Region10, an education district in Dallas, leaned on Abstract Explosion to create a solution to distribute proprietary preplanned curriculums for elementary schools all over Texas. This helped Region 10 deliver these important education tools online. They wanted districts in Texas to have membership rights to be able to download materials based on three tiers; Central Office, Campus and Classroom. Central Campus had access to view all levels of materials, Campus could see Campus and Classroom materials and Classroom was limited to only Classroom materials. Another challenge was Region 10 needed a way to load oodles of spreadsheets of users to be integrated.
Abstract Explosion built the site on WordPress and chose Woocommerce Memberships and the platform to create user access levels. WooCommerce Memberships is an extension that bolts on top of the powerful Woocomerce platform allowing you to control access rights to content on a site with the implementation of a little code before and after each secured content area.
This extension was easy to install and maintain throughout the build. Woocommerce Memberships also allowed for an easy import of thousands of .csv spreadsheets of users. Once the site was up, we exported the development users from the Memberships database and saved as a .csv file. We used that as a template and then formulated all spreadsheets to fall into this format using Google Sheets. The use of Google Sheets is very important as Excel burps the final exported .csv file making it import with errors. Once exported as a .csv file from Google Sheets we then import that file into Memberships creating all users based on their email address as a unique identifier. The users would receive an email with steps to create a password to access the appropriate tier of content. This also presented a challenge as all school district headquarters have very very tight security on their servers so the website itself had to be “whitelisted” with the district’s IT department.
As of December 2020, the website has 122,453 members utilizing curriculums. This was build just prior to COVID so it really helped education regions, teachers and students hit the ground running and learning.
