The default courses module organizes your course content, protects access by membership level, and tracks lesson completion.

• Create an unlimited number of courses and lessons
• Organize courses by category
• Protect lesson content by membership level
• Allow members to track lesson completion

Set Up Courses and Lessons

How to Mark a Lesson as Free (Public Preview)

By default, every lesson inside a protected course is restricted to members only. You can mark individual lessons as free so non-members can view them — useful for offering a preview lesson that encourages visitors to sign up.

To make a lesson as free:

1. Navigate to Courses > All Lessons and open the lesson you want to make public.
2. In the Lesson Settings section, check the Free Lesson option to make the lesson publicly accessible.
3. Save the lesson

Non-members who visit a free lesson will see the full content. If they navigate directly to any other lesson in the same protected course, they will be redirected to the course page as usual.

How to Rebuild Permalinks

Note: You may initially see a ‘404: Page Not Found’ error when trying to view a built-in Course or Lesson post type. Here’s the steps to fix that:

• Navigate to Settings > Permalinks.
• Click “Save Changes“

This step “flushes the rewrite rules” in your WordPress site and allows the Course and Lesson custom post types to use your default rewrite rules.

Courses Catalog Archive Page

The default module has an option to enable to disable the archive page for your courses. This archive will use your theme’s default post archive layout.

• Navigate to Memberships > Courses in the WordPress admin.
• Choose a setting for the Enable Archive Page for the Default Courses CPT? option. If checked if, your site will show an archive of all courses at yoursite.com/courses/

Note: It’s useful to disable this archive if you are building your own catalog page some other way or have another LMS plugin active at the same time and want to allow that other plugin to control what shows up at this URL.

Course and lessons can be public or require membership. When a course requires membership, every lesson within that course is automatically protected. Non-members cannot view a single lesson page in a protected course. If they happen to know a lesson’s URL, the logic in this plugin redirects them to the course page.

Lesson Progress Tracking

The default module includes built-in progress tracking for members.

• On each lesson page, logged-in members with access will see a Mark Lesson Complete button. After clicking it, the button changes to Lesson Completed, and members can toggle the lesson status back at any time.
• Completed lessons are marked with a check icon in the course outline, and logged-in members can view their overall course progress percentage from their Membership Account page. Completion data is stored per user, per lesson.
  

Member Progress (Admin View)

When the default module is active, a Courses panel is added to each member’s edit screen. This lets you see how any member is progressing through your courses without a separate reporting tool.

To view a member’s course progress:

1. Navigate to Memberships > Members in the WordPress admin.
2. Click the member’s name to open their edit screen.
3. Scroll to the Courses panel.

The panel shows a table of all courses the member currently has access to, including:

• Course name
• Date of first lesson activity
• Date of most recent lesson activity
• Overall completion percentage for that course