Replacing the Theme That Was Scrambling True Charity’s Courses

True Charity's Enfold theme was breaking their MemberPress Courses, hijacking lesson content with random characters and forcing the team to rely on a developer every time they needed a new course. MemberFix migrated the platform to BuddyBoss, rebuilt every layout, and created a master course template that True Charity's team now uses to publish on their own.

🌐 True Charity platform: https://www.truecharity.us/

The Situation

True Charity Initiative serves a national network of church and nonprofit leaders, equipping them with courses, toolkits, and peer connections to run effective poverty-alleviation programs.

Their member portal and learning platform run on WordPress with MemberPress Courses, and they had been preparing to migrate their existing member base from a legacy Wild Apricot system onto the new platform.

But course lessons were rendering with random characters, and every new course required hiring a developer.

The Challenge

The site had been built on the Enfold theme. Enfold is fine for a marketing site. For an LMS, it was actively destructive.

Course content was rendering with random characters injected into the body of lessons. Members trying to read a module saw garbled text.

As Avery described it during scoping:

There was a second problem underneath the first one. Even if a developer cleaned up the rendering, there was no standardized way for the True Charity team to add new courses. Every new course required developer time. For a nonprofit running on tight budget, paying a developer to spin up each course was not sustainable, and definitely not how Avery wanted her team spending their time.

As long as the theme stayed and the course-creation flow stayed manual, the platform could not function as a real LMS. And as long as it could not function as a real LMS, the True Charity team was in limbo – unable to launch, migrate, or publish without outside help.

Every additional week of bugs pushed the full launch further out.

The Decision

Enfold's page-builder dependencies were baked into every page, so layouts had to be rebuilt rather than carried over. The decision was to migrate to BuddyBoss, an LMS-friendly theme that integrates cleanly with MemberPress and Elementor.

BuddyBoss came with one design concern: by default, it looks like a social network, and Avery did not want True Charity's resource library to feel like a social platform. The team designed around that, using BuddyBoss's underlying functionality while styling the templates to read as resource-oriented rather than social-media-styled.

What We Built

The work was done on a staging environment first. Phase 1 covered four pieces of work:

• Page layouts rebuilt from scratch in BuddyBoss and Elementor templates
• Content and access rules validated against the existing site: page content, course content, and membership permissions
• MemberPress course rendering bugs resolved, so the random characters Enfold had been injecting into lessons were gone
• A single admin-only master course template that the True Charity team clones for every new course they publish

That last one is the part that compounds over time. A non-technical staff member can spin up a course by cloning the template, swapping in the content, and saving. No developer in the loop. The cost of every future course drops to whatever time it takes Avery's team to write it.

Final QA ran on staging before a controlled push to live.

With the foundation in place, next steps include:

• WordPress user profile additions so the True Charity team sees member context at the top of each profile
• A forum notification preferences page so members can subscribe to specific forum categories from one screen instead of digging through each forum's settings
• The Wild Apricot member migration, planned for the summer of 2026

Results

Early results from an ongoing engagement:

• Courses render correctly. The random-character bug is gone.
• The True Charity team can publish new courses without delay or developer help.
• The platform has a stable LMS foundation that the Wild Apricot member migration can land on.
• The team can now add forums, groups, and mobile layouts as they grow – without rebuilding the site from scratch.

The alternative would have been ongoing patches against a theme that was never built for the job, with every plugin update threatening to undo the last round of fixes.