I am using Toolset to create online tutorials. After much experimentation, I am writing to ask advice on the best, most logical custom post types to create and connect in order to display the tutorials in a way that works for me and my users.
The general idea of how the tutorial is put together is online class -> chapter -> video.
I am opening this ticket to be able to request a video chat with you guys.
I am trying to use the most logical, already-in-place, automatic, non-custom tools available to me to create these tutorials. But I am running into trouble, and the site is getting complicated.
For my tutorials to make sense to my users, I'm trying to make it so that the breadcrumbs, URL structure, sidebar navigation, and tutorial navigation all make sense. I'm protecting just the videos with woocommerce membership codes.
If you are open to doing a support video chat, please let me know.
Thank you for all you do. I already wrote a killer testimonial, but if there's anything more I can do to support you, I will. If I can make this work, you will save my site and my business.
The team and support managers who video requests go through are both away today so I can't set one up for you before next week.
If you want to describe some of the specific problems you are running into I can try to help here.
From your description it sounds like you would need
- a custom post type for courses (with a taxonomy to designate whether they are free or premium, for example). This would presumably include a description, and some custom fields such as teaser images.
- a chapter custom post type
- courses and chapters would be connected in a one-2-many relationship, with chapters child posts of courses
- the chapter post type would presumably include a text description in the post content, and custom fields such as the video for that chapter (or videos if there were more than one)
I knew I would be out over the weekend as well, so I requested live video call for Monday at 11am. Unfortunately the Google form doesn't allow me to choose a time zone, as far as I could tell, so I'm not sure exactly what time I requested.
I haven't heard back from the team about the appointment, I'm not really sure what to expect from them. If there's not a possibility that they can meet with me, I can write back and forth with you here to try to solve my problem, but I think it would be a lot of back-and-forth. But I can do that if you're willing to.
Also, to answer your question, the challenges I face with the basic setup you describe are:
- I'm not sure of the best way to group the chapters into sections for easy display in a sidebar navigation (Part 1, Part 2 etc - these aren't chapters, just groupings that the chapters go in - I've experimented with creating a post type for these and then connecting them in a relationship but things just get trickier and this doesn't really make good sense to me).
- My standard breadcrumbs don't make sense out of the box as the base link is the archive page for chapters instead of a "my classes" page - I can mess with the breadcrumbs with code but I don't know code so this seems quite risky and I would rather set up my tutorials so that the breadcrumbs make sense out-of-the-box.
- I can't remove the word "Archive" (yet) from the archive pages so I'm not sure I should rely on them to build important pages (this https://toolset.com/forums/topic/split-remove-the-word-archive-from-archive-page-titles/ hasn't worked so far) - again here relying on custom code and help from your support team, which makes me think there might be a better way
- I connect the tutorials to WooCommerce products to generate shortcodes to hide the videos to non-buyers, but the logic gets mixed up and doesn't work, depending on how I connect the tutorials.
- My per-page navigation is requiring custom code so that people don't see navigation to classes they don't own, I've gotten some help from the support team at Astra but I can't really count on them to help me all the time
- My main product is a "superclass" that contains the same content as other classes sold individually, plus some extras - I don't want to duplicate content (Ever) so I'm trying to find a way to build that superclass and at the same time use that content for the smaller classes, and protect the videos automatically for both kinds of classes.
I can show you examples of all of this in screenshots and stuff but I thought that a conversation with someone might help set me on the right track.
Ok I did get the word "Archive" removed from my archive pages using Luo Yang's help (I must have had some other code in my editor when I tried his solution and it didn't work). So that's very good.
The other issues are still active, though.
Thanks,
Liat
Hi, my manager let me know that I am in the most compatible time zone for you, so I should try to set up a good time for the video call. I'm in the US on the east coast, so right now we're GMT -04:00. Will any of these times work for you? Please let me know before close of business today so I can get something scheduled.
Tuesday, August 28, 2018 9:30:00 AM GMT-04:00
Tuesday, August 28, 2018 10:00:00 AM GMT-04:00
Tuesday, August 28, 2018 10:30:00 AM GMT-04:00
Okay I just sent the invitation to the email address associated with your account. Let me know if you have not received it within an hour, or would prefer I send to another email address.
