Hey, how's it going? Alex here from IdeaSpot and I'm back with another WordPress tutorial. Today we've got a tutorial on LearnPress and this is going to let you set up your own online course and you'll be able to sell this online course using a WordPress website.
So in this tutorial you'll be able to take a basic website and turn it into a place where you can sell a course, where users can come, they can click join and they can see your course overview, they can see your curriculum and then they can sign up and buy the course using PayPal. So if that sounds good, keep watching. For this LearnPress tutorial you can use basically any theme you like on your WordPress website.
Personally I'm using Astra and I'm using a starter site. I'm using a starter site called Coach. You can totally grab those for free. I've got a link in the description that shows you how to set up an Astra starter site. That's super easy but our first step for this one we go to plugins we go to plugins and add new we type in LearnPress here and go ahead and search and that should be the first one that pops up.
Let's go ahead and click install now and when that's ready we click activate. There we go. Okay so as soon as LearnPress is activated you'll get the setup wizard running.
If you don't see the screen you might get the setup wizard from your dashboard. with the setup wizard button there but otherwise you'll get here and then we go ahead run the setup wizard either way is fine here we can set up our currency by default it's in US dollars but you can put whichever currency you like choose your number of decimal places. I'm going to leave this all as default and just continue. Now it sets up the LearnPress static pages. So these are the default pages that LearnPress uses for the courses, profile, checkout and teacher.
So you can name the pages yourself or you can just automatically have LearnPress do that by clicking on this link here. So I'm going to do that. Just wait a moment.
Now I can click continue. So the free version allows you to sell your courses using PayPal, which is pretty cool for a free version. Go ahead and name it. enable PayPal, put your PayPal email in there. Sandbox mode is just for testing.
So when your site goes live, you can disable sandbox mode. I'll show you how to do that later. And the sandbox email can be the same.
That's fine. Go ahead and continue. Emails, we can go ahead and enable emails just to see how they work.
You can disable them later if you like, but up to you. And here we are at the finish. We can go ahead and create a new course. So go ahead and click that one.
So here we are at the create new course screen. So straight away we can close this option about joining the newsletter. There's no need for that and It is required to have the profile page and checkout page set up so you can just go ahead and click here to set them up automatically and Finally it's asking us to use the permalink option called post name. So I'd recommend using post name on most of you WordPress sites.
I think Postname is the best permalink format. If you're not already using it, go ahead and change it to Postname. If you've already got an established WordPress site that uses a different permalink setting, maybe set up LearnPress in a different folder or on a different subdomain. But anyway, go ahead, change it to Postname and click Save Changes.
Okay, back on our Add New Course page and it looks like we're good to go. I'm just going to call this one, I'll call it WordPress Course. and I'll just put some filler content in there.
Maybe go ahead and add a little image here from the media library. Let's just try this guy maybe. Pop them in there. Okay that should get us started. Let's hit publish.
So now it says course is published, we can view our course. So this is what it looks like so far. We've got our description, our picture, our title.
It's got some breadcrumbs and the number of students there. I'm going to show you how to remove those a little bit later on. And it's also got comments down here. I'm going to show you how to turn those off. And enrollment's free at the moment.
I'm going to show you how you can charge a few dollars to enroll in the course. So keep watching. OK, so back to our Edit Course page. The first thing we can do is untick the Allow Comments thing and go ahead and click Update. So that looks all good.
The comments are gone. We've just got our normal header, footer, and our course template here. And these tabs show the overview that we just put into our course editor. The curriculum is where the actual lessons will show up. And the instructor shows the user who created the course, in this case, IdeaSpot.
whichever account you're using that will show up as the instructor. So let's keep working on our course. Under courses we've got our WordPress course and we're going to keep editing this course.
Okay back on our course editor let's just scroll down to curriculum and we can add a section for our course here. So I'm just going to call it section one and press enter and that will add section one to our course. So in section one we can add a new lesson or we can add a quiz with that little clock icon.
So I'm going to add a lesson and I'm going to call that lesson one. Hit enter and that will add lesson one. The other settings down here are, you can pretty much leave them as default. I've set the duration of the course. to 52 weeks but you can use whatever you like there.
All of that stuff is fine. And so we've got lesson 1 and let's make a quiz as well. Let's make a quiz 1 as well.
Hit enter. So now this is all done I'm going to go ahead and click update. It's always best to click update after making any changes just to make sure the database is all linked up properly. Let's go ahead and have a look at the course again. So here's our course, we can go ahead and click curriculum and there we go, we can see our lesson 1 and our quiz 1 have been added to the curriculum.
So back in our dashboard, let's go to lessons and let's start adding some content to lesson 1. So there's lesson 1, let's go ahead and click edit. So I'm just going to paste some filler content in there and the rest in duration can be limited but if you choose 0 that will disable you have unlimited time on the lesson you can allow people to preview the lesson without taking the course i'd leave that unchecked if you're trying to sell the course and want to leave it hidden so people have to pay before they can see it and also Also there's comments here, so let's go ahead and untick the comments. And besides that, that looks all good.
So let's go ahead and click update. So now we can view our course. Let's go ahead and click the permalink, open it up in a new tab here.
And here we are. It looks quite nice. You've got our content.
You can go to the next section or next quiz. You've got your title there and you've got your sections and quizzes there in the left sidebar. So I really quite like that layout. It's nice and clean, easy to use. I think what we'll go ahead and do now is add the quiz.
So let's go back to our dashboard and go to LearnPress and let's go to quizzes. So here's quiz one that we started earlier. So let's go ahead and click Edit So up top here We can put a little background information for the quiz or information that you'd like the students to have while they take the quiz quiz so you can do anything that you do in a normal blog post text images videos whatever you can create a question so let's go ahead and make a new question let's call it is wordpress great and add as new so that's question Question 1. So by default you can have a true or false question, but we can actually change it to true or false, multiple choice or single choice.
I'm going to choose, say, single choice. So single choice, you can set up several answers and have one correct answer. So single choice is where there's only one correct answer.
Multiple choice is where there might be multiple correct answers. So in this case I'm just going to have single choice. I'm going to add an option.
We could say, I don't know. So this option just could be. maybe. And there's a few extra things you can add here. We can add some like question content.
We could add a bit of an explanation for the question and maybe even could add a hint if the person needs a hint for the question. Those are all up to you, but that's basically all you need to do to make a quiz. So then you'll be here.
We can make a new question, question number two. I'm going to skip that just for the sake of the demo, because you just repeat the same process. And here we go. There's a few options.
You can use pagination to show the list of questions. You can allow them to review the questions after they're finished so they can go back, maybe change their answer if they're feeling like they want to change something later. Show correct answers after reviewing.
You could leave that on or off. You could give them a set amount of time to do the quiz. I'm going to have unlimited time. You set that to zero and that gives them unlimited time.
You could give them minus points if they get something wrong. You can set the passing grade. I'm going to set that grade to 100. but you can set that to whatever you'd like.
And you can allow people to retake the quiz as many times as they like. So I might let them do it 10 times. You could set that as many times as you want or set it to zero if you want to not allow them to retake the test. And this will allow you to check the answer if you set that to one, but I'm just going to set it to zero so you can't check the answer and show hint. I might set that to, you can set it to one for unlimited hints or zero for disabled hints, or you can maybe limit them to say five hints back and forth.
quiz up to you. I'm going to just set that to unlimited. So that looks all good.
I'm going to go hit update. So let's look at our quiz. I'm going to open that quiz in a new tab and here we go.
It says we can do it 10 times. The duration is unlimited. Passing grade is 100% and there's one question and here's a bit of the back. info for the test.
So at the moment our lesson and our quiz are both locked off so we're going to need to enroll in the course before we can see the content and try the quiz. So let's have a go at doing that. Let's go back to our course page you can use that link there.
We can just go back to the course page through the dashboard either way and scroll down here, click enroll. It's got free enrollment and here we are. We're enrolled in the course. We can go ahead and click continue.
Lesson one is just a matter of reading the text and clicking complete. Do you want to complete? And you say okay.
It'll say congratulations, you've completed lesson one and now you're on to quiz one. And there we go. We can read a little bit before we start the quiz and click start.
So here we are in our quiz. Is WordPress great? There's a little bit of that background info we put in and we can choose true. We can choose the hint.
Clicking hint will show the hint and the explanation that we put in when we set up the question. And then once you're ready, you go ahead and click complete. Do you want to complete quiz one? And there we go.
And hooray, we got 100% on quiz one. And it'll show the time we spent and how many right and wrong questions. And we can redo it here. It says we've got plus 10 shots to redo the test.
didn't pass. So there we go. Let's go ahead and click finish. Do you want to finish the course?
Okay. And there we go. We've finished our WordPress course.
So back here, we can still access our lesson and our quiz. So we can go back to the content if we need, but we can track our progress with this course progress tracker. And that was all really, really simple. So that covers making a free course.
Let's say we wanted to charge a few dollars and make some money from this course. So let's go back to our dashboard and let's go to courses and let's go to edit the course. All we have to do now is just scroll.
down and click pricing here in the course settings and let's make the price $39 and there we go. You can set a sale price as well and set up a sale if you wanted to make it $20 for the sale and make a sale schedule. I'm just going to leave that for now but you can use that option if you like.
Go ahead click update. Okay so now if someone came to your course they would see okay here's the course page and it's $39 and you can click buy this course and that takes you to a... registration screen.
So let's click buy. So this is the checkout. Returning customers can log in and new customers can register.
So let's click register and now they can set up their username, email, password and then register. So I just went ahead and filled that out and click register. So here we are at our checkout.
Here's our price $39. It's going to say no payment method is available because we still have to select PayPal as our payment method. So I'll just do that right now. So here we are in our dashboard under LearnPress settings and we go to payments and scroll down to the bottom payment order and PayPal is here and we're going to have to click that little gray tick button that'll change to blue and then we click save.
So that one should be blue now and let's also go to PayPal here and just click that and just make sure your PayPal email is in there. I'm going to choose sandbox mode for testing. Put the PayPal sandbox email in there as well. Click Save. And now when we look at our checkout, we're going to have our PayPal option there.
We can go ahead and place our order. And that'll process. And that'll take you to PayPal where you can log in and complete the payment. So once you're happy that your course is ready to sell live, you can go back into here in your LearnPress settings under payments and PayPal, and you can untick the sandbox mode and then you're live on PayPal and you can start selling all your courses.
One thing I should mention with LearnPress is that it uses the WordPress. user registration to let people register for courses. So you will need to be able to enable that in your general settings.
So go to settings and general here, and you'll have to enable registration for your site. So make sure membership, anyone can register. So that might not be ticked on your WordPress website.
Just make sure that's ticked. Otherwise, no one's going to be able to register for your courses. If it's not ticked, just tick it and go ahead and click save changes.
The only other thing I was going to cover was how to change up this actual course page and get rid breadcrumbs, get rid of the student count and maybe you can get rid of the instructor tab if you'd like to remove that one as well. So basically we're going to do that in CSS. We'll go to customize, open that customizer in a new tab. This is just your theme customizer. In your theme customizer you'll want to add additional CSS.
That's usually down the bottom and I'm going to go ahead and paste in the CSS that I've made. So there we go. We've got LearnPress breadcrumb display none, course students display none and course nav tab instructor. So the breadcrumbs are gone, the student counts gone and the instructor tab is gone.
So I'll put this CSS code in the video description below the YouTube description below and you can just copy that and paste it into your own theme customizer and you're free to do that yourself after that's done make sure you hit publish and now when we reload our page that all looks good so I'm pretty happy with that. So if this has been helpful so far remember to click like and click subscribe because I keep making these new WordPress tutorials every week but I'm going to show you how to wrap this up. So let's go back to our main page. Let's link the course into sort of our main home page.
So I'm going to edit this in Elementor. You can use any page builder you like if it's Gutenberg or Divi doesn't really matter. I'm using Elementor for this demonstration.
I'm just going to link one of these buttons to our course. So let's wait for this to load up. So I'm just going to change the head.
header on this starter site so it says join our WordPress course and instead of start now we can go ahead and maybe call it enroll or maybe join join now and the link we're gonna link that to our WordPress course so grab that link from your WordPress course and then paste it in there hit update so now we've got a link where users can join our course right from our home page so let's just go to our home page and let's reload that and when they click join now they'll be taken straight to your course where they can join, enroll, pay through PayPal. Everything we set up earlier can be accessed. So that basically wraps it up.
Remember to click like if this video was helpful. I really liked using LearnPress. I thought, I think for a free plugin, this gives you almost all the features that you would get from some of the premium ones.
And this was quite easy to use. It did take a little bit of setup time and a little bit of CSS to get the course page looking how I wanted it to look. But other than that...
I have nothing but positive feedback for these guys. I'll also mention that LearnPress is made by these guys at ThinPress. I was using the free version today, but you can get these bundles which add even more features.
So I think the obvious one that people might like is WooCommerce. This free one, you could only use PayPal, but WooCommerce, you can set that up exactly how you want with your payment system. And you can have things like content drip. So different parts of the course can be released, say, as your semester or your course year. evolves new lessons will come out according to your own schedule and you can have co-instructors and these are actually lifetime prices as well so you get uptight updates for life which is great a lot of these new plugins you have to pay for them every single year i think that was the case with learn dash which i covered before but uh this is a one-off and the really nice thing you get with this um with this fee is that you get access to um i think with the Theme bundle, you get one theme and with the pro bundle, you get unlimited themes.
So LearnPress have gone ahead and designed course websites pre-built. So these look gorgeous. I mean, today we were just using a basic Astra starter site, but if you want something that's really perfect for a course or an educational or a school website, that's not a lot of money to spend if you're doing such a big project. That's tremendous value. I'll drop a link in the description so you can go ahead and grab one of those.
But yeah, if this has been helpful, definitely click subscribe, click like. I'll come back with more WordPress tutorials. Let me know if you have any questions or how your experience has gone with these plugins because I'd love to know and offer any help if I can. So thanks and I'll see you next time.