How Your WordPress LMS Website Can Benefit from Gutenberg and WordPress 5.0
Learn about the new WordPress editor called Gutenberg and what it means for your WordPress LMS website. Discover how LifterLMS is not just Gutenberg compatible, but also builds on top of WordPress 5.0 with a powerful blocks based system so you can build custom LifterLMS course layouts, lesson layouts, and more.
How LifterLMS Built Gutenberg Blocks for WordPress 5.0
This LifterLMS training breaks down the Gutenberg block editor that shipped in WordPress 5.0 and how LifterLMS built native course, lesson, and pricing blocks on top of it. Chris Badgett and Thomas Levy walk through a live course build, show how block visibility rules restrict content to enrolled students, and answer real audience questions about theme and plugin compatibility during the transition.
What You’ll Learn
- What the Gutenberg block editor is and how it differs from the classic WordPress editor
- Which building blocks make up a LifterLMS course, including course information, the syllabus, access plans, and the progress bar
- How to restrict a block, like a course syllabus, so it is only visible to enrolled students
- How Gutenberg reduces the number of plugins needed to customize a course or lesson layout
- How LifterLMS blocks work alongside page builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder, and Divi
Key Takeaways
- Test any major WordPress update, including a new editor, on a staging site before rolling it out to a live LMS
- Use LifterLMS’s native course and lesson blocks to reorder, hide, or remove default page elements without a page builder
- Apply LifterLMS visibility rules to restrict blocks like the syllabus to specific courses or membership levels
- Keep plugins and themes updated incrementally rather than letting updates pile up for years
- Treat a page builder and Gutenberg as complementary, not competing, when you want a specific custom section
Frequently Asked Questions
In most cases, yes. The Gutenberg core team built it so that metaboxes, the settings panels plugins like LifterLMS rely on, continue working after the update. The real risk is plugin and theme compatibility, which is why testing on a staging site first matters more than the editor change itself.
Yes. WP Fusion’s lead developer confirmed the plugin is ready for Gutenberg, which means it is ready to work alongside LifterLMS and Gutenberg together.
As a general rule, yes, and that includes WordPress core itself. Back everything up, test the updates on staging, and treat a major release like this one as a good moment to update everything together rather than letting individual plugins fall behind.
The sidebar is not part of the Gutenberg course editor itself. It is managed separately through your theme’s widget areas. LifterLMS ships sidebar widgets like course progress and course syllabus that you place into your theme’s course or lesson sidebar from the WordPress widgets screen.
Yes, through a free plugin called LifterLMS Blocks, which adds Gutenberg compatibility ahead of the official release. It is still being refined, and feedback on what is missing is welcome.
Themes with a lot of built-in layout features will likely need more work to integrate directly with Gutenberg. Simpler themes that mainly offer layout settings, like sidebar and header options, tend to work well with little to no issue. Astra, OceanWP, and Launchpad were all working with Gutenberg at the time of this recording.
The Gutenberg plugin lets you keep using the classic editor on a post by post or course by course basis. Check the dropdown next to the Add New button, or the option inside an existing post, to confirm you selected Gutenberg rather than the classic editor.
LifterLMS add-ons that look for a short code, like the Gravity Forms integration, scan the saved content of the page for that short code. The mechanism that saves content works the same way in both Elementor and Gutenberg, so it should work, though this specific combination had not been directly tested at the time of the question.
Full Webinar Transcript
What Gutenberg Is and Why WordPress 5.0 Matters
Gutenberg is the major new feature rolling out in WordPress 5.0, and it is a brand new editor for WordPress. If you are inside the WordPress community, you have probably been hearing about it for a while. If you are focused on growing your online course business or membership site rather than WordPress itself, you may not have heard of it yet.
The new editor is very different from the classic visual editor, the TinyMCE editor that has stayed mostly the same for a long time. That older editor looks like the tool you use to write an email or publish a blog post, with the familiar bold and italic buttons. Gutenberg replaces that with a block based editing experience.
It has been in development for quite some time, and it matters that plugins and themes adapt to it and move forward with WordPress 5.0. The goal of Gutenberg is to make building websites and custom layouts easier, and to make the editing experience closer to what you see is what you get. That is going to be an adjustment for people who have used WordPress for a long time. For people just starting out in the WordPress LMS space after the update rolls out, there will not even be an adjustment. They will just walk in and start using it, and it should be easier for them from day one.
Who Builds Gutenberg and How LifterLMS Is Embracing It
WordPress core, the open source software you download or that comes included with your hosting, is developed by a large community of contributors, many of whom work for Automattic and others who are independent community members. Gutenberg is rolling directly into WordPress core and is primarily built by that same core contributor community.
This open source model, where a large community of people contributes to the core project, is one of the things that makes WordPress such a powerful option for a self-hosted website or a self-hosted learning management system. Companies like LifterLMS then build additional functionality on top of what core WordPress provides.
So to be clear about who is behind this change: WordPress itself is behind the Gutenberg update, and LifterLMS, as the plugin suite you use to turn your website into a full learning management system rather than just a place to publish posts and pages, is behind adapting to the new system. That means staying compatible with Gutenberg while also giving you more power because of it.
How Gutenberg Changes Course Layout Customization
The reason WordPress is making this change comes down to making websites easier to build. There is a long standing concept in web development called WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get. When you write a blog post or page content in classic WordPress, what you see in the editor is not a clear representation of what actually shows up on the front end of your website. Gutenberg is designed to close that gap, so what you see while editing gets much closer to what visitors actually see.
The experience is built to make it easier for non-technical people to build what they want, while also letting plugins and themes add more options to the process. The success of page building tools like Beaver Builder, Elementor, and the Divi Builder shows that this is what people want: to see what they are building as they build it, and to customize layouts without needing to be a web developer or write code.
For LifterLMS specifically, this means you can start customizing the layout of each course, the building blocks that make up a course, to whatever you want. If you want to use only certain pieces, or reorder how a course is laid out by default, you can do that.
Testing Gutenberg Safely on a Staging Site First
There was no official release date for WordPress 5.0 at the time of this recording, though a mid to late January release was the estimate circulating, not an official one. Software releases balance shipping on schedule against making sure a change of this magnitude, one that touches a large share of the internet, is in good shape before it rolls out.
Thomas Levy: There are a lot of plugins out there, and we cannot guarantee that installing Gutenberg will not cause a conflict with one we are not aware of. Staging sites are really important, and it is extremely easy to set one up today. If your host does not provide one, consider moving to a host that does, and always test on staging first. Please do not submit a support ticket that says “Chris told me to install Gutenberg and now everything is on fire.” Use staging first.
Chris Badgett: Thank you for that public service announcement. This is also going to be more of a process than a single event. As Gutenberg rolls out and LifterLMS adds more features related to it, things will keep evolving over time. Engage with it, and if you have feedback on how it is working, let us know.
How to Try Gutenberg Before It Officially Ships
You can already start using Gutenberg on your site right now. The first time I used it, I just pasted some content into a page, and I found it genuinely easy and fun to use. It is worth playing with it soon, just so you are ready when the official release lands.
Inside your WordPress dashboard, a prompt lets you try Gutenberg as a plugin ahead of the WordPress 5.0 release. Install it on a staging site first, get comfortable with the interface, and you will already be ready by the time it ships as the default editor.
How to Add Your First Blocks to a WordPress Page
Starting with a plain WordPress page, away from any LifterLMS-specific settings, shows the new editor at its simplest. Gutenberg is not the WYSIWYG box you are used to. WordPress was originally built as a blogging platform, so the editor first prompts you for a title, then lets you start writing. The real shift happens when you open the block inserter, the plus button, where you can add blocks to your content one at a time: an image, another paragraph, or a gallery of images.
A Common Blocks section includes headings, audio, quotes, lists, and more. A Formatting section lets you insert code, drop in the classic editor if you want it, or add custom HTML, along with pull quotes and tables. You can even bring in your existing widgets, and there is a Layout section where you can introduce columns.
The Media and Embed Options Built Into Gutenberg
Gutenberg ships with a long list of embed blocks: Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, WordPress.com, SoundCloud, Spotify, Flickr, Vimeo, Animoto, CollegeHumor, Dailymotion, Funny or Die, Hulu, Imgur, Issuu, Kickstarter, Meetup, Mixcloud, Photobucket, Polldaddy, Reddit, ReverbNation, Screencast, Scribd, SlideShare, SmugMug, Speaker Deck, TED, Tumblr, VideoPress, and WordPress TV. If you are building multimedia training content for a course, that is a lot of options for getting outside media directly inside your lesson content.
Paragraph Block Settings and Basic Layout Controls
Every block carries its own settings alongside the content itself. A paragraph block, for example, lets you set a background color and a text color, add a drop cap so the first letter of a paragraph displays large in an old-school typography style, and change the font size. If you have worked with page builders like Beaver Builder, Elementor, or Divi, this will feel familiar, a basic page builder built around individual blocks, each with its own settings panel.
Opening a Course in the Gutenberg Editor
Switching a LifterLMS course over to the Gutenberg editor, with the WordPress sidebar hidden through the full screen mode setting, is a good way to get a feel for the interface. It takes a little exploring to get comfortable, since it is a genuinely new editor, but it is intuitive once you start clicking around.
On the front end, a course still shows the pieces you would expect: the access plans, the course information, the course description, and the syllabus below it. Opening that same course in the back end shows the featured image using the standard WordPress featured image field, and the familiar Launch Course Builder button that jumps into the regular LifterLMS course building experience for adding lessons and quizzes. Jumping back out to the WordPress page for the course is where Gutenberg’s blocks live.
The Building Blocks That Make Up a LifterLMS Course
Building a brand new course from scratch shows the individual pieces, or blocks, that make up a course in LifterLMS: the title, the course description, course information, access plans, a progress bar, and a continue button. Selecting any one of these blocks opens its own settings panel on the right.
The course information block, for instance, lets you change the title heading, add an estimated completion time, and hide elements you do not want to display, like course categories. These are the same pieces LifterLMS has always shown by default on a course page, now exposed as individually configurable blocks instead of a single fixed template.
Restricting the Course Syllabus to Enrolled Students
The course syllabus block has a feature some course creators care about a lot: keeping the syllabus private rather than fully public. By default the syllabus links are all live and clickable on the front end. Using LifterLMS’s visibility rules, you can set the syllabus block to only display to enrolled students, and you can scope that enrollment check to this specific course, to any course, or to any of a selected set of courses or memberships. That gives you real membership-style restriction control over what shows on a public course page versus what only enrolled students ever see.
Building a New Course From Scratch With Gutenberg Blocks
Starting a brand new course and adding the default blocks shows how flexible the layout has become. If you want the progress bar positioned higher on the page than its default spot, right above the first paragraph, you can drag it there directly. You cannot move a block above the course title itself, but everything below that is fair game to reorder to match how you actually want to present a course, rather than the stock LifterLMS layout order.
Removing Course Elements You Do Not Want to Display
One of the most frequent feature requests LifterLMS has heard is how to remove default elements entirely, like course information, from a course page. With Gutenberg blocks, that is a one-click fix: select the block you do not want and use the trash icon to remove it, rather than needing custom code or a support request to hide it.
What Reusable Blocks Are and How They Differ From Access Plans
Thomas Levy: Reusable blocks are a core Gutenberg feature, not something specific to LifterLMS. If you customize a block, say an introductory paragraph you want repeated across every blog post, or a content upgrade with a download link or an email opt-in, you can save it as a reusable block and drop that same customized block anywhere. Page builders like Beaver Builder and Elementor have a similar concept, sometimes called global rows.
It does not really make sense for something like an access plan, since access plans are not that customizable to begin with and are already effectively reusable as configured. Reusable blocks are more useful for something you have heavily customized yourself, like a repeated call to action.
Creating an Access Plan While Building a Course
Some of a course’s settings, like access plans, live in metaboxes below the block editor rather than as blocks themselves. Creating a new access plan there, for example a one-time payment that expires after one year, and publishing it, starts to fill in the course you are building. Back in the Gutenberg editor, the blocks reflect that content taking shape, including a small LifterLMS settings panel in the block editor’s top toolbar.
Will Your Current Site Still Work After Gutenberg Ships
Chris Badgett: Whether everything working on your site now will keep working once Gutenberg ships is really a question of testing in your own staging environment, since it depends entirely on which plugins and theme you are running. Nobody’s goal is to break your website. There has been a fair amount of fear-mongering around this release, and no one’s website is going to explode.
That said, with any major change, always test your stuff. As a website owner it is your responsibility to make sure things work. Use best practices, test in staging first, and if you run an e-commerce or LifterLMS checkout, make sure that checkout does not break. In general, not much is actually changing under the hood. The biggest effect on most plugins and themes is around how metaboxes work, and the Gutenberg core team has done a genuinely good job making sure metaboxes continue to work after the update. Mostly this is a user experience change: you, as a course creator or content creator, will have a different experience of creating content, but the underlying site should keep working.
If you are relatively technically savvy, which you probably are if you own or manage a website, it will be an adjustment, but a manageable one. When you do see a problem, contact the developer of the specific plugin or theme involved. If it is a LifterLMS issue, contact LifterLMS. Everyone building on WordPress wants their plugins and themes to keep working, so that ecosystem is actively working through this together. Testing on staging and reporting issues to the right developer is the best path through a release of this size.
How LifterLMS Works With Gutenberg and Page Builders Together
Chris Badgett: In some ways, what LifterLMS is building with Gutenberg is itself a kind of page builder, giving you the power to create a custom, module based layout. That said, it is not as evolved as a dedicated page builder like Beaver Builder, Elementor, or Divi. Some page builders have already announced their own plans for integrating with Gutenberg. My understanding, from WordPress’s own leadership, is that the long term goal is for page builders to build on top of Gutenberg through a shared, common API. People are already doing great things combining page builders with LifterLMS today.
Thomas Levy: Functionally, Gutenberg replaces the WordPress editor, and page builders also replace the WordPress editor. If you are already using a page builder, you open your edit course or edit post screen and build your content there instead of typing into the classic editor box. That workflow should continue working the same way it does today. If you are already using LifterLMS with a page builder, Gutenberg most likely does not change anything for you in the simplest version of that question, though it is still worth checking with your specific page builder about their own Gutenberg plans.
Why You Should Update Your Plugins and Themes Incrementally
Chris Badgett: As a general rule, yes, you should plan to update WordPress core, your plugins, and your theme for this release. Back everything up, test the updates in a staging environment first, and especially for a major release like WordPress 5.0, treat it as a good opportunity to update everything across the board once testing confirms it works.
Thomas Levy: There can be a tendency to avoid updating things out of fear of breaking something, but the more you follow that instinct, the more complicated an update eventually becomes. If you update regularly and test in staging as you go, updates stay incremental and far less scary. If you have not updated LifterLMS since a version from two years ago, that backlog of missed updates becomes a much bigger, more overwhelming project than staying current would have been. Good testing practices are what actually make the question of whether to update stop being scary. Services exist that can automate checkout and enrollment testing so you can confirm an update has not broken anything, or you can test manually, which is what we do ourselves.
The LifterLMS Blocks Plugin for Early Gutenberg Support
Thomas Levy: LifterLMS Blocks is a free plugin we built specifically to add Gutenberg compatibility ahead of the official WordPress 5.0 release, and it is what is being demonstrated live in this training. It has not been widely publicized yet, and we expect it to fold into LifterLMS core once WordPress 5.0 actually ships. There are still a couple of rough edges around how some of our existing metaboxes interact with it, and those are actively being worked through.
If you search for LifterLMS Blocks, you can install it right now on a test site and try it against the Gutenberg plugin yourself. Feedback is genuinely welcome. We are a small team building an ambitious product, and we cannot think of every edge case ourselves. If you find something that is not working the way you would expect, especially around a specific integration like a page builder or a form plugin, let us know so it can get fixed before the official release.
How Themes Are Adapting to Gutenberg
Themes need to look at Gutenberg compatibility too. Astra, a popular theme in the LifterLMS community, was already working well with Gutenberg at the time of this recording, and OceanWP and Launchpad were as well. As a general pattern, themes that are more feature rich are likely to need more work to integrate directly with Gutenberg, while themes that mainly offer a handful of layout settings, like sidebar position and header options, tend to work fine with little to no issue.
This mirrors what has already happened with page builders and themes: as page builders like Beaver Builder, Elementor, and Divi have matured, the amount a theme itself needs to do has gotten smaller. That is part of why a minimal, speed focused theme like Astra has become popular. You can use it with a page builder for a fully custom layout, or use it on its own with Gutenberg to build custom layouts and columns without one.
Good Hosts for Setting Up a Staging Environment
A number of WordPress hosts already offer built-in staging: WP Engine, Kinsta, GoDaddy’s managed WordPress, and DreamHost among them. If your business runs on top of WordPress as a real web application, an online school or training platform, rather than just a brochure site, having a staging environment is worth prioritizing. If your host does not offer one-click staging but you have access to cPanel or a file manager, you can still set one up yourself.
How Gutenberg Lets You Customize the Lesson Page Too
The lesson page does not yet have as many block based options as the course page, but this is where Gutenberg gets genuinely exciting for LifterLMS. Right now, a plugin adds a set of elements before and after the lesson content by default: things like a back to course link at the top, a mark complete or take quiz button, and navigation at the bottom.
That default layout has to make a general assumption about what most people want, and it will not be right for everyone. Building an individually configurable option for every one of those pieces the traditional way would mean a lot of extra database calls, and database calls slow a website down. Gutenberg gives LifterLMS a way to ship a sensible default template for the lesson page, the same way it already does for the course page, while letting you delete what you do not want, reorder what is left, and adjust visibility, all without writing code or adding another plugin.
Without Gutenberg, getting that same level of customization today requires a couple of extra plugins on top of LifterLMS. Some sites already run 60 or more plugins trying to solve exactly this kind of layout problem. Gutenberg lets LifterLMS add a meaningful amount of native customization, roughly a dozen or so new configurable options, without needing to build a full page builder into the plugin itself, and without adding to that plugin count. It will not have every feature of Beaver Builder, Elementor, or Divi in this first version, but it gives every LifterLMS site a working, drag and drop layout option out of the box, with the door open to a dedicated page builder later if you want to go further.
Using Gutenberg and Elementor Together
A LifterLMS site owner attending the training, Jonathan, shared how he combines Gutenberg and Elementor in practice: start a page in Gutenberg, and you can get roughly 85 percent of the way to what you want. When Elementor has a specific feature you need for one section, build that section as its own Elementor template and pull it into the page in just that one spot.
He noted that pulling a LifterLMS short code into Elementor and getting the exact styling you want can be a little painful, since you are dependent on the short code’s own markup. Building the LifterLMS pieces natively as Gutenberg blocks instead lets you style them exactly the way you want, then bring in page builder sections only where you actually need Elementor’s extra features, getting the best of both approaches in the same page.
Why Blocks Are Replacing LifterLMS Short Codes
Thomas Levy: Short codes solve a real problem, one that WordPress as a whole, and by extension plugins and themes, has not fully solved on its own. LifterLMS currently has dozens of short codes, and requests come in regularly for more. A block is effectively a visual replacement for a short code, and Gutenberg is a step toward retiring short codes over time in favor of blocks.
That matters because a short code is a strange, code-shaped way to ask a non-developer to configure something visually. It is genuinely difficult to drop a short code into a page builder module and get the exact layout and styling you want, the way Jonathan described. Blocks, and the visual customization that page builders and widgets already popularized with their own modules, are the direction this is heading, and it is a direction worth being excited about: a future where course creators configure LifterLMS visually, block by block, rather than pasting short codes and hoping the styling lines up.
