There are more types of courses that website owners offer for their visitors depending on the goal they want to achieve with the respective courses.
One of the cases when the access requirement rules of Thrive Apprentice come in handy, is when you wish to provide the visitors of your website with an online course, but you would also like them to subscribe to your website.
With this option, you can limit the access to a course for email subscribers only.
How does it work?
First, you give your website visitors kind of a sneak-peak, meaning that you make one or more lessons publicly available. This will give anyone who visits your website a preview of how useful the course is.
After that, you make the rest of the course available only for logged in users. This means that the visitors of your website will have to either log in (if they already have an account) or subscribe/register to your website, in order to get the full course.
Note: Naturally, you can also choose to skip the first part and make the entire course available only for logged-in users.
How to use the Access Restrictions to get subscribers
After creating your first course and adding it to a product, you will have to restrict access to it. In order to do this, first, go to your Thrive Apprentice dashboard, click on the “Products” tab and select the product for which you want to set up the restrictions:
The next step is to open the “Access requirements” tab and set up your rule:
The options that appear in this dashboard are based on what plugins/connections are activated on your website:
Since, in this case, the goal is to have a subscribers-only course, the default “WordPress Role” option has to be used. Thus, click on the “WordPress Role” option:
This will open a drop-down with the user roles that are set up for your WordPress page. Here you can determine what role does a visitor have to have in order to be able to access the course:
This box contains every user role that you have added to your WordPress admin dashboard. Thus, if you add new ones, they will be displayed here too and you can give access to those specific roles as well.
Just select the role(s) you want to give access to, by checking them. For instance, if you want to give access to subscribers, select the “Subscriber” user role here:
Access restriction rules
After you configure the access requirements rules, you can proceed with setting up the content that will be displayed to anyone how is trying to access the product without having the right permissions:
You can either keep the global site behavior, as set in your general Thrive Apprentice settings:
Or you can configure a new behaviour, set at product level. The process for doing that is detailed here:
Tip: The users will be able to register using the sing up button from below the login form:
However, if you wish, you can set up a different registration page and link it in a custom message, so people will use that page to register/subscribe:
Restriction Label
You can also set up restriction labels for your subscribers-only courses. For that, access the course overview dashboard, and choose from the already existing list:
Furthermore, if you want, you can also add a new label. In order to do that, click on “Add Label ”:
Next, you can select the color of the label, by clicking on the arrow next to the color field:
Use the color picker to choose the desired color, and once set, click on “Apply”:
Next, you can add a name in the field next to the color box and then click on “Save Label” to make sure all your changes are saved:
When you have finished setting up every part of this option, you can simply click on the “Save” button from the bottom lower part of the dashboard:
This way you will save the access restrictions for the course.
Preview the Access Requirements
After you finish setting up the product, you can check how it will look like for the logged-in visitors of your website, as well as the ones who are not logged in.
Logged-in users:
In order to see how the course will be displayed for people who are already logged-in on your website, simply click on the “Preview Course” option from the upper right part of the page:
This will open the course in a new tab, in the same browser, where you are logged in as the admin of the website.
Here is an example of it:
As you can see, I can just go ahead and click on the “Get started” button. The label at the top of my cover page also lets me know that this course is not started yet.
Users who are not logged in:
If you want to see how the course will be displayed for people who are not logged in, then, open the page where the course can be found, in another browser, where you are not logged in; or open it in an incognito window.
You can easily do that by right clicking on the “Preview course” text and choosing the corresponding incognito/private option of your browser:
This is an example of the way a course is displayed for a visitor who is not logged in:
You can see that at the top of my cover page, there’s a “Subscribers Only” label, which means that only the logged in users will be able to access it.
Whoever tries to access any of the course modules, will be redirected to the content that I’ve set in my “Access restriction rules” dashboard:
In case you would like to find out more info on how Thrive Apprentice works, please check out this knowledge base section.