Imparting education on WordPress sites is becoming increasingly popular, this is mostly because WordPress in itself is a great content authoring tool and it is “the” most popular and secure CMS available currently. As more users start using WordPress for eLearning, there is a massive need for a secure, robust and flexible membership platform for WordPress.
While you’ll find tons of membership platforms for WordPress, many times users miss the most obvious choice which is “BuddyPress“. BuddyPress is a plugin built and maintained by WordPress core team and it is perfect for education websites. Whether you’re a school, an academy owner or a small membership site, BuddyPress would provide the perfect solution for your membership needs.
Apart from the fact that BuddyPress has been around for over 10 years and it is the most secure membership plugin, BuddyPress is incredibly flexible and robust.
BuddyPress is particularly useful for Education sites as education sites most necessarily are built on communities. Online education becomes much more effective when there is community learning and this is where BuddyPress excels. Even if you’re selling just 1 book or course, an effective community system would help you in generating much bigger marketing audience as users interact in discussions and share them across social networks as well.
Features in BuddyPress for Education sites on WP
- Built as a social network for creating communities
- Activity recording
- Custom Groups
- Custom Profiles and registration
- Private Messaging system
- Notifications
- Email templates
- Seemless integration with BBPress
- Many plugins to extend the functionality
- Strong community
All the above features are incredibly useful for education sites
But BuddyPress is heavy…
BuddyPress provides a lot of features and also options to disable these features if you do not need them. The recommended memory limit for BuddyPress is 64 MB in PHP Memory limit and so does WooCommerce the most popular e-commerce platform for WordPress.
If you compare BuddyPress with other membership systems you’ll find that BuddyPress puts a much much lower memory impact than other plugins. Of course, the comparison should be made on same/similar set of features.
While UI/UX, user friendliness is cool, and makes any plugin popular, one thing above all is code quality. A good (poetic) code is maintainable, secure and robust. With poorly coded plugins you not only risk the future of your eLearning site but also a lot of time in maintaining and debugging.
Self promotion
If you’re starting an education website or an e-Learning community on BuddyPress, do consider purchasing our theme WPLMS , the Learning management system for WordPress.