Homeschool curriculum publisher · WooCommerce
Well-Trained Mind Press
Well-Trained Mind Press publishes classical education curriculum for homeschooling families, sold as print, digital, audio, and annual subscriptions.
It runs as four properties rather than one store: a 1,000-product storefront, a state-affiliate site on a synced subset of the catalog, an author site, and a busy forum. One small team behind all of it, none of them engineers.
AssemblyWP knows WordPress and WooCommerce. I hand them projects with confidence that they will complete them quickly, efficiently, and well.
They came to us with an aging site and wanted it modernized: performance, security, and standards brought current by someone who specializes in WooCommerce rather than WordPress generally. Underneath that, complexity at this scale fails one corner at a time, and their team was finding those corners by customer complaint.
- WooCommerce
- Subscriptions
- GeneratePress + Elementor
- Affiliate catalog syndication
- Warehouse integration
- Authorize.net + Stripe
- FunnelKit
- Klaviyo
- ClassWallet
- UPS/USPS
Redesigned and rebuilt the main storefront from scratch.
A new front end on GeneratePress and Elementor, with the business rules deliberately kept out of it. Presentation lives in the theme and the store's rules live in a plugin, so the design can be changed again without putting checkout, pricing, or fulfillment at risk.
Built the curriculum resource library.
A full content system sitting alongside the store, organized by curriculum stage as well as by grade and age, with drag-and-drop sequencing in the admin because pedagogical order is not alphabetical order. Resources filter live by age and grade, sort the way a person expects rather than the way a database does, and the library is membership-gated all the way down to direct URLs.
Built a two-way integration with their fulfillment warehouse.
Shipment records come back and match against orders, closing them out and attaching carrier and tracking so customers get real tracking in their notification. Stock levels sync the other way to keep the catalog honest about what is actually on the floor, with a safety threshold that takes a product out of stock before it hits zero so a scheduled feed can't oversell.
Built the product syndication to the affiliate stores.
The main catalog feeds a network of state-affiliate storefronts. WooCommerce's own product webhook drops the things a publisher needs most, so we rewrote the outgoing payload to carry complete custom-field data and full variation records, built the receiver on the affiliate side, and added a command-line push for launches and for recovery after an outage.
Carried a standing development queue for years.
Checkout logic, shipping rules, catalog sync, subscription behavior, reviews, SEO tooling, and integrations across their payment, shipping, and education-funding partners.
Optimized the database under the catalog.
A catalog this size, carrying variations, custom taxonomies, and years of order history, accumulates weight that shows up as slow admin screens and slow product queries. We profiled what was actually costing time, cleared out what had accumulated in the tables, and tuned the queries the store leans on hardest.
Repaired a character-encoding failure across the database.
Tables were on a legacy character set while the content was not, so product copy rendered as mojibake. We converted every affected table with a staged migration instead of a risky single pass.
Hardened the store, and keep it hardened.
Security here is maintained rather than audited once: the platform and its extension layer kept patched, admin and account surfaces tightened, and real access control enforced on the gated areas. On a store carrying customer accounts, subscriptions, and paid downloads, that is the floor the rest of the work stands on.
Optimized the catalog for AI answer engines.
llms.txt, a sitemap reference in robots.txt, and corrected heading and document structure across the homepage and blog templates, so a catalog this size is legible to AI assistants and answer engines rather than only to traditional search crawlers.