Plugin recommendation – Event Espresso or WooCommerce Extensions

  • My company offers day long training courses to our clients, before attending a course they have to complete an online training course which is powered by the WP Courseware plugin.

    Currently our site just lists the dates of the upcoming training courses however we want to increase functionality so that customers can book places on these courses via the website.

    Our ideal customer journey is:

    1. Customer picks a course to attend and pays for a ‘ticket’ – either online (payment gateway) or offline (bank transfer/cheque)
    2. Confirmation of course attendance is sent to the customer telling them to complete the online course before attending. At the same time the user is automatically given access the WP Courseware powered online course
    3. At regular intervals before the course a reminder email is sent telling the customer they need to complete the online course. (2 weeks before, 1 week before, day before)
    4. Customer attends course.
    5. After completing the course the customer is sent a ‘Thank you for attending’ email, that encourages them to return to our website to complete an after course survey
    6. Only after completing the survey is the customer able to download a ‘Certificate of Completion’

    All of these steps need to happen automatically without input from our end (the only exception to this is if the customer pays via an offline method, we will have go in a mark the order as paid to trigger the next steps).

    I’ve been doing some research in the best way to go about achieving this functionality and as far as I can see we have two options:

    • Event Espresso – Pros: A fully featured events booking plugin. Cons: Lacking integration with WP Courseware
    • WooCommerce – Pros: Tight integration with WP Courseware, extendable with extensions. Cons: Not an out of the box events management system, would require extensions (like WooCommerce Bookings or The Events Calendar + Woocommerce Tickets).

    It seems to me to be a choice between treating the training course like an event or like a product. At the minute I am leaning towards the WooCommerce solution however am interested to gather opinions from the community to see if anyone has experience with either of the methods or if they can recommend another option I haven’t though of.

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