Enable Users to Build Custom Group Licenses

With Uncanny LearnDash Groups, you can give visitors to your site the ability to choose the courses they want, specify how many users they have, and buy access to a group that contains those courses for their users.  The cost is calculated automatically based on the courses they’ve selected, bulk discounts applied, the group created, and the group leader assigned — all automatically.  This article will cover how to set up the page that enables this functionality.

Set up a “Buy Courses” page

To enable users to build and purchase custom group licenses on your site, you’ll need to create a “Buy Courses” page (see Fig. 1 below).

If you activated the Uncanny LearnDash Groups with WooCommerce already installed, the Buy Courses page should have been automatically created.  If not, simply create a new page and drop in the shortcode [uo_groups_buy_courses] or add the block “Buy Courses”.

Shortcode/Block

[uo_groups_buy_courses product_cat="193,203" product_tag="179,398" min_qty="5" max_qty="10"]

Block Name: Buy Courses

The shortcode supports several optional attributes:

• product_cat: Add product category IDs to this attribute to control which group courses are available for groups based on their associated category. This option is useful if you create several pages using the shortcode for different organizations to limit what they can each purchase.
• product_tag: Add product tag IDs to restrict the list of courses to ones that match the product tags specified.
• min_qty: Require that users purchase at least a specific amount of seats to create a group.
• max_qty: Limit the maximum number of seats that can be added to a group.

Using the “Buy Courses” page

On this page, users will build a custom group license product that includes any courses set up by an administrator as LearnDash Group Course products.  (Use the attributes product_cat and product_tag to include only Group Course products in specific categories or with specific tags.)  These are the steps involved:

1. Set a group name. This name is saved and becomes the name of the group license and the purchase will be added as Group Leader of that group. The next time they log-in to the site and go to the Group Management page – this new license and group will be available for them to see and manage.
2. Set the number of seats they want to associate with the group.
3. Select courses.  The list of available courses on this page includes all LearnDash Group Course products set up in WooCommerce.  It is not an exhaustive list of all courses in the LearnDash. When a user selects multiple courses, the pricing and discounts are automatically calculated and updated at the bottom of the form.
4. Bulk discounts are automatically calculated if they are configured.
5. Proceed to their cart in WooCommerce, review their order, and complete the purchase. The username and password provided at checkout will be used to create the Group Leader for the new LearnDash group.

Fig. 1. The Buy Courses form is the way for Group Leaders to create a Group, bundle courses, set group seats and purchase a Group License.

Important Notes

There are several important points to be aware of regarding the behavior of these custom licenses:

• In some situations users will not have access to their purchase until an administrator manually completes the order in WooCommerce.  If you would like orders to be autocompleted, we recommend you install this plugin.
• When users create a custom LearnDash Group License, but do not complete the sale (because they abandon their cart, for example), a Learndash Group License product is still created.  You will see these under Products in the WordPress admin panel.  However, these automatically generated products that have received no orders will be automatically deleted 24 hours after creation.  It is not necessary for an admin to delete them.
• Products and orders associated with group purchases should not be deleted. If they are deleted, group functions such as adding users, courses or seats to the group may not work as expected.  In this situation, the group can be downgraded from the Edit Group page so that it functions as a Basic LearnDash group with access to reporting tools only.
• If you would like to integrate this page with your WooCommerce shop, we recommend you create an “External/Affiliate” product in your WooCommerce store that links to the Buy Courses page.  You can then add a description of the Group License process to that product’s description.