How to Manage Multiple LifterLMS Courses from One Place

Adding courses, lessons, quizzes, assignments and more…how users can manage courses and other things using an Excel-like spreadsheet quickly and easily. Bulk editing data, applying search filters, duplicating courses, adding new courses, export data to CSV, users will learn how managing courses is fun with Smart Manager.

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How To Manage Multiple LifterLMS Courses From One Place

This webinar shows how to manage multiple LifterLMS courses from one spreadsheet-style dashboard using Smart Manager by Store Apps. You will learn how to inline-edit, duplicate, bulk update, and export courses, lessons, quizzes, orders, coupons, and users across the whole site, run advanced searches, save custom views for your team, and apply percentage discounts to course prices in one action.

What You’ll Learn

• Why a spreadsheet-style dashboard beats opening one course at a time on any large LifterLMS site
• How Smart Manager auto-detects every LifterLMS post type, including courses, sections, lessons, quizzes, engagements, memberships, coupons, and orders
• How to bulk edit hundreds of records with advanced search, saved views, background processing, and one-click exports
• How to slash prices, copy fields, drag-fill values, and move lessons between courses without touching the database
• How Store Apps prices Smart Manager and the standing 25% discount for LifterLMS customers

Key Takeaways

• Reach for Smart Manager the moment the site holds more courses than you can comfortably open in tabs
• Use advanced search plus bulk edit to apply category, difficulty, status, or pricing changes across the whole catalog in one pass
• Save custom views per team member so an instructor or a stock manager only sees the columns and rows that belong to their work
• Use the Calculate action for percentage discounts on regular and sale prices, avoiding manual math errors
• Add one record for any new custom post type or meta field, then let Smart Manager read the structure from the database and give it a dashboard

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Why This Webinar Is Different

Chris Badgett: Hello and welcome to another complimentary training from LifterLMS. I am super excited. I have got the good folks from Store Apps Smart Manager over here. It is Akshat and Tyrone. Welcome to the call. I am really excited to get into the innovation you folks have built around managing courses more at scale from an Excel-like interface.

We are going to do a little presentation about that. I would encourage everybody on the call to ask questions. If you are watching this in the Facebook group, feel free to drop comments below the live stream and I will keep an eye on those.

Akshat: First of all, thank you for having us on the show. It has been great to connect with all the awesome people who are attending. This is actually what we consider a normal webinar in our lives, where people come to talk about traffic acquisition or getting sales or conversions. This one is more about how people can better manage their time and how they can save cost. We hope that people here are tuned to something new, something different or exciting.

What Smart Manager Is

Akshat: Tyrone will present a product demo of Smart Manager and how LifterLMS courses can be managed using it. Before we go into the demo, a quick background on Store Apps. We are official WooCommerce extension developers, and we have been in this business for the past 11 years. Smart Manager was the first product we launched.

We saw clients with 150 or 200 products who had to go into each product one at a time to change price, description, or anything else. We knew that pain would only grow. Ten years down the line there are thousands, then millions of stores with catalogs in the hundreds and thousands. We wanted to give users a way to manage everything from one place, using something they already knew.

Why A Spreadsheet Is The Right Interface

Akshat: We chose a spreadsheet as the model because Excel shows the data in rows and columns and makes it easy to edit and to make changes. That is how Smart Manager came into existence. We began with products, then added orders, coupons, and any WordPress post type you name. Subscriptions, bookings, memberships, all can be managed from one place, whether you want to edit and make changes directly, export, or duplicate. We also have full support for all LifterLMS courses, quizzes, assignments, and lessons.

Zero Setup For LifterLMS Post Types

Tyrone: In Smart Manager we have tried to make the job simpler for the store owner. When a site launches with two products or two courses it is fine, but once the site grows it becomes very difficult and time consuming to manage those things. That is what Smart Manager is for.

Smart Manager is smart because it will automatically detect all the custom post types. LifterLMS creates custom post types like courses, quizzes, engagements, memberships, and everything else. You do not have to do anything. Once your data is there, Smart Manager will automatically detect it from your WordPress database and let you manage it. It is zero setup, zero configuration. You just need to activate the plugin, and you are ready to use it.

The Smart Manager Dashboard At A Glance

Tyrone: This is the Smart Manager dashboard. It has a separate menu in your WordPress dashboard. Once you activate it, you do a one-time connection if you are on the Pro version to authenticate with Store Apps. After that you will see this dashboard. When WooCommerce is active on the site, Smart Manager will land on the Products dashboard by default.

The entire view that looks like a table or an Excel sheet is what we call a dashboard. There are a few layers to it. The first bar is the navigation bar. From here you can navigate to any dashboard, because Smart Manager lists every custom post type it detects. Instead of moving between WordPress screens, you switch between post types inside one page.

The Action Bar And The Grid

Tyrone: The navigation bar carries the search and the settings. Below that is the action bar, which holds every action you can take on the data. Add, delete, any CRUD operation, bulk edit, export, show and hide columns. A number of things can be done from here.

The main grid below is where your actual data lives. It behaves like Excel. You can rearrange columns, sort them by clicking the header, and the sort runs at the database level. That means you can sort and immediately export the sorted list.

Opening The LifterLMS Courses Dashboard

Tyrone: Let us go to Courses for LifterLMS. I have created some sample courses here. Smart Manager will display all the courses and their meta information. The detailed meta information is segregated into the different post types LifterLMS creates.

By default Smart Manager loads a set of columns that it thinks are useful, some from the post table, some from post meta, and some from the taxonomies. You do not have to configure any of that. You can start immediately.

Creating A Course Inline

Tyrone: To add a course from Smart Manager, you specify the number of courses you want to create. If I create one course, it will add an entry with a placeholder title. I will just type a name, say Test Course. Set the status to Draft. If I need to assign a category, I can say it is a Writing course, and save.

Smart Manager is not as detailed as the full LifterLMS editor from underneath, but it is enough for the overview-level work. Once I save, the course is saved. It is in draft, but if I switch it to publish it goes live on the store.

Duplicating A Course In One Click

Tyrone: Instead of creating a new one, sometimes I want to duplicate an existing course. I select the course and click Duplicate. Smart Manager can duplicate all the courses in the database at once, or a specific selection. It duplicates records at the post and related taxonomy level. It does not touch the custom table level, but for a basic duplicate it covers what you need.

Running Long Operations In The Background

Tyrone: When I press Duplicate, Smart Manager offers to continue in the background. If you are duplicating an entire store with 500 or 600 courses, it will take a couple of minutes. Rather than stay stuck on the screen, you click Continue in Background. The process finishes on its own, and Smart Manager emails the admin address to tell you the job is done.

You can see it has already created a duplicate course with the text Copy prepended in the title, just like WordPress does.

Inline Editing Just Like Excel

Tyrone: Every value in the grid edits inline. Change the title to Copy 1, change the taxonomy, add a difficulty level of Beginner, and you see small red icons appear on the cells. Those are your unsaved changes. Click Save and everything commits at once. You can queue up any number of changes across the grid before saving them.

Editing Complex Fields Like Instructors

Tyrone: For complex fields like instructors, which are stored in serialized or JSON format, Smart Manager gives you a JSON editor in the cell. You can extend it and add your own mapping through a JSON map file, and Smart Manager will respect that mapping and give you editable fields based on the structure.

Deep-Editing And Front-End Preview Links

Tyrone: Each row also carries edit and view icons. The edit icon opens the course in a new tab in the standard WordPress editor. This is there for the few fields you might want to edit that Smart Manager does not surface in the grid. The view icon opens the course on the front of the site, so you can check whether it looks proper and whether any CSS changes are needed.

Editing Course Content Inline

Tyrone: Just like the WordPress editor, Smart Manager includes a full visual editor for the long-form content fields. If you want to edit the description or the excerpt of a course, the editor opens inline in the grid. You do not have to open the course editing screen to change HTML content. You can edit it right here.

Uploading Featured Images From The Grid

Tyrone: Featured images live in the grid too. The row shows the featured image that is set on the course. To upload a new one, click the image cell. Smart Manager opens the standard WordPress media library. Pick or upload an image, and it is attached to the course. The whole thing is one click.

Basic Full-Text Search

Tyrone: Once you have data in the grid, the real question is how to search and how to act in bulk. That is where Smart Manager really becomes your workhorse. The default search is a Google-style full text search. Type a word like photography and Smart Manager searches every column, returning anything that matches.

Full text search is broad on purpose. It is a starting point, not a way to build a precise action list.

Advanced Search With Grouped Conditions

Tyrone: For precise work, toggle on Advanced Search. Advanced Search lets you build complex conditions. Say the difficulty is Intermediate or Beginner, and the course title contains Photography. Smart Manager auto-populates every field on the course, so you do not have to remember field names. Pick Difficulty, pick Beginner, and click Search to see every course at that level.

You can layer additional conditions. Add a filter for title contains Free, and now you see beginner-level free courses. You can also add a second group of conditions to combine ANDs and ORs across groups. Group one for pricing rules, group two for topic rules, then search.

Bulk Editing The Selected Rows Or The Whole Search Result

Tyrone: Once you have a filtered list, the point is usually to update it. Check the header checkbox at the top of the grid. Smart Manager asks whether you want to update the selected items or every item in the search result. By default the grid loads 50 items per page, but the header checkbox can act on all matching records, not only the visible page.

Click Bulk Edit. You can set the status of every selected course to Draft in one action. Click Update, and Smart Manager offers Continue in Background again for larger jobs. On a small run, it finishes immediately, and the affected courses drop out of the front-end view.

Show And Hide Columns To Focus The View

Tyrone: The grid holds many columns by default. If the workflow is narrower than that, use Show or Hide Columns to prune the view. Remove Author, remove Content, remove the edit-link column, keep Title, Status, and Difficulty. Now the grid shows only the columns that matter for the job at hand.

Recent Dashboards Persist Between Switches

Tyrone: Smart Manager is smart enough to remember your last view. If you switch from Courses to Products, and you have not saved anything, moving back to Courses shows the same layout. Only an active Advanced Search is cleared between switches. The recent dashboards list also builds itself, so switching between Coupons, Orders, and Products stays a click away.

Saving Custom Views For Your Team

Tyrone: For anything more permanent, save the layout as a Custom View. Excel has custom views. Smart Manager builds on the same idea. Give the view a name, say Courses for Akshat, and choose whether it is publicly available or private. Publicly available means anyone with Smart Manager access can see it. Private means only you and whoever you grant access to.

Restricting Views To Specific User Roles

Tyrone: Open the view in Settings. Smart Manager can grant a view to any WordPress role, including every LifterLMS role like Instructor, Student, and LMS Manager. Those roles are auto-detected. You can also grant it to specific user emails on newer builds.

Once the view is saved, that team member logs in and only sees the dashboards and columns they are meant to work with. A stock manager sees stock work. An instructor sees courses. No one has to swim through the whole admin.

Exporting Data With One Click

Tyrone: Exports work the same way across every dashboard. Take Orders as an example. Smart Manager shows the LifterLMS order status in a colored pattern so completed and pending payments are easy to scan. Click Export and Smart Manager returns a CSV of every order in the current view.

If I only need the orders for a single day or a single status, I build the search first and then export. The export honors the grid state. You export a snapshot of exactly what you see.

Trashing And Permanently Deleting Records

Tyrone: Back on Courses, the delete flow works the same as WordPress. Move a duplicate row to the trash, confirm the warning, and it is trashed. Smart Manager includes a hidden setting that lets you view trashed records inside a dashboard, so you can untrash a course you sent to trash by mistake. Permanent delete removes the record from the database with no undo, so use it with intent.

Sorting The Grid For Export

Tyrone: Sorting works on any column. Click the column header to sort ascending, click again to sort descending. Sorting runs at the database level, so it is fast on large catalogs. If you sort by featured image, the courses with an image group together. Sort in the format you want, then export, and the CSV comes out in that order.

Managing Sections, Lessons, And Coupons

Tyrone: LifterLMS also has coupons that you give to customers for a discount on courses, and Smart Manager gives coupons the same dashboard as every other post type. Sections are the same. Each section row carries a link back to the parent course. If you want to know how many sections belong to a course, search the section dashboard by course ID and export the result.

Lessons behave the same way. In this demo I have grown the lesson list to about 99 rows. Load More at the bottom of the grid keeps pulling records in an infinite scroll. Every lesson row shows its title, its parent course, and the publish date, so you can filter to find one lesson inside a big catalog fast.

Working With Missing Or Custom Meta Fields

Tyrone: Sometimes a field you need does not show up in the grid. Click the column search, look for the field by name, and it will appear if the value has ever been set on a record. Smart Manager reads its columns from the database, so if a meta field or an add-on field has never been written to, there is nothing for it to detect yet.

The fix is straightforward. Edit that field once, on any single course or lesson, through the standard WordPress editor. That writes one entry to the database. Reload Smart Manager and the field now appears in the grid, with the correct data type, ready to edit and to bulk update.

Editing And Deleting Saved Views

Tyrone: You always retain control over the views you have created. Open a saved view and you can change its columns, rename it, or delete it outright. If a view was only a one-time filter, delete it and Smart Manager will bring you back to the default dashboard. If a view needs a new column, add it and save the view again.

Handling WooCommerce Orders Alongside LifterLMS

Chris Badgett: To clarify a question from the audience. LifterLMS has its own e-commerce system, and it also has an optional integration with WooCommerce, which has its own orders. If we are selling LifterLMS courses through WooCommerce and also selling non-LifterLMS products, can we do all the order work in Smart Manager?

Tyrone: Yes. The LifterLMS Orders dashboard shows LifterLMS orders. The WooCommerce Orders dashboard shows WooCommerce orders. Both live inside Smart Manager, both use the same grid and the same actions, and any post type on the site works the same way.

Beyond WooCommerce, A Manager For All Of WordPress

Chris Badgett: You started with WooCommerce, is that right, or where did this start?

Tyrone: We started with WP eCommerce back in 2011. WooCommerce launched in 2012. Once WooCommerce took off we moved onto it. From there we went one notch higher. We now handle any post type, so the tool is really a manager for WordPress. If I want to manage media, I open the media dashboard and I can delete files in bulk, edit alt text in bulk, and update captions in bulk. Pages, posts, everything is manageable through the same interface.

Auto-Detecting BuddyBoss And Toolset Post Types

Chris Badgett: A viewer question. He has a database of books and learning materials for a certain job type, built on BuddyBoss with a lot of custom post types and custom fields created by Toolset. How far can Smart Manager go there?

Tyrone: It should detect any post type. That is how it works. Smart Manager depends on the presence of data. If you have one record for a BuddyBoss post type, or a custom post type you built with Toolset, add that one record from the normal WordPress UI. From that point Smart Manager reads the shape from the database, detects the data types and the taxonomies, and lets you manage the post type without any extra setup.

Managing LifterLMS Quizzes

Chris Badgett: We had a question about quizzes. Do you have any quiz data you can show?

Tyrone: I have one quiz in the sample data. It appears as a Quizzes dashboard alongside every other LifterLMS post type. You can inline edit, search, bulk edit, and export quizzes the same way as courses.

Excel-Style Drag Fill To Copy Values

Tyrone: One more thing worth showing. If I need to copy the same value into many rows, I select the value and drag the corner down, just like Excel. Smart Manager fills the value down through every row I drag over, and I save the whole set at once. It is purely like Excel. The one thing not there yet is formulas. We are working on formulas too, so that if you already know Excel, there is nothing to relearn for Smart Manager.

Prepend, Append, Search And Replace On A Field

Tyrone: For text fields there are more options in Bulk Edit than a simple set-value. Choose a field like Title. You can set a new value, prepend text to the current value, append text, or run a search-and-replace across every selected record. All of it applies to the whole search result or the selected rows.

Copying A Value From Another Field Or Course

Tyrone: There is also a Copy From action. Copy the value of another field into this field, or copy the value from another course into this course. This helps when a report or an import wrote data into the wrong field, or when you need to move a value from one field to another for every record on the site. Point the action at the source, click Update, and the field is copied.

Moving Lessons Between Courses

Chris Badgett: Claire asked whether you can move content from one course to another, say a lesson from course A to course B.

Tyrone: Yes, through the parent course ID. Every lesson row shows the course ID it belongs to. Change the ID, save, and the lesson moves to that course. If I want to move many lessons at once, I drag-fill the new course ID across the whole selection, save it, and every affected lesson now belongs to the target course.

Slashing Prices In Bulk With The Calculate Action

Tyrone: During a festive season most stores want to slash prices. Coupons work for that, but for outright price cuts on the products themselves, math errors creep in fast. Smart Manager has a Calculate action for exactly this.

Say the sale price is blank. First, set the sale price to the regular price. Then decrease the sale price by 50 percent. Smart Manager runs both actions in sequence in a single Update. It takes a regular price of 11, sets the sale price to 11, then reduces it to 5.50. No calculator, no per-course math, no spreadsheet on the side.

Cleaning Up Junk Data At Scale

Tyrone: Another useful pattern is site maintenance. Many sites start out with a lot of test data. Test courses, test orders, test products used to check how the site looks. WordPress will let you trash 20 or 50 rows at a time through Screen Options, which is painful when the test set is 10,000 rows.

Smart Manager can display trashed records, search by status, and delete every match in one action. You do not have to go to the database level, and you do not have to sit through a 200-page click loop.

Managing WordPress Users And Roles

Chris Badgett: Is there anything for user management in here?

Tyrone: Yes, the Users dashboard works the same way. Change a user’s role from the grid, including any LifterLMS role like Administrator, Author, or LMS Manager. Edit any user field inline, export the list, and search by role. If you run email marketing outside WordPress and you want to export every student on the site so you can announce a new course, run the search and export from the Users dashboard.

Where To Get Smart Manager

Tyrone: Smart Manager lives at storeapps.org. Along with Smart Manager, Store Apps ships Pulse Variation Manager for bulk creating and editing WooCommerce variations, Butler for cross-gateway sales reporting, and several other WooCommerce extensions.

On pricing, the Smart Manager page has annual plans for one site and five sites, and lifetime plans for one site at $479 and five sites at $499. Once you come from LifterLMS you get a standing 25% discount on any plan, and there is a separate offer for agency licenses on larger builds.

What Is Coming Next

Tyrone: Two updates are close. First, Smart Manager will get a dedicated dashboard for custom taxonomies, including LifterLMS categories, tags, and difficulties, so managing taxonomies feels the same as managing post types. Second, we are working on an Undo, so you can review a history log of the changes done in Smart Manager and roll back a specific change. It is not a full audit-log plugin, but it will cover the common case of reverting a recent bulk update.

Closing Thanks

Chris Badgett: Tyrone and Akshat, great presentation. I appreciate that. This is an amazing tool. Thank you for integrating with LifterLMS. Just yesterday I was talking with someone building what looked like a Udemy clone. They are migrating off a different LMS with around a thousand courses, and they need to do exactly this kind of bulk work. So thanks for your contribution to the space, not only to LifterLMS but to WooCommerce and WordPress. WordPress is awesome, and what makes it special is what the community brings to make it more usable.

Akshat: Thank you for having us. It was a pleasure to integrate with LifterLMS. We are on a mission to provide as many valuable products as we can to the community. LifterLMS is one of the greatest platforms for courses, and it was really good to integrate with it. If anyone has questions, reach out to Store Apps for support.

Chris Badgett: Thank you very much. Thank you to everybody for coming. I hope everyone has a great rest of your day. Take care.