Integrate WooCommerce with Edwiser Bridge to sell your Moodle courses online by using the Edwiser WooCommerce Integration extension

To get POWER, you have to
CONNECT ALL the parts!

So you've got your Moodle site integrated with WordPress using the Edwiser Bridge, and the Edwiser Single Sign On and Selective Synchronization extensions. What's next? How about integrating with WooCommerce?

Edwiser WooCommerce Integration
extension logo

Section I: Overview

The WooCommerce Moodle Integration allows you to sell courses, synchronised by Edwiser Bridge, using WooCommerce. This will leverage on WooCommerce's strengths of e-Commerce functionality and it will allow you to sell multiple courses as bundled products without the need of an additional extension.

This post is Part 4 in the series of Edwiser Bridge and its extensions. Here is the Big Picture that shows where this extension fits in:

Section II: Pre-requisites

This post assume that you have already successfully purchased, installed the WooCommerce Integration extension and activated its license key.

Screen 1. License key information.

Section II:

As mentioned in the official documentation for this plugin, you will have to do the following four things first:

(1) Disable guest checkouts
Go to WooCommerce | Settings | Checkout and uncheck the 'Enable Guest Checkout' option.

Screen 2. Disable guest checkout.

(2) Enable registration on the Checkout Page
Go to WooCommerce | Settings | Accounts and check the 'Enable registration on the "Checkout" page' option.

Screen 3. Enable registration.

(3) Disable automatic password generation
Go to WooCommerce | Settings | Accounts and uncheck the 'Automatically generate username from customer email' option.

Screen 4. Disable automatic passwords.

(4) Make a product virtual and downloadable
Go to the course product page via Dashboard |Products..

Screen 5. Editing a product.

.
..and then check both 'Virtual' and 'Downloadable' fields in the 'Product Data' meta box.

Screen 6. Set the product
as virtual and downloadable.

Click the "Update" button to save your settings.

Section III: Create courses as WooCommerce products

This can be done in two ways.
(A) You can either make all Edwiser courses that are synchronised from Moodle as WooCommerce products.
(B) Create a Product and associate an existing synchronised course with the product.

(A) Synchronising courses as WooCommerce products from Edwiser Bridge Settings page

Go to Edwiser Bridge | Settings | Synchronization | Products

Check the 'Create courses as products' check box. Any course that is synchronised from Moodle will be created as a WooCommerce private product. It will not be available to end users.

If you check the 'Publish Synchronized Products' check box, then the private products will be published and the end users will be able to access them.

Screen 7. Synchronising courses.

Note: if you check the 'Update courses as products', then all previously imported Moodle courses will be updated. The price type of the course will be set to 'Closed'.

Click the 'Start Synchronization' button to create the WooCommerce courses.

(B) Create a Product and associate an existing synchronised course with the product.

Go to Products|Add Product

Type the product's name.

Screen 8. Adding a product.

Scroll down to the 'Product Data - Simple product' section and click the 'WooCommerce Integration' horizontal tab. You will see a metabox open that contain two fields - Courses and Group Purchase.

In the Courses field, you can select one or more courses from the dropdown list.

Screen 9. Selecting courses to be linked to the product.

The beauty of the metabox interface is that more one or more courses can be bundled was a single product. Once a course has been linked to a product, click the Publish button to save the product.

Screen 10. Publish a product.

Creating product variations

A real gem of the Edwiser WooCommerce Integration plugin is the Single Product Variation feature, This is a feature that allows the user to customise a product by creating variations.

Go to Products | Choose a product | Edit

Screen 11. Editing a product to add variations.

The name of the product is MyProduct (it could be anything - a T-shirt, a trousers or a dress). We will now create variations of that product.

 Select the product type as Variable product and then click the Attributes tab.

Screen 12. Getting ready to enter attributes.

Click the Add button to add one attribute at a time. In the example below, I have created two attributes color (with values red and white) and size (with values medium and large).  The values are separated by a '|' (pipe symbol) separator.

Screen 13. Variation attributes and values entered.

Check the "Visible on the product page" and "Used for variations" checkboxes.
Click the "Save attributes" button to save your attributes data.

Next, you will create variations of the product.
Click the Variations tab.
Click the "Add variation" dropdown box and choose "Create variations from all attributes".

Screen 14. Auto-generating
variations from M attributes and N values.

Click the "Go" button.
A warning message will pop up to warn you that the plugin will create M * N variations (sub-products). Ignore the warning and proceed.

A "N variations added" message will appear. Click the "OK" button to continue.

Screen 15. Confirmation messages.

Since I only had 2 attributes (M) and each attribute had 2 values (N), a total of M x N = 2 x 2 = 4 variations were created autmatically by the Edwiser plugin. So in effect, the plugin created ALL possible combinations of sub-products. This is what software should be - creating things automatically and removing the tedium of doing such things manually!

Screen 16. Variations created, ready for editing specific settings.

Each variation of the product can be given a separate price. To do that, click on the "Click to toggle" inverted triangle.

Screen 17. Editing a variation.

The full dialogue box will open for the variation red color-medium size of the product. The dialogue box gives you a lot of flexibility.

Check both the Downloadable and Virtual checkboxes. A price for the variation is required. Without the price, if that particular variation is chosen by the user, WooCommerce will output a message "Sorry, this product is unavailable. Please choose a different combination".

You can edit the "Regular price (RM)" and "Sales price (RM)" fields.

Screen 18. Using the powerful dialogue box.

The dialogue box is very powerful. Note that you can also link (associate) a course with the product variation. The dialogue box can be expanded or closed to save vertical space.

To save your attribute data, click the "Save changes" button to save your variations settings. Lastly click the "Update" button to save your Product.

Screen 18. Saving variation and product data.

To view the product page, click on the permalink of the Product.

Screen 19. Testing the product page.

At the prduct page, you will see the attributes that the user can select.

Screen 20. Product page shows variation information.

The screen below shows the product variation price based on the color and size.

Screen 21. User has chosen a specific instance based on the
color-size choices. The price of the variation is shown.

Conclusion

Edwiser WooCommerce Integration plugin is a very powerful plugin. It behoves the web developer to use. It will allow you to leverage on the popularity and power of WooCommerce. It will also allow you to easily create variations of a product. It is a must-have if you are want to use WordPress to sell your Moodle courses.

For more information, head over to Edwiser's Edwiser WooCommerce Integration plugin webpage.

Regards
Frankie Kam

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