If you use a membership plugin to protect content on your WordPress site, you might be wondering:
“Can I protect Thrive Apprentice courses with my membership tool?”
You may be surprised to know that Apprentice will already work with many membership plugins… depending on how they are setup.
We already have deep integrations with MemberMouse, MemberPress, Wishlist Member — and our integration with SendOwl lets you bypass the need for membership tools entirely...
...But this doesn't mean that Thrive Apprentice won't work with your membership plugin!
In this video tutorial, you'll discover a setup that works for other popular tools such as:
...and many more.
More...
Thrive Apprentice makes it easy for you to build and manage online courses that are available only to your paying members, customers, or even as free opt-in incentives to join your mailing list.
Check out the video to see how it works, and read the post below for more information on how to set this up.
In order to show you exactly how this setup works, we’ve got to cover some of the fundamentals of how WordPress manages ‘User Roles’, and how they talk to Thrive Apprentice.
Read on and I guarantee you’ll learn a thing or two about your own website. If you already know about Thrive Apprentice access restriction management and how WordPress User Roles work, then you can jump ahead to the exact step-by-step setup with your membership site.
Access Restriction Rules For WordPress User Roles
This versatile integration trick makes use of the new Access Rules feature we recently added to Thrive Apprentice. With this feature, you can create and edit rules that specify how users get access to courses.
If a user doesn’t match the rule, they cannot view the course content.
This Access Rules feature vastly expands the use-cases for online courses and serves as the backbone for integrating with your membership plugin.
So before we get into paid membership protection, here’s how to use this feature to offer free courses on your website.
The Basics: Protecting A Free Course (no membership plugin required)
Online Courses are a great opt-in incentive for growing your mailing list. Rather than offering just a free PDF or download, you can offer courses in exchange for a visitor joining your mailing list.
The Restriction Rules make it super easy to do this.
Restricting a free course for subscribers only only takes a few clicks.
In this situation, you would want to restrict access to the WordPress role ‘Subscriber’. For a visitor of your website to get access to the course, they must first be given that WordPress role.
To do this, it’s as easy as creating an opt-in form on your website and connecting it to not one but two different services (you can add a second service under the ‘advanced’ settings).
Choosing this option lets you provide access to your course at the same time as they sign up to your mailing list.
This means that when a visitor enters their information on your opt-in form, their contact information is subscribed to your mailing list and a WordPress user is created inside your website with the role ‘Subscriber’. They are then free to access your course!
Not sure how that works? Here’s a video tutorial from Hanne that will show you the setup for using Thrive Apprentice to grow your mailing list:
So, that’s the basics. Now in order to integrate this with your membership tool and protect courses based on purchase, we need to talk about how WordPress User Roles are managed on your website.
Using WordPress User Roles
By default, every WordPress website has 5 basic user roles. Yes, that includes your own website! This is not a feature that is added by any plugin, the 5 roles are already there.
You can safely run your website for many many years without ever needing to use any of these additional user roles. But when the day comes that you want to hire a professional to help you improve your website, they’ll come in handy.
The 5 default roles are:
- Admin: That’s you! The first time you install WordPress, you will get an account with full privileges to do anything.
- Editor: Can’t add or remove plugins, but they can change any blog content, tags, categories, authors, etc.
- Author: Unable to edit anyone else’s content, but they can create and edit their own content for your website.
- Contributor: They can write and edit their own posts but are unable to publish their content or add any media (video, audio, images).
- Subscriber: Only has ‘reader’ privileges and cannot edit anything. Just like any website visitor except that they can log in and out.
(There is a 6th role, the ‘Super-Admin’, but it’s only used with WordPress Multi-Site installations).
NOTE: You should never grant any User Role except ‘Subscriber’ to someone you don’t know, otherwise you risk giving them access to editing content on your site!
What Makes Up A User Role?
Each User Role is made from a set of capabilities — that’s the name WordPress uses for it.
A Capability is a permission to perform an action. For example, ‘delete comments’ is a capability, and so is ‘unpublish a page’ or ‘upload media files’.
An Admin has all capabilities — there’s nothing they can’t do. But the other User Roles have less and less capabilities.
So, why does WordPress have default User Roles made up of capabilities? Well, WordPress is designed to be something you can expand. If you want to hire other writers, developers or designers to log in to the backend of your website and do some work for you, you would grant them a specific user role that offers the capabilities they need.
(In fact, if you want to hire someone and give them access to your Thrive plugins, the new Access Manager feature makes that as easy as ticking a box).
Multiple User Roles:
There is one super important note that you need to know in order to restrict courses with a membership tool:
WordPress code allows multiple User Roles at once.
Yes, that means they can be a Subscriber as well as a Contributor.
In this example, the 'Test' user is listed as having 2 roles applied at once.
However:
The WordPress dashboard hides this option.
It rarely makes sense to give someone multiple roles, since an editor can do everything a contributor can (plus more). For this reason, you won't find an option in WordPress that easily lets you assign multiple roles.
But WordPress is still coded to allow it. Membership plugins may or may not utilize that code. It's up to the plugin developers to decide their approach. Depending on what you are trying to achieve and which tool you use, you might find this to be a limitation. If you are, you might find a workaround with plugins such as Multiple Roles, but we can't assure you this will work for every setup.
Remember: our integrations with SendOwl, MemberPress, Wishlist Member and MemberMouse will bypass any of these restriction issues you may run into.
Membership Plugins + WordPress User Roles
Each membership plugin or tool works its own way. There are no strict rules about how they should or should not operate and each one is different.
But many of the plugin developers have decided to leverage WordPress User Roles, or at least have the capacity to work with them.
Although this process hasn’t been tested with all membership plugins, we’ve done the first stage of research for you. Here are links to the documentation for each plugin that indicates how they work with WordPress User Roles.
Check out the documentation for your plugin and then see if you can make it work!
(There are even ways to expand on WooCommerce so purchases can grant a User Role.)
If your plugin isn’t listed here, it may still work. Simply dig around in the documentation for your plugin and see if they have any info on working with WP User Roles.
For those plugins that do expand on WordPress User Roles, they work by restricting access to certain pages or posts on your website only to users with the corresponding roles. That means they can create members-only areas and content only visible for paying customers.
Behind the scenes, there are two different ways that these types of membership plugins work:
- By creating additional user roles.
- By granting additional user roles.
In either of these cases, the membership plugin allows you to grant or revoke access to a User Role depending on the customer’s purchase status.
For example, by making a purchase, a customer could then be given a User Role for a limited time — say, 6 months — and then if they don’t renew their account, that User Role will be revoked, preventing them from accessing the paid content anymore.
Since most memberships fall into these 2 categories, let’s go through these setups.
Setup #1: Membership Plugin Creates Additional User Roles
Some membership tools will create their own additional user roles inside of your WordPress website.
For example, if you are using s2Member, then the moment you install and activate the plugin, it will automatically create 4 new User Roles on your website, named Level 1 - Level 4.
If your membership tool creates it's own User Roles automatically (like s2Member), you can simply use those.
This is the simplest setup. Although Thrive Apprentice doesn’t have a specific integration designed for s2Member, you can use the ‘WordPress Role’ restriction and simply select which of those new membership levels you would like to restrict the course to.
It’s as easy as checking a box in the Apprentice Restriction rules.
Remember: a user can have multiple user roles, so they could be a Subscriber as well as a Member Level 2 at the same time.
S2Member will then grant that User Role to the customer upon purchase. Depending on how you set it up, if it’s a subscription or split pay model, S2Member will remove that User Role from the user if they fail a payment.
This way, Thrive Apprentice doesn’t have to do anything except look for that User Role.
Setup #2: You Need To Create Your Own Custom User Role
Other membership plugins won’t automatically create a user role when you install and activate them. Depending on which plugin you are using, you may still have the ability to assign a user role to a user based on their membership status.
In this case, you’ll need to create your own custom User Role.
For example, let’s look at using Active Member 360, a membership tool that works directly with Active Campaign.
Although Active Member 360 doesn’t primarily protect content based on User Roles, it does have this as an extra feature called ‘Role to Tags Mapping’.
AM360 doesn't create User Roles, but can still work.
This feature means a WordPress user role will be granted to a subscriber if they have a specific tag inside of Active Campaign.
However, there is no custom WordPress user role that exists yet.
You definitely do not want to use the admin, editor, author, or contributor roles — that would put your website content at risk — so instead you could use the ‘subscriber’ role. But you might want to reserve the ‘Subscriber’ role for other behaviors on your website.
So in this case, we’re going to create a custom User Role by duplicating the ‘Subscriber’ role. Here’s how:
Step 1: Download ‘Capability Manager Enhanced’
Capability Manager Enhanced is a free plugin you can find in the WordPress plugin repository, and it will permit you to create custom user roles.
A simple and free plugin that lets you create custom user roles for course restrictions.
If this plugin doesn’t work for you, there is a slightly more complicated plugin that will achieve the same results, and it’s called User Role Editor. It comes with a picture of masks… don’t ask me why.
Step 2: Duplicate Subscriber Role
With the Capability Manager Enhanced plugin activated, select: Users > Capabilities.
You’ll get a panel that shows you which capabilities are associated with which user roles. Now you need to duplicate the ‘Subscriber’ role. Why subscriber? Because that’s the most harmless role on your website.
To do this, make sure ‘Subscriber’ is selected and loaded in the top right hand corner. Once you have loaded the Subscriber role, choose a name for your new role under ‘Copy Subscriber Role’ and click ‘Copy’.
Make sure you are only copying the Subscriber role.
In this case, I’ve named the User Role ‘Wellbeing’, because this role will only be used to provide access to a course on the topic of Wellbeing.
Your customers will never see this name, so it just needs to be something you can identify.
Step 3: Connect Your Membership Level to That User Role
Again, we’re using Active Member 360 as an example, but each plugin will have a slightly different way of doing this. If you are unsure how, look at your plugin’s documentation.
In Active Member 360, we will return to the ‘Role To Tags Mapping’ feature. Here we will select our newly made custom user role ‘Wellbeing’, and associate it with a tag called ‘Status: Student’.
This setting in Active Member 360 connects a membership level to your new custom user role.
Now if that subscriber in Active Campaign receives the tag ‘Status: Student’, then they are automatically granted the User Role ‘Wellbeing’ inside of your WordPress website.
Note: With Active Member 360, you'll also need to set a membership level in the plugin options for the visitor logging into your website. This role-to-tags mapping is to permit a member to access a specific course.
Step #4: Restrict Course Access to Your Custom User Role
Now back inside of Thrive Apprentice, you want to enter the ‘Restrictions’ tab for your selected online course > Enable Restrictions > Create Rule.
By selecting ‘WordPress Role’, you will now see your newly made Custom User Role available in the list. Simply select this User Role, and click ‘Add Rule’.
Now simply select your custom user role as the access rule for your course.
Voila! Your membership plugin manages the customer's purchase status and Thrive Apprentice manages their course access.
New Membership Integrations
In the future, we will be expanding our custom integrations with more membership tools and directly with checkout tools that let you bypass the need for membership plugins entirely.
When we announce an integration, it means our developers have taken extra steps to create a deeper connection between Thrive Apprentice and that specific tool. A deep integration gets our tick of approval and we can offer support for it.
For example: if you have Wishlist Member, MemberMouse or MemberPress installed on your website, you’ll find those options appear inside of Thrive Apprentice's access restriction options to reduce the need for these extra steps.
But although our integrations make it even easier to set up access restriction rules, they are not the only way you can get a membership tool working with Apprentice.
Report Back With Your Results!
We haven’t tested this workaround with every tool in question — there are just so many out there — but if you are using a membership plugin, investigate your documentation to see what it says about WordPress User Roles and let us know if it works!
If your membership plugin does manage User Roles, then with a bit of effort this process should work… but we’d love to know if you find it successful.
Try it out and leave us a comment below so we can build a growing list of approved plugins.
Now if only these subscriber role users could add an avatar that would display in thrive comments… That would make blog communities even more personal and better! 😛
Hey Danielius, Thrive Comments pulls in avatars from Gravatar if they have one assigned to their email address over there. Does that help your setup? Or are you looking for something more than that?
Well, and almost no regular blog user have Gravatars! :’)
Yes… guys Whyyyyyyy are you using gravatars?!! It is archaic and against your philosophy.
Oh and you force gravatars for the author box on posts. Most of us are the owners of our websites. Give us the ablity to post the picture of our choise.
Your philosophy is “own the platform”. (Just saw Paul quote Shane with that on this or the previous post I just read)… yet you force us to use a 3rd party platform, WordPress, and use their gravatars?!
That is so contradictory. Makes no sense and is frustrating. Give me the creative ability to use what I want.
One can change the picture anywhere on the site… but your programming forces me to load up a picture in some 3rd party platform to drop a picture for my Author box. It is crazy.
I think you’ve misunderstood what we mean by “own the platform”.
I can tell this means a lot to you 🙂 So I looked into a solution. You can install this free plugin:- https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-user-avatar/
It works fine with Thrive Comments and Theme Builder.
not helpful for me, sorry! I cannot combine user roles with my newsletter tool.
David
Which newsletter tool is that, David?
There is one thing on my wishlist and that is a Digistore24 integration.
If you can’t do that for whatever reason than a Woocomerce integration would be nice.
Anyway, great post Brad! 🙂
We’ve seen lots of requests for Digistore24, so it’s on our radar. Nothing confirmed yet, but the volume of requests does affect our priorities. Regarding Woocommerce: although we don’t have a direct integration, there are plugins that can grant WP user roles on WooCommerce product purchase. I haven’t tested it, but have a look at this plugin by Skyverge. Thanks for stopping by to comment Oliver
Are there any news on the Digistore24 integration, Bradley?
It’s the one thing that I am waiting for to finally use Thrive Apprentice. 🙂
That’s a thing that would be very interesting for me, too 🙂
Same here, any news?
With Thrive Automator it’s now 100% possible to integrate with DigiStore24. Learn more about it here: https://help.thrivethemes.com/en/articles/5966990-automation-walkthrough-connecting-your-thrive-themes-website-to-digistore24-using-thrive-automator
With Thrive Automator it’s now 100% possible to integrate with DigiStore24. Learn more about it here: https://help.thrivethemes.com/en/articles/5966990-automation-walkthrough-connecting-your-thrive-themes-website-to-digistore24-using-thrive-automator
With Thrive Automator it’s now 100% possible to integrate with DigiStore24. Learn more about it here: https://help.thrivethemes.com/en/articles/5966990-automation-walkthrough-connecting-your-thrive-themes-website-to-digistore24-using-thrive-automator
How would that work with aMember?
Not 100% sure, but I can confirm from aMember’s documentation that they do protect with WP User Roles. Have a look here, and if you get the chance to test it out, let us know how you go.
Hi, thanks for the good news, up to now I used a complicated workaround to use thrive apprentice with s2member. Still, I am afraid there may be some problems with the integration, since s2member documentation is clear about different member levels: there is a hierarchy between them, so level2 members have access to level 1 and 2 stuff, level 3 members can access level 1 to 3 content and so on.
For this reason, I wonder: in your integration, who is actually protecting the content? TA or S2?
I’ll rather not mess with my memberships, but I will do some testing on a staging website asap. Thanks in advance for your answer
Leo
In this setup, it is Thrive Apprentice that is restricting the content. So, although s2member follows a hierarchy, Apprentice is simply checking to see if they have the required user role. What I’m not sure of is if a user with level 3 in s2member also is technically granted level 2 in WordPress user roles.
I’d love to know the results of your test. Let us know what you find out, and thanks for your comment Leonardo
Hello Bradley, I did some tests and I am really confused now: the problem is that in WordPress dashboard you can NOT give a user more than one role. If my member is a s2member level1 user, he can’t be a level2 user.
Even if I create different roles, an user that has a access to my “piano course” would not be able to access my “guitar course”, as an example.
To allow this setup, s2member uses “custom capabilities” that are fully modular. I think your main assumption “users can have more than one role” is wrong.
To be sure about it, I tried on a website with no s2member installed, and things are not different: if you are an editor, you can’t be a subscriber as well.
Maybe I missed something, please let me know.
Cheers
Leo
It is confusing… After digging a bit further, it looks like WordPress code allows multiple user roles to be assigned to a user, but that the WordPress UI doesn’t directly let you. That is why some membership plugins can grant multiple roles. For example, I found this plugin that changes WP user role selection from dropdown to checkbox (multiple). Thanks for reporting back with your discoveries, Leo, so we can pass it on. I’m going to update the original post to make a mention of this.
Hello Bradley, thanks for your answer. The plugin you suggested seems to be perfect, but I won’t rely on a
two years old plugin, that seems to have been abandoned. If I switch my website to TA+s2member+Multiple Roles, what will I do if the latter is broken after a wordpress update?
Please tell me, sincerely: is there any possibility that TA will support custom capabilities in the future, or it’s something too complicated?
Thanks in advance for your answer
Leo
I agree regarding reliability. Sorry to hear this workaround isn’t a solution for you, Leo. Regarding Custom Capabilities? We haven’t seen this as a feature request before, but I’ve created a new request and given it 2 votes for you and for Andrew. Here’s how we do work with feature requests.
Hi Bradley, if TA supported custom capabilities it would be the only membership plug you would need for TA. It wouldn’t be difficult to integrate as TA courses and courses pages are just WP pages and posts. Custom capabilities appears as default on all WP pages and posts once you have S2 installed.
Hi Bradley, that’s strange, as I requested this feature–custom capabilities–I think almost 2 years or so ago when Thrive Apprentice was still in beta. I requested it in the Thrive Themes forums. And IIRC, there were other people requesting it too (I’m not 100% sure about that).
Oh yes, you’re right! I found it and a few others from quite a while back. Thanks Peter, I’ve combined the feature requests.
Thanks, Bradley! 🙂
Hi Leo,
I too had the same question. I ran a quick test last night and it appears that TA restricts users based on role, meaning a level 2 member can only access level 2 and not level 1.
This is great news as I can finally use S2 roles for each course without worrying about higher level members being able to access lower level member courses.
This still means that we need to create a level one premium member and then use ccap to ensure our blogs or other areas of the WordPress site are protected.
The good news is we can use S2 and remove the need for send owl.
Hello Andrew, this could work if you have different memberships: silver users, gold users and so on, with a hierarchy among them. Not if you wish to sell different courses one by one, since it’s not possible to grant an user more than one wordpress role.
Or is it???
Cheers
Leo
I think you’re right. I’m not sure if a member can have more than one membership level. If Apprentice could have the custom capabilities window added to it then it would work perfectly.
The only other work around is that you create level one as a monthly or yearly membership that gives people access to all your courses or they can buy them individually (which would end up being more expensive). Each course you sell would be a different level or they become premium members at level one for all courses.
Ideally none of this would need to take place if we could implement custom capabilities.
Could thrive enable this? It appears in the side bar by default on all pages and posts when you have S2 member installed.
I found another workaround. If you have a user who purchased course A and they are S2 member level 2 then they also want to buy course B, which is S2 member level 3, you could create an additional level, say level 6 which gives the user access to both courses. And then manually assign them that role in the backend.
You would have to tell customers to notify you when they want to purchase multiple courses.
Hello Andrew, this would be complicated but possible with a very limitied number of courses. I have more than 15 on my website, so I would need a different level for each course and a different level for each combination of courses. It makes billions of different combinations.
Hi Leonardo,
I had S2Member on my site for a while and tried everything in great detail. I gave it up only because it only has 4 membership levels and I have more courses. If you read my blog post you will see how content protection works – S2 Member creates a user role for each membership level and you can select these created user roles in Apprentice to protect your content.
Ho Peter, I use s2member on my website to sell about 20 different courses separately, this is possible with ccaps (custom capabilities) that sadly are not available in thrive apprentice, and probably will never be.
Even if you just had 4 courses, you will still have problems because you can’t be a s2member lvl1 user AND a s2member lvl2 user at the same time. Cheers, Leo
Hi Peter,
S2 offers unlimited roles. You just need to update the php file to the desired number.
I have read your blog post, great work, very detailed.
Well I am using yet another setup…
I realized at one point that I don’t necessarily need both a shopping cart and a membership plugin. Just to many components and variables to match up. You either need to pay a fee for an external shopping cart, or your membership plugin that has the functions you need only has capability for 4 membership levels…
Therefore I decided to completely cut out the membership plugin. I use Thrive Apprentice to host my 10 courses (some free, some paid), and I use WooCommerce as my shopping cart to sell the products. I know not everyone likes WooCommerce, however it has a huge advantage when it comes to foreign language sites, namely that pretty much every country has integrations built for their local currency.
I use YITH Role Changer for WooCommerce, which automatically assigns the appropriate role to the person who checks out. I even have All Access Pass implemented. Whenever I add a new course, I just create a new user role with the Members plugin.
I use Thrive Leads at the time of registration to add the person to my email list and to give them access to my free course (you can test it on my site if you are interested.) My only sorrow on the subject is that Thrive Themes still doesn’t have WooCommerce integration, a new subscriber can only be added as a WordPress user and not a WooCommerce customer.
This sounds like a great setup, Peter. We agree that most membership setups are overkill, especially when WordPress already has some membership functionality built right in. I’m a little lost on the final part. Are you saying that in the Thrive Leads form you cannot set a user as a WooCommerce customer? Wouldn’t that make sense since they haven’t completed a purchase at that point?
That is true in the case of a paid course.
However I have free courses that I give access to all email subscribers that sign up through Thrive Leads also. From Thrive Leads form I cannot add a user as a WooCommerce customer, I can only add them to a mailing list and a WordPress user.
I’d recommend you use the ‘Subscriber’ role to protect your free courses and grant that at the Thrive Leads level, rather than involving a customer role for non-customers.
Now that Thrive Apprentice supports s2member, does that mean it will work with OptimizeMember, seeing as it’s just a rebadged version of s2member?
If OptimizeMember sets its levels by User Role (just as s2member does), then yes it should work. If you test it out, let us know your results!
Do you have a preference of one plug in over the other?
I was just about to start creating my courses Using Send Owl. Do we need Send Owl in addition to one of the plug-ins you mentioned?
We recommend Send Owl on it’s own, and you won’t need anything else! If you use SendOwl, you don’t need an extra membership plugin since we built an integration in Thrive Apprentice that will do the rest for you. It’s absolutely the easiest and most affordable way to go. Most membership plugins are overkill for course delivery and will complicate your setup adding extra costs. We have lots of articles on our knowledge base but start with this one. Hope that helps!
This is great for S2 member, except for the fact that S2 member provides incremental access based on level. So if your role is level 3, then you get access to level 1 & 2. Does Thrive apprentice restrict access to only the role/level the user has assigned to them in WordPress, or does a role/level 3 S2 member user get access to level 1 & 2?
I want to create one new role/level for each course I sell but I’m worried that if role/level 6 buys an online course they will get free access to all the courses in the levels below.
Please confirm ????
I’m not sure. Thrive Apprentice only protects via the WP User Role, but I’m not sure if a level 2 user in s2member also technically has the level 1 WP User Role assigned at the same time. Another user in the comments (Leonardo) had the same question and is looking to test it out. But if you manage to test it out first, let us know your results!
When I buy 1 license which costs $67, can use all plugins on 1 website or there are some restrictions?
You can purchase each of our plugins separately, or join the Thrive Membership to get all of our plugins at once.
Hello, Thrive Apprentice is it available in French? I mean, even if the backoffice remains in English, can we customize the text of the breadcrumb and those of call to action for example (like “next course” or “previous course” in “Cours suivant” ou “Cours précédent”)? Thanks in advance for your answer
Yes, Thrive Apprentice will work with language translation into French
To expand on that further, in Thrive Apprentice, you can customize all of the course labels to say what you want. So you can manually choose what text should be on the ‘next lesson’ buttons, or what label to use for ‘module’, or ‘chapter’, etc. Simply enter your French variation and you’re good to go. If you purchase Apprentice, you’ll find this option under Settings > Template Settings > Course Labels.
I wonder if it is possible to make all these things without a member plugin?
What if I restrict my courses like that:
1. for every free course I make no protection
2. for every “free against mail“ course I make subscriber restriction
3. for every paid course I restrict to another role that I create for this?
Now if I make the roles manually for every purchase then I do not need any plugin right?
Yes, that’s right. That way if a customer purchases your course or transfers the course money into your account, you would have to manually go into the WordPress backend and add that Paid Course User Role to the buyer. At a low volume, that’s totally manageable. But if you want to grant access immediately or do this for a high volume of buyers, you’ll want to use a tool that does it automatically.
I get that Apprentice can be integrated with WooCommerce by installing another plugin that creates a User Role after a successful WooCommerce checkout.
But is there a plan to integrate Woocommerce with Thrive Apprentice without having to create separate roles? The reason I want this is because if I am offering 100s of courses (example upsell/downsell oto variations), then I don’t want to be creating 100 different user roles for each variation. I want the course to be linked to a WooCommerce product. I currently use WP Courseware which does this, but the UI is a bit outdated so I am hoping Thrive Apprentice works on this feature.
It’s not currently on the roadmap for Apprentice (we have some other exciting features planned first) but this request has been logged a few times before. I’ve added your vote to the feature request for WooCommerce with Apprentice. Here’s what that means, and thanks for your comment Abhi – Your feedback helps us plan our updates.
ThriveCart please Brad! 🙂 Ship, Ship ship please.
Infusionsoft, pretty please Brad!
Integrate with Apprentice.
Hello! Thanks for this great article. Membership management is probably IMHO the only thing really missing from your fantastic suite of products @Thrivethemes. If you ever wanted to add this to your arsenal of current products, it would be absolutely awesome. 😉 Cheers!
Hey Bradley I have been looking for an easy solution to create courses within my niche. I have checked out kajabi/karta etc but loathe the idea of paying $120+/month. WP + Thrive looked like the solution but if I use something like Wishlist, why would I need Thrive Apprentice? Many Thanks … michael
With Wishlist, you can protect any content on your site for paying members only. But you still want to organise content into courses. With Apprentice, you can create an attractive list of your courses and track student progression so they know which lessons they have completed and know where to continue from. It’s also easy to build lessons and only publish them when they’re ready, reorder lessons, etc. Check out Thrive Apprentice and you’ll see what I mean. Hope that helps!
Can we customize membership layout especially lesson post. I would prefer there is an option for big video with sidebar like in Thinkific. For me current sidebar location taking lots of space on the content area. And I feel overcrowded and competing with the content especially the sidebar with lot of lessons shown. I hope the design is more flexible similar to Thrive Architect
So, finally you can use WordPress Members WITHOUT Sendowl if you use Sendowl for payed courses? I sent an request about that to the support. Would have been nice to be notified about the update. Thanks anyway – I am glad its integrated.
Hi Bradley,
I dont see Thrive Apprentice working for B2B sales of compliance courses like health and safety which my customer ‘must’ show completed courses and be able to download certs. They must be able to track completion and access their data whenever they want. Almost we build the courses (10+) and then they manager their users after we upload their id’s. We’ll have companies of >10 to 1k>.
Do you think this is beyond Thrive A?
At the moment, yes that’s beyond Thrive Apprentice. It sounds like you’re talking about the bells-and-whistles of an LMS (Learning Management Solution). We have a very ambitious roadmap for Thrive Apprentice that will grow it into a powerful solution for everything you’ve described, but as of right now, we don’t have the full feature set you need.
Great honesty Bradley. Yes if you had that setup I’d be supporting the beta. I’m sure it will come in the end because the competition in this space is so strong.
It seems like a lot of users have issues with their payment setup.
The best solution would be for thrive themes to create there own payment system and optimise the checkout flow.
Thrive themes talks a lot about optimisation and conversion but you really need to build a plugin that optimises the checkout Experience fort our customers and increases our conversions.
Cheers, Adam
Thanks for your suggestion, Adam. We’ve certainly had many discussions amongst the team about this topic.
But I’d love to hear from you on one question: What kind of order fulfilment would you look for? What I mean is – how would you want to deliver a product to a customer once they’ve made a purchase?
First thing as I would be selling a course to a new user/member that requires first to register a new account and then be redirected to a secondary payment processor. In this case sendowl.
Seems to be a lot of people on the discussion about all of these other plugins and how to do work-arounds to get one time Payment’s, monthly membership payments, yearly membership, group of courses , etc
https://thrivethemes.com/online-courses-membership/#comments/398593
Your customers are tell you they need a solution to handle all these issues
No plugins by other people.
A plugin by thrive themes that integrates seamlessly with thrive apprentice.
Now this plugin would also need to handle new user registration. (And VAT)
So when a new customer wants to buy a course or membership after they click the buy button the flow to create a new account and add payment details should be as simple as possible preferably all on one page that has logo and simple footer like a landing page.
So how about
“Thrive Payments”
Also this would need to allow us to sell downloads like ebooks etc
Then we can build sales pages with thrive architect
Add buy now button form
“Thrive Payments”
Everything managed by thrive themes. From building the landing page through to registration, payment to thank you page.
How about it?
Again, thank you for your suggestions. Yes, all of this has been on our minds for some time now but it’s good to hear this from your perspective too. Thanks again!
I’m confused by the SendOwl + Thrive Apprentice set-up. If I have multiple paid courses that I would give customers access to (based on which one they’ve purchased), the SendOwl integration would handle all of this? Or would the SendOwl integration give them access to all paid courses no matter what?
Yes, the integration manages all of that. You can sell individual courses and users will only be able to access the ones that they’ve paid for. You can also sell bundles, which are a collection of course in a single purchase. You can read more about how this works here: https://thrivethemes.com/tkb_item/how-to-assign-access-to-your-course-set-up-the-sendowl-protection-options/
I am in a group that teaches how to create memberships and they are giving out a free website along with wishlist. I already use thrive apprentice for a course I have. (along with send owl)Is there any benefit to also having wishlist? And does thrive apprentice allow for dripping content like whishlist does?
How does this work with Woocommerce now that you’ve integrated with them? Is the login the same for the woocommerce checkout, and wordpress so they can purchase the course through sendowl?
We have integrated WooCommerce with Thrive Theme Builder, but not with Thrive Apprentice yet. Right now, if you want to sell courses with WooComm, you need a 3rd party membership tool to protect courses until a WooComm purchase has been made. But we are going to work on a direction integration.