additional CSS to style their code to make it look like the rest of your design.
It is required to set up an account to access the Thinkific examples, so I canāt point you to how you link to their site but it should just be a URL you copy from the Thnkific system. Moving forward though, it will probably be a lot more than that because you will most likely need to display a gallery or slider of courses, latest courses, most popular courses, promotions, etc., together with addition sales information. If you are just linking to Thinkific then you are probably writing yourself out of this solution.
Not sure if these further options apply, but using their Wordpress templates may be the easiest route here. A further option would be to use BlocsPlus to create a Wordpress Template that would integrate their system.
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Hi HabitualShaker
Im deffo keen on the simple solutionā¦ and fine with payment process via Thinkific. (tho could keep cartloom if there was any benefit)
So ā¦ given that I have to get things moving asap (and can then have breathing space to figure out best solution)
I should just link up stripe and paypal into the Thinkific setup ā¦
Apologies to @Jannis ā I didnāt mean to leave out Poster 2. Itās a big part of my ecosystem too, and I hope to experiment with some interesting integrations using it in the new year.
Iād love to explore this subject more, as building an LMS (for my own sites) is going to be one of the big projects for 2023.
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Just incase anyone interested, I managed to create buttons and links within Thinkific so easy to combine the two.
All the video courses and downloadable pdfs are on Thinkific and also we are using their own payment gateway
which is same rates as stripe. Its $34 a month. Means we have got rid of Cartloom, Vimeo and Stripe.
Everything is under one roof.
Iāll report back in the future ā¦ but seems ok so far !
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