An enterprise leadership development firm needed a scalable platform to deliver customized online learning experiences to multiple corporate clients simultaneously.

Each organization required its own branded channel with independent content, user management, and progress tracking while sharing the same infrastructure.

Challenge

The firm was managing separate WordPress installations for each corporate client, creating significant maintenance overhead and preventing them from scaling their business efficiently.

Organizations needed isolated learning environments with different course libraries, user rosters, and branding without cross-contamination between clients.

Corporate clients demanded enterprise single sign-on integration, granular reporting capabilities, and the ability for organization administrators to manage their own users without site-level access.

Solution

84EM engineered a multi-tenant WordPress theme that transforms a single installation into multiple isolated learning environments, each with independent branding, content libraries, and user management.

The solution integrates with LearnDash to provide sophisticated course delivery and progress tracking while adding custom features that standard LMS platforms cannot provide.

This architecture consolidated dozens of separate WordPress installations into one system, reducing infrastructure costs while improving reliability and feature velocity.

Technical Implementation

• Channel System Architecture: Built a cookie-based channel switcher that dynamically filters all content, users, and courses based on the active organization, creating completely isolated environments within one WordPress database.
• Hierarchical Group Management: Developed a parent-child group structure allowing organizations to manage divisions, departments, and teams with inherited access controls and course assignments.
• Enterprise SSO Integration: Implemented SAML-based single sign-on with REST API endpoints that validate user credentials and automatically provision accounts based on group membership.
• Organization Admin Interface: Created a custom admin dashboard where organization leaders can manage users, assign courses, and view progress reports without accessing WordPress admin or seeing other organizations’ data.
• Background Processing System: Integrated Action Scheduler to handle resource-intensive operations like bulk user imports, channel access updates, and report generation without impacting site performance.
• WP-CLI Management Commands: Built custom CLI commands for bulk operations including user imports, skills assessment processing, and database maintenance tasks.
• Custom Reporting Engine: Developed an advanced reporting system with exportable data, REST API endpoints for external systems, and real-time progress tracking across all organizational levels.
• Intelligent Search Optimization: Enhanced Relevanssi search integration to prioritize course content and deliver relevant results by content type and user permissions.
• Custom Post Types and Templates: Created specialized templates for webinars, tools, events, and personal dashboards with custom field integration through Advanced Custom Fields.
• Access Control Layer: Engineered fine-grained permission system controlling course visibility, content access, and feature availability by channel, group, and individual user level.

Results

The multi-tenant platform enabled the firm to reduce infrastructure costs by 85% while serving multiple enterprise clients from a single, maintainable codebase.

Organizations gained self-service capabilities for user management and reporting, reducing support requests and enabling faster onboarding of new corporate clients.

The channel architecture provided complete data isolation and security while maintaining the operational efficiency of a single system, creating a competitive advantage in the enterprise learning market.