Add Private Forums to Your Courses!

By: Justin Ferriman • November 11, 2014
Filed Under:

We are excited to announce today the release of our latest integration, one that is sure to add an element of life to your courses.

Before getting into the details, we want to thank you all for your contributions to the LearnDash community.

Your continued suggestions, encouragement, ideas, and comments have been instrumental in the evolution of LearnDash.

Which brings us to our latest update, an integration…

Course Specific Forums with bbPress

bbpress-logo-large

What is bbPress?

For those of you who are not familiar with bbPress, it is a free forum plugin offered by Automattic (the same folks behind WordPress). It’s an extremely popular solution with over 1.5 million downloads. It’s the same forum plugin we use for our LearnDash support.

Key Features of the Integration

Automatic Forum Access: As soon as someone purchases (or registers) for a course, they are granted forum access so that they can create new threads and topics.

Public or Private Forums:  Allow visitors to see forum topics or block the forum contents entirely so they are exclusive for your enrolled users.

Multi-Forum Support: Associate as many forums as you want to your course.

Dynamic Associated Forum Widget: Place this widget in your course sidebar and it will dynamically display the associated forums for the course. Users can click on the associated forum name to be taken to the forum itself for posting.

As you can imagine, this integration allows you to add additional value to your courses. You can now create course-specific communities to engage your users even further. Make the forums exclusive to only those who are enrolled, or leave them open – the choice is yours!

As an example, if you are using LearnDash for a classroom, you can now encourage students to discuss the course content, post questions, or provide their reaction to it.

If you are running a business course, the bbPress integration will help you create an environment conducive to idea sharing and connection building – increasing the value of your entire offering.

How to Use bbPress with LearnDash

To start offering forums with your courses, all you need to do is install and activate:

  1. LearnDash
  2. bbPress
  3. LearnDash-bbPress integration

Once all three are running on your site, you can start to create forums specifically for your courses. To display the forums that are associated with each course, use the course forum widget (found under APPEARANCE > WIDGETS).

The associated course will also display for the specified forum, as shown below.

The integration is available for download on the support site.

What’s Next?

We take pride in driving the WordPress LMS industry to new levels, and the functionality we are currently working on will continue to do just that.

As we quickly approach the end of this year, we are working on a variety of fronts. First, as has been mentioned before, you can expect to see more integrations with today’s popular solutions.

At the same time though, we have new functionality that is currently going through testing – functionality that will not only impact how your courses are delivered, but potentially how you decide to configure your entire WordPress LMS.

Thank you all so much for your contributions to LearnDash, your feedback is what motivates us. And while it is close to the end of the year, you can certainly expect to hear from us again in 2014.

Until next time!

Don’t have LearnDash? Click here to purchase and get started with your online courses!

Justin Ferriman

Justin started LearnDash, the WordPress LMS trusted by Fortune 500 companies, major universities, training organizations, and entrepreneurs worldwide. He is currently founder & CEO of GapScout. Justin’s Homepage | GapScout | Twitter