Full-Stack Developer / Team Lead
2020-2022GoodFoodCookingSchool.com
A custom membership platform for an online cooking school, fusing Sensei LMS and WooCommerce Subscriptions into one product with bespoke course pages, a recipe calculator, gift cards, and an affiliate system.
→ A subscription cooking school that feels like one cohesive product rather than a stack of plugins, with courses, commerce, memberships, and email marketing working as a single system.
The problem
Good Food Cooking School sells cooking education as a membership: subscribe, and the courses open up. The pieces to build that exist off the shelf (WooCommerce for the store, WooCommerce Subscriptions for recurring billing, Sensei LMS for the courses), but out of the box they don’t make a product. Each plugin brings its own templates and its own assumptions, so the default result is a site that changes personality on every click: a branded homepage, a generic cart, course pages that look like learning-management software.
For a consumer subscription business, that’s fatal to conversion and retention. The school needed the whole journey (landing page, checkout, membership, courses) to feel like one deliberately designed product, plus the business machinery around it: gift cards, an affiliate program, and email marketing that actually knew what customers were doing.
The approach
Over two years I built and evolved a bespoke WordPress theme that harmonizes WooCommerce and Sensei LMS into a single experience, with custom landing pages and fully custom cart and checkout flows, and WooCommerce Subscriptions wired in so membership status governs course access. I also managed a team of developers on the project, owning the architecture and the client relationship while coordinating the team’s work across the platform’s many moving parts.
The course pages got the deepest customization. Far beyond stock Sensei templates, they carry features built for how people actually cook: a recipe calculator for scaling ingredients, a shopping list generator, and personalized recipes, each shipped as a custom plugin extending the platform.
Around the learning experience, I built out the commercial layer: gift cards, an affiliate system to power referral growth, and a customized Mailchimp integration that segmented the audience by course interest. When a visitor opted in from a course’s sales page, they landed in that course’s subgroup in Mailchimp, so the school could market each new course to exactly the people who had shown interest in it.
The outcome
The result is a cooking school that feels like one product, not a plugin stack: a subscriber lands, checks out, and cooks through a course without ever hitting a seam. The platform carried the school’s membership business through two years of continuous development, and the site is still live today.