Be nice and respectful

While the LMSCoder Golden Rules are presented in no particular order, I have placed this one at the top on purpose.

During the course of managing a website, you may:

  • Become frustrated
  • Interact with human beings for technical support

At no point should frustration be taken out on human beings, as that will never help your situation.

Your problems are not their problems.

There is not always going to be an already-made [solution] for your use case.

Solutions can take the form of:

  • A plugin
  • A code snippet
  • A tutorial
  • A webinar

Given the virtually unlimited flexibility of open source software like WordPress and LearnDash, you may be the first person on the planet to either:

  • want to do something
  • be willing to fund the development

Your website is ultimately your responsibility

There should be no such thing as a “website emergency” if you take basic precautions.

  • Take regular backups, that can be easily rolled back or migrated to a new host if needed
  • Test software updates on a staging environment

If a new version of, let’s say, a WordPress plugin, causes a critical error on your website, then you can:

  • Catch the error on your staging environment
  • Roll back production to a working state
  • Obtain a previous version of a plugin from your backup files

There is no “better” or “worse”

Often I see questions like, “which is better: Easy Digital Downloads or WooCommerce?”

No other context. No details on the requirements and expectations of the question asker. No apparent consideration that the answer may be “neither.”

When it comes to a comparison between two reputable products, the answer is always: it depends.

Everything has its pros and cons, and there is no one-size-fits-all “best.”

Understand the basic economics of the software business

WordPress costs $0. This does not mean:

  • All WordPress themes and plugins must be $0
  • All WordPress-related coding and consulting services must be $0

Most people agree with this, because the absurdity of expecting people to work for you for free just because the work involves software that happens to cost $0 would be self-evident.

Given the above-established absurdity, why are the following points any less absurd?

  • Since LearnDash costs $159, all LearnDash-related addons must be less than $159
  • All LearnDash-related coding and consulting services must be less than $159

Any LearnDash-specific addon is going to have less customers than LearnDash itself, by virtue of the facts that:

  • Their product ostensibly serves a more narrow niche
  • The number of customers cannot exceed that of the dependent software.

Depending on the total addressable market of the sub-niche, and the costs associated with developing and supporting the software, it may not be economically feasible to anchor pricing to that of the dependent product.

After all, if WordPress is $0, why do WordPress plugins and themes charge for their products?