The American Philosophical Practitioners Association is led by the prominent author and CUNY (City University of New York) professor Lou Marinoff. While its homebase is New York City, APPA has a global reach as a hub for philosophy practitioners, professors at major and small universities, and life long learners.

While the site is backed up by an edu, it remains tethered to its user base to bring in revenue to remain operational. To do this, we were challenged with creating a social network of paid subscribers to the site. After subscribing to one of its many quarterly or yearly subscriptions, users were allowed to create profiles, featuring their resume, images, and background information. This also gave them access to the library and events, where they were free to promote the sale of their books and publicize future events under the APPA platform.

Along with subscriptions, the site also sells an assortment of digital and physical products, like academic journals, branded merchandise, and registration for classes. We built all of this on the WooCommerce platform with a custom built theme for WordPress. To create the social network, we integrated the Ultimate Member plugin and worked with their team to offer a seamless experience from registration to account creation. To facilitate payments for the store, we used Stripe to receive credit cards.

All of this needed to be facilitated to allow administrators to add content easily to the store and content heavy pages. We created custom fields to allow creating new tabs, general content, users, and products.

The site is mobile and tablet friendly.

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