Create Beautiful Course Websites with Modern WordPress and the New Sky Pilot Theme
Enjoy a demo of the all new WordPress LMS Full Site Editing (FSE) theme “Sky Pilot” for courses and membership sites
Building a Beautiful Course Website With the Sky Pilot Theme and Full Site Editing
In this LifterLMS training, Chris Badgett, Kurt Von Ahnen, and Will Middleton walk through the Sky Pilot theme, a full site editing WordPress theme built exclusively for learning management system websites. You will see the front end of a Sky Pilot course site, the WordPress site editor, a live build of a distraction free lesson template, and answers to real questions about page builders, WooCommerce, migrations, and child themes.
What You’ll Learn
- What full site editing is, and why it matters for a WordPress course website
- How blocks, templates, and template parts fit together in modern WordPress
- Where the Sky Pilot theme fits in the LifterLMS bundles and how the pricing works
- How to build a distraction free lesson template without writing any code
- How to run Sky Pilot alongside Divi, Elementor, or Beaver Builder on the same site
Key Takeaways
- Try Sky Pilot for one dollar on the LifterLMS demo site before committing to a full license
- Use a staging site for any migration on a site with real traffic, users, or content
- Reach for a custom template when you want a specific lesson or course to look different, and apply it in bulk through the lessons list
- Start with WordPress, LifterLMS, and Sky Pilot on a new build, and only add a page builder or a blocks plugin when there is a real reason
- Take the free quick start course on the LifterLMS Academy site to see Sky Pilot at work and learn the essentials in about 20 minutes
Frequently Asked Questions
It depends on how involved the site is. On a small site with light traffic and simple content, you can activate Sky Pilot, adjust anything that looks off, and go. On a larger site with lots of pages, users, and blog posts, spin up a staging copy first, rebuild there, and push to production when the layout, the header, and the footer all read the way you want. Most hosts offer one-click staging.
Sky Pilot is a theme, so it can coexist with a page builder plugin. On a staging site, deactivate your builder’s theme, activate Sky Pilot, and keep the builder plugin active. Pages you built with the page builder keep rendering through the builder. Your course pages, lesson pages, and student dashboard inherit the Sky Pilot design. Many LifterLMS site owners run Sky Pilot for the LMS surface and a page builder for landing pages.
Yes. LifterLMS has a WooCommerce integration, and the Sky Pilot theme includes styling designed for WooCommerce product pages and catalog layouts. Out of the box, the WooCommerce shop and single-product pages render in the same clean, modern style as the rest of a Sky Pilot site.
For a new site, start minimal. Use WordPress, LifterLMS, and Sky Pilot on their own before you add anything else. If you find yourself needing a specific effect the block editor cannot deliver, reach for a focused blocks plugin before a full page builder. Add a page builder only when a client project or a specific pixel-level design requirement makes it necessary.
Only if you plan to add custom PHP or custom CSS. A child theme protects your custom code from being overwritten when the parent theme updates. If you are working entirely inside the WordPress editor with no code changes, you do not need a child theme. If you are adding snippets or overrides, create a Sky Pilot child theme and keep them there.
The free LifterLMS core plugin gives you courses, lessons, quizzes, memberships, and student reporting, and it runs on any theme. The premium bundles add e-commerce gateways like Stripe and PayPal, marketing integrations, advanced quiz features, priority support, and access to Sky Pilot itself. The Universe bundle at $360 per year includes Sky Pilot, five sites, and support. The Infinity bundle covers everything, including office hours.
Full Webinar Transcript
Why LifterLMS Built Sky Pilot Exclusively for E-Learning
Chris Badgett: Hello and welcome to a LifterLMS complimentary training. My name is Chris Badgett, and I’m joined by special guests Kurt Von Ahnen and Will Middleton from the LifterLMS team. We’re going to be doing a demo of the LifterLMS Sky Pilot theme, a new full site editing theme for WordPress. It’s super modern, it’s built exclusively for learning management system websites, and it looks gorgeous with LifterLMS.
We’re here on the cutting edge of what’s happening in WordPress, continuing to innovate and do things the WordPress way. We embrace full site editing and the block editor, while also accommodating other ways of doing things. You can use Sky Pilot with a page builder like Elementor, Beaver Builder, or Divi, and we’ll talk about that today.
The Design Problems With Multi-Purpose WordPress Themes
Chris Badgett: There are a lot of challenges people face when creating a learning management system website with WordPress. One of the biggest is having an outdated theme. People’s design preferences change. Typically people update their theme or their design every couple of years. Some themes are hard to customize without coding knowledge, and even if you do have coding knowledge, they can be really challenging to make display the way you want.
There are a lot of great multi-purpose themes out there, but they’re not designed for the e-learning industry specifically. We took a different approach. We built Sky Pilot exclusively for e-learning and membership sites. SEO evolves. The needs for performance and speed evolve on the internet. It’s important that the theme you choose is optimized for speed and SEO, which Sky Pilot is.
What Full Site Editing Adds to a Course Website
Chris Badgett: What makes full site editing really useful is that it gives you the ability to edit your templates without coding. That can be a course template, if you want your course or your lesson layout to look a certain way. It could be your student dashboard. You can really start to customize that experience with a modern full site editing theme like Sky Pilot.
Many themes also have very limited global styling options. When you want to make global changes to the look and feel of your website, it’s difficult to do. Not with Sky Pilot. You can also create templates on the fly that don’t even exist yet. If you have a vision in your head of a certain type of landing page, or a marketing funnel page, or a course sales page, you can create it from scratch with full site editing and Sky Pilot without writing any custom code. Then you can reuse that template wherever you want and modify it dynamically as time goes on.
Understanding Blocks, Templates, and Template Parts in Modern WordPress
Chris Badgett: Modern WordPress uses these components called blocks. That’s the Gutenberg block editor. LifterLMS, as a leading learning management system in the WordPress ecosystem, started creating block components of courses and lessons four years ago, when blocks were introduced. So a course page might contain a syllabus block, some access plans, a course description, course categories, instructors, and so on. We use blocks in regular content too, images and columns, and to make up the structure of a custom post type.
Will Middleton: PHP templates are what we’ve used in the past. WordPress has always defined what a page looks like. It’s got a header on the top, it’s got a title, it’s got the content of the page, and it’s got a footer. That template was in PHP, and if you knew how to code in PHP you could edit it. Now with the block editor and full site editing, the exciting advancement is that you don’t need PHP to modify these templates.
What we’re doing at LifterLMS with the Sky Pilot theme is leaning into this block editor. We’re taking our components, the syllabus block, the instructors block, and other parts of lessons, and turning them into blocks. So you as the course creator have the power to use WordPress blocks and LifterLMS components to create custom lesson templates and custom course templates. If you have courses in a certain category that need to look a certain way, you can do that by selecting a template on each course.
There are also template parts, like the header, the footer, or the comment section. These are components that go into other templates. You can modify the structure of these parts with blocks as well.
Sky Pilot Pricing and How the Bundles Work
Kurt Von Ahnen: Sky Pilot is fully released. There’s a page dedicated to it on the LifterLMS site. Sky Pilot on its own is $99 a year, or you can bundle and save. You benefit from an LMS-only theme focus, and when you see pages about memberships, courses, and everything LifterLMS packs into a site, you’ll see it’s made especially for this environment. You can leverage modern WordPress 6.2 and forward with full site editing fully compatible.
LifterLMS starts as a free core plugin. With the free plugin, you get memberships and courses and everything you need to get going. When you jump into the Earth bundle, you can start selling your courses. In the Universe bundle, Sky Pilot is included. For $360 a year, you get five sites, unlimited support for two users, Sky Pilot, the core plugin, plus e-commerce and marketing add-ons. The Infinity bundle has everything under the sun.
If you just want to try Sky Pilot before you buy, you can try it on the LifterLMS demo site for one dollar for 30 days. That’s one of the best ways for new clients or potential clients to figure out whether running online courses is the right choice for them.
A Front-End Tour of a Sky Pilot Course Website
Chris Badgett: You can get the exact site I’m sharing with you by getting the LifterLMS demo site. This is what Sky Pilot looks like. You can see how beautiful the courses look. My user is logged in, so you can see progress data. It’s super powerful. The site is using plain WordPress and Sky Pilot, without any other additional plugins. Even the testimonials on the home page are built with base WordPress.
Here’s the all-courses page. If you want to see the full course catalog, look at how gorgeous these courses look. If we jump into one, like the Financial Independence Retire Early course, you see the design of how the course lays out. There’s the lesson navigation on the side. You can see with these checks which lessons my user has completed, and jump into all the lesson content.
Courses, Memberships, Groups, and the Student Dashboard
Chris Badgett: We’ve got memberships as well, and the membership catalog is here. If you want to bundle multiple courses in one membership, do the academy thing, or run a coaching program that has lots of courses in it, you can do that through LifterLMS memberships styled by Sky Pilot.
We’ve also got groups, which are ways of offering training at scale to a business, a school, a family, or any kind of organization. There are updates rolling out soon around social learning. The student dashboard is particularly well laid out. Everything a student needs is in one place. As a student drills into their dashboard and sees how they’re doing, the design is super modern and clean.
Inside the WordPress Site Editor With Sky Pilot
Will Middleton: Everything inside LifterLMS looks the same, courses, memberships, and so on. What’s unique with Sky Pilot and the full site editor is that under Appearance you have a new area called Editor, and Customize is no longer there. Customize is what we’re used to in themes like Astra or Cadence, and older LifterLMS themes, where you change settings and layouts for pages and posts. Now we have the Editor instead.
When you launch the Editor, you get a new interface. On the left you see Templates and Template Parts. On the right you see a preview of your page. If you jump to Templates, you can scroll through what’s available. There’s a 404 page, an archive template, a product catalog template, and a few taxonomy templates you can customize. What we care about in LifterLMS are Single Course and Single Lesson.
If I click on Single Lesson, I can edit this template. Open the List View up in the top toolbar. It shows the structure of the page. I have a header with a group and a row, a site title and a navigation, and a couple of buttons for login and the dashboard. Then a group that contains my post title and post content. The List View is essential for understanding what’s happening on a full site editing page.
Building a Distraction-Free Lesson Template
Will Middleton: A very common feature request is to remove the header and footer from lessons, so students can focus on the content. Let’s build a distraction free lesson template. Go to Appearance, then Editor, and open the Templates list. You could edit the existing Single Lesson template directly, but a better approach is to create a new one. Click the plus button at the top and choose to create a custom template.
Name the template something like “Distraction Free Lesson.” In this template, keep the post title and post content, and remove the header and footer blocks. Save the template in the top right corner. Now open one of your lessons and, in the sidebar, change the template from Single Lesson to your new Distraction Free Lesson template. Update the lesson. When you view it, the header and footer are gone. Just the lesson content and the next lesson button remain.
All of this happened without writing a single line of code. That’s where the power of Sky Pilot and the full site editor comes in.
Applying a Custom Template to an Entire Course at Once
Will Middleton: The obvious question is, do I have to click into every lesson one by one and change the template? The short answer is yes, unless you use bulk edit. Go to Courses, then Lessons in the WordPress admin. You see the lesson list of every lesson on your website. Filter by course so only lessons in the course you want appear, for example a “Business Budgeting” course.
Select all the filtered lessons, choose Bulk Edit from the actions dropdown, apply, and set the template to your Distraction Free Lesson template. WordPress updates every lesson in that course in one operation. Now every lesson in that course renders on the distraction free template. Again, no code required.
LifterLMS Academy and Podcast as Live Sky Pilot Examples
Chris Badgett: Let me share other examples of sites using Sky Pilot. The LifterLMS Academy at academy.lifterlms.com is built with just LifterLMS, WordPress, and Sky Pilot. It’s the site that carries our official quick start course for LifterLMS. That’s one of the main ways we teach people to use LifterLMS. If you jump into the quick start course, you see how beautifully the lessons lay out. It’s a free course, and it’s also a great demonstration of Sky Pilot.
We have a challenge on the Academy called the Six Figure Course Plan Challenge, a five day challenge that helps you come up with a plan for your online course project in one hour a day. It’s powered by LifterLMS and it’s an example of a more traditional course sales page built with Sky Pilot and native WordPress.
The LifterLMS podcast site is another Sky Pilot build. Our internal training team site is also powered by Sky Pilot. We use our own tools.
Who Sky Pilot Is Built For
Kurt Von Ahnen: We see a few main use cases for Sky Pilot. First, experts. People that need to monetize their expertise, have a course they want to sell. I hit this target a lot on LinkedIn when I talk about layoffs, and about how everybody has room for a course in their brain. Great way to get a side hustle started.
Second, schools. The idea that schools need a huge custom application on some other operating system to run their courses is a complete misnomer. Years ago I came to LifterLMS from the corporate arena, and I used it with very large audiences the same way a school would.
Third, companies. If you’re a company with employees to onboard, technicians to train, or business processes to teach, it’s not always about selling a course. It’s about accessibility. Build something on a subdomain to your main website and train your people remotely.
Fourth, agencies. If you’re running an agency and you’re building training sites for clients to use or monetize, LifterLMS with Sky Pilot is a strong platform. You can reach out through lifterlms.com/agency for information on agency use.
Switching an Existing WordPress Site to Sky Pilot
Kurt Von Ahnen: If you have a very basic site with low traffic and not much content, install the theme, activate it, adjust what needs adjusting, and put out an email announcing the new look. But if you’re more involved than that, use a staging site. A staging site is a duplicate of your website in a separate area of your host. You can do anything you want to it, and when it’s exactly the way you want it, push it to production. Most hosts have made staging a one-click operation. If you have a lot of users, a lot of content, or real traffic, build in private and launch when it’s ready.
Chris Badgett: We recently switched our demo site template from the Cadence theme and Cadence blocks to Sky Pilot. It took us about a day to convert the Cadence blocks over to native WordPress blocks. We could have left Cadence blocks in there, but we decided to demo a more minimal version of just LifterLMS, Sky Pilot, and WordPress. We tightened up the content, spent some time in the block editor making sure it looked good with Sky Pilot, then switched off of Cadence.
We did something similar on our podcast site, which is now only powered by Sky Pilot, and our internal training site. On the main LifterLMS site, which is much larger, we mapped out capacity, set aside time, and did the switch. Then we tightened up pages as we went. It went well because the team was in sync on the migration plan.
Using Sky Pilot Alongside Divi, Elementor, or Beaver Builder
Will Middleton: On the Divi question, the Divi suite includes both a builder plugin and a theme. My recommendation is to create a staging website, activate the Divi Builder plugin, deactivate the Divi theme, and activate Sky Pilot. Now you have the Divi Builder plugin and the Sky Pilot theme on the same site. Theoretically your pages should look the same. The header and footer might look a little different. Then you can decide, page by page, which pages to keep on the Divi Builder and which to move to native blocks with Sky Pilot.
Kurt Von Ahnen: Another option is to put the LMS content on a subdomain. Build everything you want on the subdomain with Sky Pilot, and leave the Divi theme and Divi Builder on the main site. It’s another architecture, depending on how you want to run your SEO and manage the project.
Chris Badgett: There’s also a blank template in Sky Pilot that you can use to launch a page builder on top of a Sky Pilot page, if you want the LMS parts of the site on Sky Pilot and specific landing pages on your builder.
Kurt’s Story of Rebuilding Two Sites on Sky Pilot
Kurt Von Ahnen: For me, using Sky Pilot was a matter of perfect timing. I was in the middle of migrating a bunch of websites from one host to another, and one of them, the Powersport Academy, just didn’t want to migrate. I could spend days trying to figure out how to complete that migration, or I could rebuild it. I’m pretty quick at building websites, so I rebuilt the site with Sky Pilot pretty much out of the box. I used similar imagery for my featured images, put my memberships in place, and built out the course catalog. Everything aligned well. The cards have drop shadows for a 3D appearance, and the high contrast reads as accessible and open.
The other site I did was Manana No Mas. That was a different exercise. I wanted to try a new block builder called Maxi Blocks and see how it would sit on top of Sky Pilot. Maxi Blocks has two paths, a block menu and a template menu. When I designed the home page from their template menu, editing the header in the site editor reset the home page formatting, similar to a page builder losing its formatting. Elsewhere on the site I used the Maxi Blocks block menu without the template pages, and it worked cleanly. If I want to edit a page, I just go to Edit Page and pull in the specific Maxi Blocks I want. Both sites turned out well.
Sky Pilot and WooCommerce
Chris Badgett: LifterLMS has a WooCommerce integration, and we designed WooCommerce styling directly into the Sky Pilot theme. If you scroll to the bottom of the Sky Pilot product page on the LifterLMS site, you can see the screenshots, including the WooCommerce product page and the WooCommerce catalog. Out of the box, Sky Pilot looks great on top of WooCommerce.
Free LifterLMS Core Versus the Premium Bundles
Kurt Von Ahnen: If you’re a corporation putting onboarding lessons or courses inside an existing site that already has a mandated corporate template, and you’re not selling those courses or actively promoting them, the free core plugin covers you. You just want the courses available to your employees, memberships, student management, reporting, and certificates. The free core plugin handles that.
If you’re an expert or marketer, you probably want e-commerce, a payment gateway connection, a CRM integration for marketing, and appearance, which is what Sky Pilot is all about. It really comes down to use case and how you want to grow your project.
Chris Badgett: When people get started with the free version of LifterLMS they’re often surprised how much we give away for free. Then at some point they want to sell, so they add the Stripe add-on or the PayPal add-on. Maybe they want the design upgrade to what you’re seeing here today, so they get Sky Pilot. Maybe they want advanced quiz features with more question types and richer grading. Load up whatever you need, when you need it. You can start with the free core plugin and upgrade later, and every upgrade is seamless. You never have to remove and reinstall a bigger package.
Getting Started With Sky Pilot as a Beginner
Will Middleton: As a beginner, I found Sky Pilot intuitive. You’re not just learning Sky Pilot, you’re learning how to do full site editing in WordPress. What really helped me was giving myself permission to spend an afternoon just playing around in the WordPress editor, figuring out how the appearance editor works, watching a few YouTube videos about full site editing. Then it clicked. There is Sky Pilot documentation on the LifterLMS site, and the LifterLMS YouTube channel runs a segment called Feature Friday, which has recently been demoing Sky Pilot features.
Kurt Von Ahnen: The navigation menu in the upper left of the edit screen, the List View, is the key to unlocking access to blocks within blocks and nested blocks. When you open something with the List View, it usually has settings on the right sidebar. That’s more of a general WordPress pro tip than a Sky Pilot pro tip, but understanding that pattern makes the whole editor intuitive.
Chris Badgett: If you’re brand new, the LifterLMS quick start course is laser focused on the essential 5 to 10 percent you need to know to get things rolling. About 20 minutes of learning and an hour of implementation, and your site is up. You do not have to be a developer to do it. We also have a free WordPress beginner course on the Academy site that walks through the basics of creating posts and pages, the Gutenberg block editor, and the structure of WordPress itself.
Where to Try Sky Pilot and Get Support
Kurt Von Ahnen: There’s a page on the LifterLMS site dedicated to Sky Pilot. It walks through the benefits, screenshots, use cases, and how to leverage modern WordPress. If you want to save money with Sky Pilot, look at the bundles. Sky Pilot is included in the Universe bundle and the Infinity bundle. If you want to test drive it before you buy, use the one dollar 30 day trial at lifterlms.com/try. That’s a fully populated demo of LifterLMS that LifterLMS hosts for you.
Chris Badgett: LifterLMS support runs through help@lifterlms.com, and the team processes that inbox every business day. There is a Facebook group for the LifterLMS community with users helping each other. On the highest plan, the Infinity bundle, you get the office hours Mastermind call, a live call with other power users and LifterLMS team members. We have a 100 percent customer happiness refund policy. If you get Sky Pilot on its own now and want to upgrade to a bundle later, we do a prorated upgrade so you get credit for your existing license.
Sky Pilot has an LMS focus, it’s modern, it’s beautiful, you can design without code, and you can create new templates on the fly. Spend a little time learning full site editing, take Sky Pilot for a test drive, and we’re here to support you along the way. Thanks for coming.
