LifterLMS 10.0 Launch Party

Enjoy a demo of the all new LifterLMS 10.0 features and new premium add-ons accompanying the launch.

---

Inside The LifterLMS 10.0 Launch Party

The LifterLMS 10.0 launch party is the live celebration of 12 years of building the most customizable Learning Management System (LMS) for WordPress. Chris Badgett is joined by the LifterLMS team for the story of how LifterLMS reached its tenth major version, live demos of the four headline 10.0 features (Focus Mode, the Any Engagement Trigger, Cart Abandonment Recovery, and the Events add-on), and a wide-open Q&A on the platform.

What You’ll Learn

• How the four headline LifterLMS 10.0 features work: Focus Mode, the Any Engagement Trigger, Cart Abandonment Recovery, and the Events add-on.
• How to configure Focus Mode as a site-wide default or override it on a per-course basis, on Sky Pilot or a third-party theme.
• How to build one reusable engagement that fires across every course, membership, and access plan on your site.
• How the three-email Cart Abandonment Recovery sequence and its last-chance auto-coupon work out of the box.
• How to run live workshops, cohort sessions, webinars, and one-on-one coaching inside LifterLMS with the Events add-on.

Key Takeaways

• Turn Focus Mode on globally under Courses, Settings to give every learner a cleaner, more mobile-friendly lesson view without touching your theme.
• Install Cart Abandonment Recovery, activate it, and let the default settings recover checkout revenue automatically. Customize the emails and last-chance coupon later.
• Use the new Any option on engagement triggers to build one email, one certificate, or one achievement that scales to every course you ever add.
• Attach Events to a course, lesson, or membership to run live training natively, with a built-in Zoom integration or any meeting link you already use.
• LifterLMS 10.0 also ships quiz UI improvements, lesson editing inside the Course Builder, course capacity enforcement, and continued security and performance work.

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Launch Party Transcript

Twelve Years Of Building LifterLMS: The Origin Story

Chris Badgett: What is going on? It is Chris, Emily, Kurt, Jason, Alex, and Brian from LifterLMS. This is the LifterLMS launch party.

This is the LifterLMS 10.0 launch party, and I want to thank everybody for coming. LifterLMS originally launched in October of 2014, so it has been about 12 years. It has been quite the journey. Where did LifterLMS come from? It came from a history as a WordPress agency. That is where I started with my co-founders, and I was also working as a course creator myself. I created an LMS site in the organic gardening and permaculture niche.

So I had my own course site, was running an agency, and started focusing the agency on the LMS niche. Some of our bigger agency clients included a yoga instructor in Los Angeles named Ashley, and a real estate education entrepreneur in Australia, kind of like the Grant Cardone of Australia, who needed a custom-built LMS, education company, and online community. We built all of that with WordPress, and these were some of the first LifterLMS users. So it is one of those cases where we did not just decide we wanted to build a product and choose a niche. We worked with clients in a niche we already loved, which was course creation, coaching, and internal training, and the clients literally pulled the product out of us. That has been happening for the past 12 years. At LifterLMS, we listen. If you have a feature request, you can always reach out. The community has been a huge part of shaping the project and is really the driving force. We are not just a software company. We are removing friction and building a solution for online educators worldwide across a variety of niches and use cases.

Why We Still Choose WordPress For Online Education

Chris Badgett: Today we are just going to celebrate with you a little bit. LifterLMS 10.0 just dropped, along with a couple of new add-ons we will get into. This is going to be an interactive session, so please keep lighting up the chat and drop your questions.

This is LifterLMS 10.0, the new standard for modern eLearning on WordPress. Why do we love WordPress? We like to own our platform. We like to own the education asset we create. We appreciate the customizability and the affordability. LifterLMS is still independently owned, operated, and founder-led, with not just a founder but also a team that is passionate about online education. In many ways, everybody on this call has done so much for online education.

Meet The LifterLMS Team On The Call

Chris Badgett: I want to introduce who is on the call with us today from the LifterLMS team. Kurt Von An is here. He is part of the crew, does a lot of the live calls, does a lot of his own education projects, and has an agency called Mañana Nomas. Emily is on the call. Emily also does a lot of the live calls and has been with LifterLMS for seven, maybe eight years. Jason Coleman is here, partner at LifterLMS along with Kim Coleman from Paid Memberships Pro. They joined LifterLMS three or four years ago, and it has been awesome working with Jason and Kim. Alex Panagis from Scalemath is helping with growth and marketing. He is a recent, about eight-month addition to the team, and so much great content and things are happening there. Brian Hogg, the lead developer of LifterLMS, is on the call. Brian is a course creator in his own right, an entrepreneur in the WordPress space, an expert in events, and one of the most talented developers I have ever met.

I also want to mention some people who are not on the call. Dominique and Alex Alexander help in support, and Nadia helps in pre-sales and many other marketing things. LifterLMS 10.0 would not be possible without the full LifterLMS team. I also want to honor that life and business evolves over time. Many different people have worked at LifterLMS, have contributed to the open-source project, and many industry partners work with us on integrations. It really is a community effort.

What A Major Version Like 10.0 Actually Means

Chris Badgett: Welcome to LifterLMS 10.0, the new standard for modern eLearning on WordPress. It has been 12 years and 10 major versions. For those of you without a strong engineering focus, a major version like 10.0, 9.0, or 8.0 includes significant changes, enhancements, and evolution of the product. LifterLMS has released a lot more than 10 versions across all the products. It is probably closer to 700 releases if I had to guess. It is a ton of work, and that is how we got to where we are today, with the most customizable, secure, and affordable Learning Management System for WordPress. Also known for having the best support in the industry and a team and community that engage with each other.

Our Mission To Lift Up Others Through Education

Chris Badgett: Our mission is the same at the business level as it is for my life. It is one of the things that keeps me motivated, which is to lift up others through education, as course creators and as agency owners. When we do good work in the eLearning space, we send a positive ripple out into our communities, whether they are small or large. Education has a way of improving society in all kinds of major and minor ways. So it is great to be with you on the journey, and I appreciate all of you here who refuse to compromise on your platform, ownership, quality, and security. That is what keeps us aligned with each other here at LifterLMS.

Why The Human Experience Still Wins In An AI World

Chris Badgett: An important note on artificial intelligence. Let us know in the chat if you have been sidetracked, obsessed, interested, or curious about artificial intelligence. Most technologists are in some way, but I think it is important to remember that in an AI world, the human experience is fundamental and never going away. We may be able to accelerate what we do as education entrepreneurs with AI, but we have real humans as students. We have real human teachers. We have real humans building websites. We are a fan of automation and technology.

But learning is actually one of the things that makes us the most human. From the cradle to the grave, your whole life is basically a learning experience, and it is a very human experience. So while we use technology at LifterLMS, we never forget the human in the loop of making this happen, while also empowering technology to advance our speed, quality, and outcomes for our learners.

What LifterLMS 10.0 Unlocks: Sell More, Finish More, Run Live Training

Chris Badgett: What does 10.0 unlock for you? It allows you to sell more, to finish more, and to run live instructor-led training. Some of the key highlights: Cart Abandonment Recovery, which we will show you in a bit, lets you recover lost revenue automatically. One of the things I love about Cart Abandonment Recovery for LifterLMS is that it is an add-on you install and activate, and it literally just starts working and making you money. There are settings you can tweak and customizations you can make, but if you do not have it yet, or if you were not aware you had it, either go get yourself a copy of the Infinity Bundle, or if you already have the Infinity Bundle and you sell courses, just turn it on and activate it.

The next thing we introduced is Focus Mode. This is part of the core LifterLMS platform, and it taps into the concept of distraction-free learning. It is an opportunity for when your lessons are loaded to remove all distractions to keep learners focused and engaged. You will see a demo of that in a bit.

And then, running live training. We have the Events add-on for LifterLMS. An event can be a lot of things. It can be a Zoom meeting, like you are in an event right now. It can be virtual. It can be a one-on-one private coaching session, group coaching, a workshop, a conference, or an in-location event. There are many types. Particularly in an AI world, if you are not doing events, I would encourage you to consider adding events to the learning experience you are designing. One quick pro tip: one of the fastest events you can add is a monthly office hours or mastermind, which is an hour-long call you show up for once a month to unblock your students and answer questions. It is a great value-add that makes your platform more valuable and only requires an hour of your time that you do not necessarily have to prepare for.

A First Look At Focus Mode And Cart Abandonment Recovery

Chris Badgett: In terms of selling more, Cart Abandonment Recovery does a graceful three-email follow-up sequence, delivers a last-chance limited-time discount, and includes weekly reporting. You will see that in a second.

Here is a quick shot of what Focus Mode looks like on the desktop. You will notice the header and the footer are gone. The syllabus is much more collapsed, and the focus is really on the content, with basic navigation at the top. You will see it in action. It is important to note that Focus Mode looks great on tablet and smartphone as well. Sometimes we as creators are working on big computers or laptops, but a lot of online education learners are not necessarily on the same big screens. So Focus Mode gets even more important on those small viewports.

A First Look At The Events Add-On And The Any Engagement Trigger

Chris Badgett: The Events add-on lets you do live virtual and instructor-led training inside your LMS. If you do not call them events, you might call them classes, workshops, webinars, conferences, or training. You can change that terminology.

I like the idea of combining instructor-led training with passive training. For those of you who have had a challenge getting your course done, I would encourage you to use the LifterLMS Events add-on to deliver your course live, to force yourself onto a weekly cadence with a live audience, and after you have delivered it, you can turn it into an evergreen course.

We also have a new Any engagement trigger. This is something that bubbled up from the LifterLMS community. LifterLMS engagements allow you to select a triggering event and then deliver something when that trigger happens. A triggering event could be something like completing a course, completing a lesson, or passing a quiz, and the engagement that fires most commonly is a personalized email, an achievement badge, or a certificate. We also have text messaging available through our Twilio integration. By allowing this new Any engagement trigger, you can design systems where when a student completes any course, you can send a particular type of email. You will see a demo of that in a little bit.

Everything Else Shipping In LifterLMS 10.0

Chris Badgett: There is a lot more in LifterLMS 10.0. If we were to cover everything, it would take too much time. There is a lot of quiz UI improvement and Course Builder improvements. You will see how you can now add your lesson content from the Course Builder, so you can pretty much build an entire course from one screen if you want to. There is course capacity enforcement.

We are always updating security and hardening security at LifterLMS. It is one of the things that makes us the most advanced LMS in the WordPress space, along with our commitment to database performance. Alex and I were looking at one LifterLMS site before this call that had about 537,000 enrollments. Some of us might have a smaller LMS, but LifterLMS is also used on large platforms with hundreds or even thousands of courses and hundreds of thousands of students. Scalability is something we are always working on.

The LifterLMS Community Is The Real Win

Chris Badgett: I want to thank the LifterLMS team, present, past, and future. It has been quite the journey. For those of you in the audience, I consider you all part of the team as well. We are constantly listening, and your voice matters. At LifterLMS, we see customer support that is high quality as a feature of the product, not a cost to be minimized. That is one of the things that helps make this community so strong.

The community is the win. The community is the difference. That is the LifterLMS difference. While this is 10.0, LifterLMS is just getting started. I cannot imagine where we will be in the next 12 years, but it is exciting to think about how far we have come to reach 10.0. When I think about LifterLMS 20.0, which sounds like a lot, I get excited, because the technology landscape is changing. In education, some things change and some things never change. We are here to evolve with you, and we are not going away.

Live Demo: How To Turn On Focus Mode For A Course

Chris Badgett: I am going to pass it over to Alex Panagis. He is going to demo Focus Mode for LifterLMS.

Alex Panagis: LifterLMS Focus Mode ships in 10.0 as a core feature. The motivation behind bringing this feature to you is twofold. Number one, and in many ways the main one, is to streamline the learner experience by stripping away components of your site that are not conducive to completing a lesson and ultimately reaching the end of a course. The example we are looking at here uses Sky Pilot, which is the theme we are always going to recommend. By default, Sky Pilot already simplifies the experience quite a bit, but there are still things like the header and the footer that are not the most immersive, distraction-free experience. Focus Mode sets out to change that. Higher course completion rates mean more people have a positive experience with your course and end up leaving a review.

The core concept behind how Focus Mode works is similar to how course completion pages work. Under LifterLMS, Settings, Courses, you can set a global default. The main options here are to enable Focus Mode, then set the Focus Mode content width (which we can demonstrate in a moment), and the position of the sidebar. That means all new courses will take this setting, and any existing courses that do not have an override set. To set an override, navigate to edit the specific course you want to override, head over to the General tab, and change the default (which will always start as Inherit the global setting). By upgrading to 10.0, we are not setting Focus Mode as the default automatically, and we will not change settings on existing sites. To enable it just for a single course, you can disable Focus Mode as a global setting, then set the per-course override to Enable, which means it is on for that course only.

How Focus Mode Renders On The Front End And On Third-Party Themes

Alex Panagis: To see what the experience actually looks like, we will take a look on the front end. This is our famous Quick Start Course, which is also a great place to start if you are new to LifterLMS. The course landing view has not changed. Once you enter the lesson view, everything is stripped away. You have, as Chris showed in a screenshot earlier, a much more simple, minimal view that has a sidebar and keeps people focused on the actual task of completing a lesson and progressing through the course.

On a responsive device, on mobile or on tablet, LifterLMS Focus Mode also significantly simplifies building a responsive LMS website, compared to other solutions where it may not work out of the box perfectly. This works best with Sky Pilot, as with most LifterLMS features. If you switch over to Astra, the styling changes slightly. The way links appear and other elements are inherited from the theme, and some of that styling comes from the theme itself. You can customize it further, and we can put together resources on that at some point. Just to reiterate, the LifterLMS Sky Pilot theme is fully supported by us. If you reach out with a question about how to change something, we are far more likely to be able to help you than if you reach out about other third-party solutions you are using.

Focus Mode Chat Questions: Student Toggles, Theme Resources, And Video

Alex Panagis: The first question in the chat is whether students can choose Focus Mode themselves. Not at the moment. You set it as a global default or for a specific course. That is an interesting feature request. There could be a toggle in the account area at some point, but it is not something we currently considered.

Next question: does Sky Pilot use fewer resources than Elementor? Not to cast shade at Elementor, because it is a great product, but I would say yes, Sky Pilot most likely loads a lot less style. Elementor loads quite a lot out of the box.

Brian Hogg: Both can be optimized for sure, but Sky Pilot out of the box is a little less resource-intensive.

Alex Panagis: Another question: I have a medical education course that needs a lot of video content. Is there a built-in solution or a specific third-party integration like Vimeo? By default, if you enter the Course Builder, you can add video embed URLs to specific lessons. YouTube, Vimeo, and Wistia are supported out of the box. We also integrate with a third-party solution called Presto Player. If you use Presto Player together with our Advanced Videos add-on, which requires students to complete a video from end to end before they can progress to the next lesson or mark a lesson as complete, you can do that.

Notifications Vs Engagements: What Is The Difference

Kurt Von An: I want to talk about the Any Engagement trigger. First, it is really important to mention that LifterLMS has both Notifications and Engagements, and this is a point where some people get lost. Think of Notifications as living in the main LifterLMS menu under Settings, then Notifications in the horizontal menu. That is going to be a mix of internal and external messaging. When someone signs up for a course, a notification goes to the course author, one goes to the admin, and one goes to the student.

Engagements, on the other hand, are external. Something in the site triggered something, and I am sending a message externally, sending a certificate, or doing something. You have to think in terms of the chicken before the egg. In my example, let us say somebody buys a course, and we want to send them an email. The first thing I did was create the email that was going to be sent. I created an email that says, “Welcome to the family. You bought this. Thanks a ton. Sincerely, the team.” I am sending a very generic email, because it is not specific to a single course.

Live Demo: Building The Any Engagement Trigger

Kurt Von An: Once you have the email created, go to Engagements and create the new engagement. An engagement can be a certificate, an achievement, an email, or any of those things. Let us create a new engagement. We used to specify the triggering event: in this case, Student purchases an access plan. An access plan can be any access plan: a membership, a course, anything. Let us say Student purchases a course. Then it asks you to select the course. We used to have to go through this and create an engagement for every single course. We used to have to say, okay, College Planning, yes. Crypto Apps, yes. We used to have to create engagements for each course.

Now we have the option to select Any course. We select Any course. We choose what type of engagement to fire: Award the achievement, Award a certificate, Start a private post, or, in this case, send the email we created. When we click through, we see the Welcome To The Family email in the list. If we had 100 emails, all 100 would be here. We select that email.

Then there is engagement delay. If you have ever worked with a real CRM, this is where you say, “Wait three days to send this.” Maybe two days later, we want to send a different message, like “Have you checked out your new course yet?” In that case, we would set the engagement delay to two days. In this example, we leave it blank so it sends right away. We are saying, for any course purchased, send the Welcome To The Family email. We give the engagement a title, like Welcome Email, and hit Publish. It really is that easy. Back in the engagements list, we can see it: Welcome Email, Student purchases a course, Any course, sends Welcome To The Family. From this screen we can edit the engagement, open and edit the email, all in one place.

The caveat is when you are sending a message to everybody who buys something, make it a fairly general email. You do not want to be overly specific, because hopefully people will sign up for more than one thing as your business grows and scales. Make sure the message makes sense to everybody who sees it.

Live Demo: Editing Lesson Content Inside The Course Builder

Alex Panagis: This is another one of those features that in essence is smaller, but what it actually enables is quite big. It is a Course Builder improvement, shipping in LifterLMS 10.0 core, not as an add-on. If we create a new course, save it, and open the Course Builder, we see the default view: an empty section with three lessons in it. Previously, you would jump out to edit an individual lesson as a separate custom post type in WordPress. You can still edit lesson content that way, and your existing lessons will remain editable that way.

But if you are rapidly prototyping or planning a course (as we cover in our LifterLMS weekly newsletter today, where we make the case for planning your course directly in LifterLMS), the closer you can get to the final form of your course, the more likely it is you will actually launch. If you work in scattered Google Docs and different platforms, it is harder to eventually get things loaded into an LMS. Now more than ever, because of this feature, you can start planning a section. Say I am making a course about video editing. I would create a section for pre-production. I now have tentative lesson titles, like Lesson Number One, Deciding On A Video Title. I can dump in notes right here. Links to the video can be added here. All without leaving this screen. Depending on the complexity of your individual lessons, you can design an entire course directly from this view.

Course Builder Editing: Classic Blocks And ACF Fields

Alex Panagis: One caveat that Kurt brought up when we first demoed this feature internally: if you add lesson content in the Course Builder and later open the lesson in the individual lesson editor, you will see a note that this lesson content was created outside the Course Builder, and you need to edit it in the Course Builder view. Lessons designed using custom blocks and complex formatting elements will not be editable in the Course Builder view. Technically, the Course Builder inline editor uses classic blocks (the TinyMCE editor). Brian may correct me later on the exact reason, but if you have anything other than a classic block in your existing lessons, when you come to the Course Builder view you will just see a notice that lets you jump to the individual lesson editor.

In a nutshell, that is the feature. It makes it a lot quicker to work with simple courses, because you do not have to have 12 tabs open just to do a demo like this one. In theory, you can rapidly prototype or build the first version of a course all from within one tab.

A chat question: I use ACF fields. Could I see them in the Course Builder view? Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe they would not be visible in the Course Builder view. These are LifterLMS-specific fields. If you have attached a custom field to the lesson post type, you would still see it in the regular lesson editor. There may be ways to work around this using ACF shortcodes to add the data, but it is not a tight integration in this new inline view. I also think this sets the stage for future Course Builder improvements. As we look toward LifterLMS 20.0, this is the direction we are heading with the course-building experience.

Live Demo: Installing And Configuring Cart Abandonment Recovery

Emily: I am really excited, because the Cart Abandonment Recovery add-on is now in LifterLMS 10.0, and it is super easy to install on your website. You do not even have to set up the settings. Once you have the plugin installed, visit LifterLMS, Settings, Integrations, and look for Cart Abandonment Recovery. There are a few options here, but all you really need to do is install the plugin, activate it, and you are good to go.

If you do want to customize things, this is a little of what you can customize and how the plugin works. It sends three emails when someone abandons a cart. What we consider abandoning a cart at LifterLMS is when someone heads to the checkout page, types in their email address, and then leaves. Maybe they typed in their email, their password, and their first name, scrolled down to the purchase button, and got cold feet at the last minute. They bounced off the website, but because they filled in their email field before they got to the bottom, we captured their email, and this add-on sends them three emails to say, “Hey, you left your cart behind.”

The Three-Email Sequence Behind Cart Abandonment Recovery

Emily: The first email is one hour after abandonment by default. You can set a second email 24 hours after that. So the defaults are one hour, one day, and three days. You can change these to one hour, two hours, ten hours: whatever timeline you want. Each audience has different levels of urgency, and you can customize that completely.

Under Notifications, when this add-on is installed, you will see the three Cart Abandonment emails. You can click into each of them, just like you are used to with the notifications Kurt showed. They work in a very similar way. We have default text for the subject line, the heading of the email (the text that appears after the subject line), and the content of the email itself. There are a couple of merge codes included, like the checkout URL and the site name. Treat these carefully. You could delete the site name and add your own brand. You could change the product title out if you wanted to. These merge codes are really useful for sending to users no matter which course they were considering buying. The checkout URL takes them back to wherever they left off. The second notification goes out and is very similar to the first.

Adding An Automatic Last-Chance Coupon

Emily: The third email has a significant feature I am excited to talk about. Jumping into the third email, we see the coupon code. You do not have to use the coupon if you do not want to, but here is how it works. In Integrations, Cart Abandonment Recovery, scroll down, and you can see the coupon code prefix. CAR stands for Cart Abandonment Recovery, but maybe you would set it to your own name because it is your website. You can set what that discount is.

On that last email, the last chance to close the customer, we send them a discount and say, “You have read my first two emails and you have not completed your purchase. I am going to offer you 25% off for three days only. You can complete your purchase for 25% off.” That is what appears in the coupon code field of the email. Customize the text of those emails and customize your coupon code as you see fit. You can also get a weekly report if you want to see recovery statistics.

Reading The Cart Recovery Reporting Dashboard

Emily: This add-on is so easy to use. Install it, activate it, and it works out of the box. Optionally, you can customize this stuff. Inside LifterLMS Reporting, it adds a new tab called Cart Recovery. I inserted some sample data. We can see that three people abandoned their cart, one person came back, we can see the total conversion rate, and we can see the revenue that was recovered from that person coming back and making the sale.

Out of the box, the emails look like a quick reminder that you have something in your cart, followed by the last reminder. In this demo, I had Chris test three carts and complete one purchase. We can see we recovered one of those students and generated a bunch of revenue. All that requires is installing and activating the plugin. That one is fun.

Live Demo: Creating An Event In The LifterLMS Events Add-On

Brian Hogg: With the Events add-on, it is automatically enabled, similar to Cart Abandonment. As soon as you install it, you get a new Events menu item, which lets you add an event. Let us look at that. We can name it, for example, Monthly Webinar (which Chris mentioned as a great example of something you can add as a value-add to people in the course). You can set the date and time of the webinar. Probably not a nine-hour marathon webinar, so maybe a one-hour one. You can also mark it as an all-day event, if it is something people can drop in on.

You can add a description, for example, “Only for premium members.” You have the option to put a link here directly, or the option to generate an online meeting through the Zoom integration. We may add other providers later. You can set the defaults in Settings. You can also pick a specific course, lesson, or membership. I will attach it to the Quick Start Course, like the earlier demo. Hit Publish.

What Students See When You Attach An Event To A Course

Brian Hogg: Head over to the Quick Start Course and you see the event in the events listing. There is an option to subscribe to the calendar, so students in the course can automatically get every event added to their calendar. They do not have to keep coming back and checking each time there is a new event. They can also add an individual event to the calendar of their choice.

If there is a link, it is automatically turned into a clickable link in the description. If the student is logged out or is just a visitor, they will only see the event title and the date and time. They will not see the description, the link, or the option to add to the calendar. This lets you show that there are live events happening, but the details, Zoom link, and other content are only available to people who are enrolled in the course.

If we edit the course, you can see the block settings and toggle on and off specific features of the Events block. It is automatically added to new courses and lessons once you install the plugin. A note on the meta boxes: with WordPress 7.0, they may not appear where you expect. If you were using LifterLMS before, you may need to drag them up in WordPress 7.0. There is a new Events tab on the course that shows every event added, so you can quickly edit or remove events from a course.

Renaming Events To Webinars And Setting Up Zoom

Brian Hogg: Under Settings, as Chris mentioned, if you call these something different, you can have the singular name be Webinar and the plural name be Webinars. That is what will show throughout the interface. You can also edit the date and time format. I am half British and I have traveled to Spain a lot, so I am well aware that day and month order gets interchanged compared to Canada or the United States. You can edit that here.

Settings gives you full instructions on how to set up your Zoom connection. Once you have it set up, it is really easy. When you add an event, pick Generate A Link, and it generates a unique Zoom link and meeting for your event. Students can click that and join.

Events Q&A: Zoom Plan Levels, Manual Meeting Links, And Group Leader Onboarding

Kurt Von An: When you released the Zoom integration with Events, I want to mention something. I do a lot with Zoom integration for a popular WordPress plugin in the repository. If you follow that setup guide, you know you need to make a pot of coffee, because you are in for 90 minutes. When I saw your directions for integrating the Events plugin with Zoom, I thought, “Oh, I still have to create a Zoom app. Here comes another 90 minutes.” It was 12 minutes, and I was live on Zoom. You really knocked that out of the park. Events is one of my favorite additions to LifterLMS in a long time.

Brian Hogg: Question from the chat: does it require a particular level of Zoom, or just a link? I do not believe so. The event link I just generated is using the free level of Zoom I have. I do not know all the plan levels off the top of my head. Zoom’s free tier limits meetings to about 40 minutes, so if you do not have a paid plan, you might not be able to run a longer event.

Another angle on the question: if you do not do the direct Zoom integration, you can still drop a Zoom link in the event location details, which will only show for enrolled people in whatever course, lesson, or membership is allowed to see that. You can use a Zoom link without the deep Zoom integration if you want a more simple setup. The integration creates meetings for you automatically. You can also use Google Meet or any other provider by putting a link there.

Another chat question: could I use Events for new group leaders to help onboard them to a training portal? How would they be notified if they are not in the course? Probably create a membership that is only for group leaders. That way they are in a members-only group-leaders area where you can attach events, and they will see them.

Does an event have to be tied to a pre-existing course? No, you do not have to pick anything. We also have the lifter_elements_events shortcode. You can add it to any page and it lists all the events on the site.

A Preview Of What Is Coming After LifterLMS 10.0

Chris Badgett: Thank you, Brian, for the great presentation. Alex, Emily, Kurt too. This is just a snapshot in time. This is LifterLMS 10.0. There have been hundreds of releases before, and we are already working on new cool stuff, like more Group Seats functionality, lesson time tracking, lesson time requirements, and a new Name Your Price add-on for LifterLMS. We have some exciting AI-related work in progress. For example, we are looking at how AI agents can consume course content, along with other AI things. This is a snapshot in time. There is a lot of cool stuff coming down the pipeline.

To clarify a question from the chat: is Events included in Lifetime? Yes. The Events add-on is included in the Infinity Bundle and the Infinity Bundle Lifetime. The Cart Abandonment add-on is included in the Earth Bundle, so all paid bundle plans include Cart Abandonment.

How Office Hours Work For Universe And Infinity Bundle Customers

Kurt Von An: For those not in the know, when you are a Universe or Infinity Bundle customer, you get access to what we call our Office Hours, our mastermind call. We do it every Thursday. Emily and I host it. It is not unlike this, though it is in Zoom, with multiple people on the screen. We take questions and communicate. If you have access to that call, make it a point to show up. You will see it on our calendar, and we send emails out. We have a focus talk for 8 to 10 minutes, then jump into questions and concerns our users have. A lot of our users are agencies, so we end up with layered questions. It is a really valuable thing to do.

Using The Free LifterLMS Core To Build Before You Sell

Kurt Von An: Colleen asked whether we have a monthly plan for startup websites that need to build a community before paying a yearly fee. Colleen is not the first to ask this. LifterLMS is a whole platform, and the core is free. When I review other platforms on the podcast, this comes up a lot. LifterLMS is free. The core is free. You can install LifterLMS, the free version, and start building out your courses, your lessons, and even manage members coming in. That does not cost anything.

When you are ready to generate revenue or tie into your marketing tools, that is when you add the add-ons. Maybe you take three months, six months, to build out your lessons, courses, and membership tiers. Then when you are ready, you activate those add-ons. Everything is there for you when it is time. I am a big fan of the MVP mentality, minimum viable product. Get it ready, bring in a sample audience, build your tribe, and then begin to sell, expand, and scale. That is when those add-ons really come into play.

Continuing Education For Annual Refresher Training

Kurt Von An: Jane had a cool question. Her courses require an annual refresher training. A trainee takes courses one, two, and three, and she would like them to return and take course one again. Is there a chance you would allow a student to make more than one enrollment on the same course? We came out last year with Continuing Education. Brian, can you speak to that?

Brian Hogg: Yes. Continuing Education, as mentioned in the chat, lets you set a time when the course data would be reset or removed. That allows a student to take that same course once again, but it does not remove the certificate they might have earned. They still have that record to show that last year they completed and were certified. Then Continuing Education lets them re-enroll and retake the same course. There is also the Cohorts add-on, if people need to take the course at the same time altogether. That would preserve their quiz taking and progress from last year’s course. Otherwise, Continuing Education is a great option.

Kurt Von An: The Continuing Education add-on answers so much of what people have asked for. Thinking about all the time I have done Office Hours calls: how do we track hours, how do we track credits? Continuing Education brings all of that into one thing. It might not be a huge percentage of users who need to track that information, but for those who do, it is a very big deal. Some of our most successful LifterLMS users are in continuing education: people in the medical field, dentists, and similar. They need a way to track those hours or credits. The Continuing Education add-on lets you pick the name (CEUs, CMUs, CMEs, whatever you want to call it) and track it. I think Continuing Education is one of the best things we came out with in recent history.

Renaming Students, Courses, And Lessons With Loco Translate

Kurt Von An: Someone asked how to remove the words Student and Students because their site is not for students. This comes up frequently. Instead of Courses, you want to call it Workshops. Instead of Students, you want to call them Mentees or Apprentices. Emily has helped a lot of people with changing terminology within their websites.

Emily: What we recommend for changing names like that is Loco Translate. Some things are hardcoded, but there are also features that have been released recently by Brian to change items like the course URLs. Under LifterLMS, Settings, Permalinks, you can change post-type labels like Course, Lesson, and Quiz. To change how the word appears throughout the interface, install the free Loco Translate plugin. It integrates with LifterLMS and we have been using it for longer than I have been around, which is a good solution.

Even though Loco Translate is normally used to translate a site to another language like Spanish, you can also translate English to English. Under the Loco Translate plugin, find LifterLMS, add a new language (English), store it in the custom folder, and then search for words to change. Type the word Student, find every place it appears, and translate it to Member, Apprentice, or whatever term you want. Save changes, and it updates across the site. You will need to scroll through the list and change several strings, because the same term appears in multiple places. The same process works for Courses becoming Classes.

Dynamic Content Visibility For Enrolled And Non-Enrolled Users

Kurt Von An: Colleen asked whether we can add dynamic fields to courses to expand beyond what is default. What is important with this question is defining dynamic, because people have different ideas about what that means. What is cool about LifterLMS is that not just in lessons and courses, but everywhere in the website, you have the ability to use membership restriction tools. You can create content and pick who it is shown to, based on whether they are enrolled, unenrolled, in a membership, in a course, and so on.

Emily: You can change what content is visible on the site, in lessons, or on the homepage of your website. This is one of those advantages of using Sky Pilot and LifterLMS tools out of the box: you get access to these features on all parts of your website. Even if you are using a different theme, like Elementor, you can still use this feature on course pages.

That is our Dynamic Visibility setting. The Course Progress block, for example, is only visible to enrolled users, because you do not need to see your course progress if you are not enrolled in the course yet. You can also change visibility on other things. Say you have a 25% off Black Friday discount promo. You do not want existing students to see that 25% off discount, because they might feel like they missed out. Group the two blocks together, and on the group’s right-hand-side settings, set Enrollment Visibility to only visible to non-enrolled users. The 25% off Black Friday promo will only show to non-enrolled users and visitors.

You can also get creative and have membership-restricted content. Say your site is like Netflix, where everyone gets access to everything, but there is a pro version and a free version. The free tier might see advertisements or not get access to the director’s cut, but they do get access to the course videos. Enrollment visibility lets you say a piece of content is only visible if the user is enrolled in a specific membership. If someone is in the free membership, they see the button to upgrade. If someone is in the pro membership, they see the director exclusive video embedded there. There are many ways to slice and dice it, because it is WordPress. You can even do a complete sales-page redirect if a user is not enrolled in the course.

Where LifterLMS Engagements End And A Real CRM Begins

Kurt Von An: Maria came back with a question on engagements and notifications. When talking to my own clients, I sometimes call it “CRM light.” You can send messages, you can send emails, you can send achievements. But here is the stumbling block: our engagement system is not a conditional-logic CRM tool. You can say, when someone signs up for a course, send a message immediately, another two days later, another five days later, another 20 days later. You can do that. Once it is triggered, it is triggered. There is no conditional logic that says if they access this course, do not send this message. Or if they ask for a refund, do not send this message. Once those things trigger, they trigger.

I encourage people to leverage notifications and engagements and get the most out of LifterLMS. But sooner or later, your eLearning business is going to scale, and it is a good idea to integrate with a CRM tool that expands your abilities in outgoing communications. If I am going to build a sequence of 10 pre-set emails spanned over a year, I am building that into a funnel through a CRM tool with conditional logic, so that if someone does not finish the course, they come out of one sequence and get added to a different one.

Mateos asked, can I create an engagement triggered by the lack of activity in a course? For example, someone did not log in for the whole week. This is a conditional-logic situation I would turn over to a CRM tool. Triggering a reminder based on time is totally appropriate, but we do not have “anytime someone does not sign in for three days, send them a reminder” as a trigger. That is not something you can create today as a LifterLMS engagement.

Serving B2B, Medical Education, And Enterprise Use Cases

Kurt Von An: A question from Somal: how does LifterLMS support B2B businesses, especially managing registrations and subscriptions? “I have designed a new course for medical students and hosted it on Moodle, but I am open to see how LifterLMS can enhance the experience.” As a former Moodle developer, welcome to the bright side. Chris, over to you.

Chris Badgett: Some of the most successful LifterLMS deployments, in terms of financial success, business longevity, and student engagement, that we have noticed in the data are in medical LMS and healthcare use cases. That could be everything from test prep to patient education, to continuing education for doctors, nurses, and other hospital professions. Welcome, like Kurt said, welcome to LifterLMS.

In terms of B2B or B2C, some of the most successful LifterLMS customers are B2B. That could be business to small business or business to big business. If you are offering training at scale to entire hospitals, or multiple hospitals at a time, this would be a perfect use case for the LifterLMS Groups add-on. For medical students, I have seen successful LifterLMS use cases, particularly around passing tests like the MCAT and various other exams. It depends on the niche. To see how LifterLMS can enhance the experience, we will put a link in the chat for a demo site. We charge $1 and you get a demo site for 30 days that has all our tech installed and sample content. The exact demo you are seeing today from everyone on the call is basically the same experience you get in your $1 demo site for 30 days. If you are in the evaluation phase, that is the easiest way to check it out.

Closing Thanks And The LifterLMS Mission

Chris Badgett: I appreciate how engaged everybody was. We had a lot of questions along the way, and we answered some at the end. If we did not get to yours, email us at team@lifterlms.com and we will get your questions answered.

If you already have an Infinity Bundle Lifetime license, thank you for being a lifer with us. You got there first. You locked in lifetime. I encourage you to go check out the new products that released with 10.0: the Events add-on and Cart Abandonment. That is the whole point of Lifetime, and we are honoring the promise that our existing Lifetime users get all the new stuff we keep improving in terms of new add-ons and LifterLMS core.

I want to thank you all for coming. It is great to be with you on the journey. I am lucky enough that my life mission and my company mission is the same, to lift up others through education. I appreciate all of you that came and spent an hour and a half with us celebrating LifterLMS 10.0. Kurt, Emily, Jason, Alex, Brian, I appreciate y’all live on the call. There are more LifterLMS team members not here with us live, like Dom, Alex, and Nadia. We appreciate them as well. It is great to be with you on the journey. Thanks for coming. That is it for the LifterLMS 10.0 launch party. We appreciate you. Thanks for all the kind words in the chat and the great questions. We hope you have a great rest of your day. Take care.