When we first conceptualized the plugin in 2011, we had no idea just how popular it would become. Thanks to you, our very intelligent and responsive user community, we’ve been able to integrate customer feedback to develop the leading choice for utilizing WordPress as a learning management system.

While there are many LMS options on the web, WP Courseware leads the way in ease of use and affordability. We’ve done our best to include a robust feature set without bogging you down with a huge learning curve.

However, running an online course website requires more than just a Learning Management System (LMS). To create the best experience for students, you need additional tools for forms, performance optimization, social engagement, and automation. In this blog post, we’ll explore 10 of the best free WordPress plugins that can supplement your WP Courseware-powered online course website. These plugins are highly rated, widely used, and essential for improving functionality, performance, and user experience.

1. WPForms Lite (Free Form Plugin)

Installs: 6M+
Rating: 4.8/5
Use Case: Create contact forms, surveys, feedback forms, and quizzes easily.

WPForms Lite is a user-friendly drag-and-drop form builder that lets you create forms for student feedback, inquiries, and lead generation without any coding.

Pros:

• Easy drag-and-drop builder
• Mobile responsive forms
• Pre-built form templates

Cons:

• Limited advanced features in the free version
• Lacks payment integrations without premium upgrade

2. ThirstyAffiliates (Affiliate Link Management)

Installs: 30K+
Rating: 4.6/5
Use Case: Manage and cloak affiliate links for monetization.

ThirstyAffiliates helps online course creators manage affiliate links efficiently by cloaking and organizing them, making it easier to monetize their website.

Pros:

• Link cloaking and management
• Built-in affiliate link tracking
• Seamless integration with WordPress

Cons:

• Some features require the pro version
• Can be overwhelming for beginners

3. Elementor (Page Builder for Custom Course Layouts)

Installs: 10M+
Rating: 4.6/5
Use Case: Design custom course landing pages with a drag-and-drop builder.

Elementor makes it easy to create professional-looking course pages, lesson layouts, and sales funnels for your online courses without any coding knowledge.

Pros:

• Drag-and-drop interface
• Works with most themes
• Large template library

Cons:

• Can slow down website performance
• Some advanced features require the pro version

4. LiteSpeed Cache (Performance Optimization)

Installs: 6M+
Rating: 4.8/5
Use Case: Improve website speed, optimize images, and enhance user experience.

LiteSpeed Cache helps ensure that your course website loads quickly, reducing bounce rates and improving student retention by offering server-level caching and optimization tools.

Pros:

• Server-level caching for better performance
• Free image optimization
• Works well with WooCommerce

Cons:

• Requires LiteSpeed server for full benefits
• Some settings may be complex for beginners

5. Simple Membership (Basic Membership Features)

Installs: 40K+
Rating: 4.5/5
Use Case: Restrict course content to members only and manage subscriptions.

With Simple Membership, you can set up free or paid memberships, restricting access to certain course materials based on user roles. By the way WP Courseware already has membership functionality built in.

Pros:

• Supports unlimited membership levels
• Easy PayPal integration
• Content restriction options

Cons:

• No built-in recurring payments
• Limited integrations compared to premium solutions

6. MonsterInsights (Google Analytics Integration)

Installs: 3M+
Rating: 4.5/5
Use Case: Track student behavior, engagement, and course performance.

MonsterInsights connects Google Analytics to your site, giving insights into which courses are most popular, where students drop off, and how to optimize content.

Pros:

• Easy setup with Google Analytics
• Real-time stats dashboard
• Tracks eCommerce and form conversions

Cons:

• Some features require the premium version
• Can add extra load to the website

7. Uncanny Automator (Automation for WordPress)

Installs: 40K+
Rating: 4.9/5
Use Case: Automate tasks like email notifications, student progress tracking, and integrations with other plugins.

Uncanny Automator allows you to create “if-this-then-that” (IFTTT) automation between plugins, such as sending an email when a student completes a lesson.

Pros:

• Easy automation setup
• Works with most popular plugins
• Saves time and improves workflow

Cons:

• Free version has limited automation triggers
• Learning curve for beginners

8. Loco Translate (Multilingual Support)

Installs: 1M+
Rating: 4.8/5
Use Case: Translate course content for international students.

Loco Translate lets you easily translate text in your WordPress theme and plugins, making your online courses accessible to a global audience.

Pros:

• User-friendly interface
• Supports multiple languages
• Allows direct translation editing

Cons:

• Limited automatic translation capabilities
• Can be time-consuming for large sites

9. WooCommerce (E-commerce Solution)

Installs: 5M+
Rating: 4.6/5
Use Case: Sell courses, memberships, and digital products.

WooCommerce enables course creators to sell their courses as digital products, integrate subscriptions, and manage transactions efficiently.

Pros:

• Lots of supported payment gateways
• Flexible product and pricing options
• Integration with WP Courseware

Cons:

• Requires extensions for advanced features
• Can be resource-heavy on large sites

10. GamiPress (Gamification Plugin)

Installs: 10K+
Rating: 4.8/5
Use Case: Add gamification to increase student engagement and motivation.

GamiPress allows online course creators to implement points, achievements, and rewards to incentivize students and enhance the learning experience.

Pros:

• Fully customizable gamification system
• Integrates with most WP Courseware
• Boosts student engagement

Cons:

• Requires setup and configuration for best results
• Some advanced features require premium add-ons

Final Thoughts

These 10 free WordPress plugins can greatly enhance your online course website by improving user engagement, performance, and automation. Whether you’re looking to optimize speed, create custom pages, automate workflows, or build a student community, these plugins offer the tools you need.

Which plugins do you already use, and which ones will you be trying? Let us know in the comments!

The post 10 Best Free WordPress Plugins to Enhance Your LMS appeared first on Fly Plugins.

Today we’re thrilled to announce the first iteration of a new in-lesson, comprehensive Resource Module for your WP Courseware students…

WP Courseware Notes!

The WP Courseware Resource Module will be an in-lesson, slide-up menu for your students to access resources to enhance their learning experience. 

While Notes is the first iteration of the Resource Menu, it will soon include in-lesson options to add an ongoing Q&A thread and a resources listing for any supplemental materials you provide to your students.

With the WP Courseware Notes functionality, your students will now be able to…

• Take notes from directly within a course lesson
• Create or edit notes while also watching video with a slide-up style menu
• Use 13 rich formatting options within their notes for things like links, images, code, bulleted or number lists, and more
• Focus their view of the notes to the current lesson or the entire course
• Sort and filter notes by date

Already a WP Courseware license holder?

Awesome!

All you need to do is log into your WordPress admin dashboard, head to the Installed Plugins screen, and a WP Courseware update which includes the Notes functionality will be waiting for you to install.

If you need to renew an expired WP Courseware license, you can do that by logging into our Member Portal, navigating to the License Keys tab, and then choose, Renew License.

The post Introducing Notes for WP Courseware! appeared first on Fly Plugins.

Introducing Achievements for WP Courseware! Now you can incentivize your students for progress and performance within your courses...create badges, customize achievement point values, encourage competition with a leaderboard, and more!

Today we're excited to announce the introduction of a new feature package for WP Courseware with the addition of course Achievements!

We've been working on this update for several months and we're thrilled to finally make this update available to our loyal WP Courseware users.

Encourage Progress and Enhance Learning Retention

By now you’re likely familiar with the benefits of gamification in e-learning. A wide body of research has been published on the positive effects achieved by adding a little friendly competition into the classroom, regardless of age.

We’ll cover setup in just a moment, but WP Courseware’s Achievements functionality provides a great deal of flexibility with what you reward students for and how much you reward them.

The gamification aspects of your online course(s) can be simple or you can use your creativity to create elaborate reward structures.

Because you can create customized achievements for units, quizzes, surveys, and courses, you can structure different rewards paths by segmenting your content and student interactions.

By pairing the Achievements features with other WP Courseware functionality such as course prerequisites, you can truly take your learners on a journey through your content.

How does this help?

 

Reward Progress

One of the simplest ways to use gamification within an online course is to award points based on progress. This could come in the form of completing a lesson, completing a course, or completing multiple courses.

This is obviously a quantity-driven reward, so it’s a good idea to pair this reward structure with…

 

Reward Performance

…a quality-driven reward! We don’t want students rushing through courses to earn badges unless we’re doing our best to ensure learning retention.

With WP Courseware’s Achievements functionality, you can also reward students based on quiz performance. The functionality can be used on blocking and non-blocking quizzes, but also on surveys. This is a great way to incentivize feedback and it can be used in many different ways, from evaluation of your course to assessment of future product ideas.

Let’s Set Up Our Achievements!

1. First, we’ll head to WP Courseware’s main Settings screen, navigate to the Courses tab, and then to the Achievements submenu.

From here, we can:

• Specify our Leaderboard Page to display rankings (this page is created for you by default)
• Enable Popup Notifications to give students realtime notices of their rewards
• Choose how long the popup remains visible with Popup Time
• Choose a Popup Background Color and a Popup Text Color to match our site

2. Next, we’ll create our Achievements. The Achievements menu is accessed in the WordPress admin sidebar panel under WP Courseware.

Once you’re there, just click Add New as you would with posts or pages.

To create a new Achievement, we’ll add:

Achievement Title: This will be the name of the Achievement displayed when awarded.
Achievement Text: Here you can customize the subtext in the Achievement popup.
Achievement Details: You can configure each Achievement’s value here.

You can also customize the Achievement’s badge image by choosing from a badge in the default library or by uploading your own.

3. Now that we have our Achievements created, we’ll enable the Achievements functionality within our course.

We’ll navigate to WP Courseware’s Courses screen, choose our course, and in the Course Builder we’ll then navigate to Course Settings > Achievements.

If you would like to assign an Achievement for completing this course, you can choose that here also.

NOTE: If you are using Achievement popups, in order for them to display properly you’ll also want to navigate to Course Settings > General and set Unit Advancement to Manual. Otherwise, the student will be ushered to the next unit before the popup can be displayed.

4. With Achievements enabled for this course, we can now begin assigning other Achievements. First, we’ll assign an Achievement to a unit so that when a student completes this unit they’ll receive our Unit Completed Achievement.

Let’s head to WP Courseware’s Units screen (or access the unit from the Course Builder) and select our unit.

Inside our unit, we’ll use the Achievements metabox to select our Unit Completed Achievement from the dropdown menu.

5. Now we’re going to add an Achievement to one of our quizzes as well so that if a student passes the quiz, they’ll receive our Quiz Passed Achievement.

We’ll navigate to WP Courseware’s Quizzes screen (or access the quiz from the Course Builder) and select our quiz.

Inside our quiz, we’ll use the Achievements metabox to select our Quiz Passed Achievement from the dropdown menu.

And that’s it!

Now Let’s Take a Look at Achievements in Action!

Now that we have all of our Achievements configured, we can take a look at what happens when a student…

...completes a unit...

...passes a quiz...

...or completes an entire course!

We can also view our course’s Achievements Leaderboard from the frontend as a student…

…or on the backend in our WordPress admin dashboard.

Ready to Get Started Creating Your Own Achivements?

If you're an existing WP Courseware license holder, all you need to do is log into your WordPress admin dashboard, head to the Installed Plugins screen, and a WP Courseware update which includes the Achievements functionality will be waiting for you to install.

If you need to renew an expired WP Courseware license, you can do that by logging into our Member Portal, navigating to the License Keys tab, and then choose, Renew License.

Not an existing WP Courseware user? Well, what are you waiting for?!   Now is a great time to take advantage of 50% off sitewide as we celebrate the release of WP Courseware Achievements! See the banner at the top of our site to access the discount code.

The post Introducing Achievements for WP Courseware! appeared first on Fly Plugins.

We're starting the year strong with another major update to our WordPress LMS plugin, WP Courseware!

As 2021 kicks off, we're starting the year off with a bang with another major update to our WP Courseware WordPress LMS plugin.

But before we give you the details, first…

…THANK YOU!

We receive hundreds of feature requests each year and we review and catalog every single one of them. Even if we receive a feature request which is already on the list, we tally votes for that feature so we can prioritize them (which we’ve actually done for quite some time).

For those of you who have taken the time to send a feature request along, we’re very grateful.

Now, let’s move on to the newest features in WP Courseware version 4.8!

Customizable Certificate Builder

Internally, we’re calling version 4.8 the “Certificate Update”. Our certificate module within WP Courseware was long overdue for a little TLC, so we addressed that in version 4.8.

And we didn’t just give it a little TLC, we completely overhauled it.

Certificates can now be built from the ground up using the native Gutenberg editor in WordPress. Just drag and drop certificate fields into the spot on the certificate you’d like them to display and you’re done!

If you like the layout, you can save it as a template. And speaking of templates, the new certificate builder comes with a couple of pre-built templates to help you get started!

We also greatly extended the available fields that you can choose to display on the certificate. Now you can build a certificate using any of these bits of information…

• Certificate Number
• Certificate Expiration Date
• Cumulative Course Grade
• Course Name
• Instructor Name
• Student Name
• Image
• Signature

Custom Quiz Question Feedback

When we first released WP Courseware back in 2012, our focus was to ensure that the course creation and course management processes were as automated as possible for creators. So for quiz questions, we included an option to display a custom message to a student based on whether their quiz grade was above or below a certain percentage of correct answers.

But while this allowed for automated messaging within quiz results, the messages were, and still are, the same for every student.

We’ve since discovered that many of you are much more “hands on” with your students! And that’s great!

Now you have the ability to provide detailed feedback for any question in any quiz for any student. Doesn’t get much more granular than that!

Simply enter your message just below the actual question on the admin side when you’re scoring your students’ submitted quizzes.

Course Expiration

Wow, did we have a lot of votes for this one!

While WP Courseware does include membership functionality which allows a great deal of control over course enrollments, that setup isn’t for everyone. We heard from many, many course creators who simply want access to a course to expire at a certain point. Period.

And we heard ya!

Now access to a particular course can be revoked on a specific date for all of your students or at a specific interval from each student’s unique enrollment date.

Duplicate Any Course Element

Another one here with lots of votes!

While it has long been possible to duplicate some course elements within WP Courseware, the only option to duplicate everything in a course has been to export and re-import a course. But we addressed that, too.

From WP Courseware 4.8 forward, you’ll have a duplication option on every course element…the entire course, a single module of a course, an individual unit, or even a quiz!

What Are You Waiting For?

If you’re an existing WP Courseware license holder, as always the update will be waiting for you in the Installed Plugins panel of your WordPress dashboard.

If not, what are you waiting for? Let's make 2021 your year to create and launch that online course you've been thinking of building!

There's never been a better time to diversify your income streams and over the past year we've seen folks in many, many different industries and with so many different skillsets begin offering courses.

After all, as we often say around here...

Everyone is an expert at something.

And that means you!

The post Introducing WP Courseware Version 4.8! appeared first on Fly Plugins.

Announcing a major update to our Amazon S3 media delivery and protection plugin for WordPress…S3 Media Maestro version 4.0 has arrived and brings functionality enhancements including multi-language closed captioning, video transcoding, and more!

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Do you deliver media or downloadable files to paying customers through a membership site, online course, or your own e-commerce store?

Did you put a lot of time, effort, expertise, or all three into creating that content?

Would you like to ensure that you get paid for that investment of your time, effort, and expertise?

Do you want to ensure a flawless media playback experience for your valuable paying customers?

Yes?

Well, we have great news for you…S3 Media Maestro version 4.0 is finally here, offering a simple, yet complete, tool for managing, delivering, and storing your media with WordPress.

If you’re not familiar with our S3 Media Maestro plugin, it’s designed to allow you to store media on Amazon Web Services’ robust and cost-effective S3 cloud storage platform, embed that media on pages or posts within your WordPress site, and also prevent the sharing of links to that media (or downloadable files) between paying customers and non-authorized users (ie. folks who didn’t pay to access it).

Once S3 Media Maestro is installed and activated on your WordPress site, using it is as simple as three easy steps…

• Set up a free Amazon Web Services account (if you don’t already have one)
• Configure S3 Media Maestro to access and manage your media files on the S3 platform
• Embed your media in the appropriate page(s) using the S3 Media Maestro block in the WordPress Editor

After that, the plugin will automatically creating unique expiring and encrypted links each time a paying customer accesses your media. If they attempt to share the link to your media with someone else, the link won’t work.

Pretty slick, right?

We’ve been using S3 to store our own online course videos since 2010 and still do because it’s an extremely powerful and reliable cloud storage platform (meaning we can ensure a great media playback experience worldwide) and it’s also very cost-effective.

Storing and delivering hundreds of gigabytes of video to viewers all around the globe can get expensive very quickly, but with S3 you’re able to really scale up your membership or online course business without racking up a massive monthly bill.

(NOTE: If you’d like to learn more about how you can estimate what a typical monthly S3 bill might look like for your site, we’ve created a comprehensive guide to using their “less-than-crystal-clear” pricing calculator.)

But anyone who’s used one of the hundreds of services that Amazon offers through its AWS platform will attest, the platform was designed with developers in mind. The user console can be intimidating and difficult to navigate.

S3 Media Maestro not only allows you to embed S3-hosted media and protect that content, but it also allows you to upload and manage your media directly from WordPress without relying on the cumbersome AWS console. It’s just like using the WordPress Media Library, but instead of the media being stored on and delivered from the same server as your website (never a good idea!), the media is uploaded to and accessed from S3.

Even slicker, isn’t it?

Since launching S3 Media Maestro in 2012, we’ve logged hundreds of feature requests and suggestions from our incredible users. And just as with all of our plugins, we’ve done our best to continually improve the plugin by prioritizing and including as many of these as we can in our updates.

And S3 Media Maestro Version 4.0 delivers some of the most highly-requested features that our users have been asking for!

If we had to summarize the focus of this update in a sentence, it might read something like…

Our customers who deliver membership site or online course content often have customers all around the world and those customers might be accessing content from several different devices depending on what’s most convenient for them at the moment.

This means that ensuring a flawless playback experience can be difficult!

When users are sitting down at their desk with a large LCD monitor and a lightning-fast internet connection, you might want them to be able to watch video in the highest quality possible. But when they’re on the go and accessing your videos from a mobile phone over a cellular data network, you don’t want them to have to sit and wait forever before they can download and watch the 1080p high-definition version that they can easily access from their home or office.

With S3 Media Maestro Version 4.0, you can now take advantage of built-in, automated video transcoding so your users can easily select the resolution which is best suited for their internet connection and device!

When embedding your S3-hosted media using S3 Media Maestro, you’ll simply check each video resolution that you’d like to make available within your media player and the rest is taken care of for you. Your media file will remain on S3 at its original resolution, but it will also be converted into any other resolutions you specify and update the media player to display all of the available resolution options.

Now you can offer your customers a flawless playback experience no matter where they are or what device they’re watching from!

Want to see the transcoding feature in detail? Be sure to check out Ben’s video!

Play Video

With customers of a membership site or online course singing up from all around the globe, another major priority is enhancing learning retention by catering to customers in their native language.

S3 Media Maestro Version 4.0 now allows you to upload closed captioning files in any language and make those languages available for selection in the media player. This can include multiple languages within the same video, so if you have customers in different locations you can allow users to select the language they’re most comfortable with.

As the cost of transcribing video for closed caption files has plummeted in recent years, this is a really inexpensive way to step up your media delivery experience. There are a number of web-based apps, such as Rev, which can create your subtitle files for around $1 per minute of video, and for heavier users, there are desktop options such as Telestream’s MacCaption or CaptionMaker which could save you money in the long-run.

Want to see the closed captioning feature in detail? Be sure to check out Ben’s video!

Play Video

S3 Media Maestro has been “integrated” with Amazon Web Services’ CloudFront CDN (content delivery network) for several versions now, however, Version 4.0 completely retools and simplifies the process for using the CloudFront CDN from within the WordPress admin dashboard.

If you’re not familiar with CloudFront or even what a CDN is, you can take a glance at our original post announcing S3 Media Maestro Version 2.0 which discusses what CloudFront is, how it works, and how it can help you as a user of S3 Media Maestro.

S3 Media Maestro Version 4.0 now allows you to create CloudFront distributions right from within WordPress. It also allows you to navigate through distributions to select the media file you want to embed with S3/CloudFront.

Prior to this version, distributions needed to be manually created in the AWS console, while you’d also need to retrieve a file name from your CloudFront distribution in the AWS console and put that into S3 Media Maestro’s shortcode builder.

We just didn’t think that process was much fun!

Want to see the CloudFront feature in detail? Be sure to check out Ben’s video!

Play Video

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If you haven't yet purchased a license for S3 Media Maestro and would like to take advantage of all of this new functionality as well as additional updates we have planned for the coming months...

Now is the time!

As of 11:59PM EDT on Wednesday, September 30th the price of S3 Media Maestro will be increasing.

This is your chance to lock in your license at the current price level before it goes up for good, so please don't wait.

We will be unable to honor the current pricing tiers after September 30th.

The post Introducing S3 Media Maestro Version 4.0 appeared first on Fly Plugins.

Today we’re excited to announce that we’ve wrapped up development of version 4.7.0 of WP Courseware and it includes one of the most highly requested features of 2020…

Memberships!

In a nutshell, this functionality allows you to assign any content published on your site to a WP Courseware course. When users are enrolled for a course, they’ll automatically receive access to any content you’ve associated with that particular course.

Now you no longer need to purchase, configure, and maintain a separate membership plugin to offer both courses and premium members-only content.

To see the new membership functionality in action, be sure to check out Ben’s latest video on our YouTube channel…

So what type of content can you include in your membership?

With this new membership functionality, you can now get creative and really broaden the types of supplemental content you offer to your students to enhance the learning experience and deliver more perceived value.

Let’s look at a few types of resources you might choose to protect on dedicated pages which, together with your course(s), would create an attractive membership package.

Live Webinars

Webinars are a great way to add value to your course offerings. They can be used to address dynamic topics which change too frequently to be a part of your evergreen course content and they’re also great for bringing in guest presenters who may have expertise in an area tangential to your own. We’ve also seen them frequently used by course creators to cross-sell or upsell additional products or services such as coaching or consulting. Webinar hosting platforms like Zoom, GoToWebinar, and WebinarJam allow you to easily embed these sessions into WordPress pages.

Q and A Sessions

Following up on the heels of live webinars, we’ve also worked with course creators who dedicate a page behind their membership paywall to regular live question and answer sessions. These can also be facilitated through online conferencing platforms like Zoom and they’re a scalable way for you to offer your the value of your expertise without committing to one-on-one calls or coaching.

Group Discussion

Building a community in addition to a course can keep your members coming back long after they’ve finished your course content. Whether you choose to use a forum plugin to facilitate discussion or decide to embed a private Facebook Group on its own membership page, any discussion option you choose can now easily be associated with a specific course with WP Courseware’s membership feature.

Premium Downloads

This is a tried-and-true method for adding “bonuses” to your course’s sales page and enhancing overall value. In addition to your course content, you can offer valuable members-only resources within your site. This could include checklists, workbooks, ebooks, spreadsheets, audiobooks…we even worked with one course creator who offers a set of free members-only WordPress plugins that are designed to assist with parts of the workflows that he teaches students in his course.

Case Studies and Interviews

We’ve seen a lot of course topics which greatly benefit from students being able to see a “real world” example of the course concepts in action. If you’re teaching any topic which is designed to lead students to an outcome, why not use case studies or interviews to show them how someone else has used your strategies to arrive at that outcome? They can help your students build confidence in the subject they’re learning while also helping you establish social proof that you can deliver results!

Discounts and Special Offers

This doesn’t work in every course or membership niche, however, if you’re able to directly negotiate special pricing on products or services that your students can take advantage of, then creating a dedicated membership page for listing these is another terrific value-add.

Recommended Tools

Another great way to add value to your course is through a recommended list of tools or resources. This can be a major time-saver for your students, especially if your instructional content is highly process-oriented. This will prevent them from having to research and evaluate different solutions or tools when you’ve already done the work of “trial and error”. It can also be a nice source of additional income for any products you’re recommending for which you happen to be an affiliate.

The post Create Memberships with WP Courseware Version 4.7 appeared first on Fly Plugins.

With the number of high-profile data breaches we’ve seen making the news over the past few years, you can only imagine what these massive leaks of secure information cost consumers and companies. For consumers, although largely protected against fraudulent financial activity, trying to untangle the knots of identity theft can be an incredibly stressful experience.

For businesses experiencing a security breach, the work required to repair the damage, smooth over a brand’s tarnished image, and build back the trust of customers can be monumental and costly.

Currently, over 12% of all retail purchases are made online according to the United States Department of Commerce. This generates trillions of financial transactions each year around the globe which all collect some degree of sensitive information. When a breach occurs, the average total cost to clean it up comes in at $3.92 million and 25,575 records are obtained, on average, during each incident according to a study conducted by IBM.

In response, many financial institutions, in cooperation with their overseeing federal lawmaking bodies, are implementing measures to prevent fraudulent transactions online. India became one of the first nations to implement drastic fraud prevention measures and several others currently have legislation in debate.

As of this month, the European Banking Authority has amended its requirements laid out in its 2015 adoption of a customer protection act titled the Revised Directive on Payment Services (PSD2) to require a new two-factor authentication standard for transactions within the European Union’s established European Economic Area.

This new directive has been labeled Strong Customer Authentication, or SCA, a title which is almost as ambiguous as the drop-dead date set for its implementation by merchants and banks (more on that in a moment).

What Is SCA?

This new requirement for European transactions processed online forces a two-factor authentication process during a purchase in which the bank accepting the payment and the issuer of the payment instrument (ie. the bank issuing the card used for purchase) are both located within the European Economic Area.

There are a number of secure details associated with the payment instrument being used (credit card, debit card, etc.) and this two-factor authentication process requires that two pieces of sensitive data are passed along with the transaction to ensure it against fraud. These two pieces of data transmitted must represent two of the three following methods of identification:

• Something the customer knows (password, PIN, etc.)
• Something the customer has (such as a phone number)
• Something the customer is (fingerprint, facial recognition, etc.)

If two of these are passed successfully, the transaction will continue to process and if not, the payment may be declined.

As you might imagine, any payment gateway used to facilitate these transactions will now be responsible for the transfer of associated two-factor authentication to process the payment.

What This Means for WP Courseware Users

WP Courseware has users around the globe selling access to courses from and to dozens of different countries and around 25% of those users are within the European Economic Area. This being the case, our talented lead developer, Cory Crowley, has been working tirelessly to ensure that our EU customers who are using WP Courseware to create and sell courses are in compliance with the new SCA requirements.

There are a few important facets to the impacts of this legislation, so we’ll cover the essential “need to know” facts.

Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) FAQs

Who Is Affected?

This change affects WP Courseware users who:

• Receive funds for the sale of courses at a bank located within the EEA
• Sell courses to customers who bank within the EEA

If you do happen to fall into these two categories, please read on for further details.

What Do I Need to Do?

For the most part, any required changes have been taken care of for you. WP Courseware currently allows users to sell courses using either PayPal or Stripe.

PayPal Users

PayPal has taken the step to handle this new two-factor authentication on their end. In a nutshell, if you are currently selling your courses with PayPal you likely won’t even be aware of any changes as customers will interface with PayPal during the transaction.

Stripe Users

Stripe, however, has left it to software developers who include payment gateway functionality to ensure that their transaction process utilizes the Stripe Payment Intents API as opposed to their legacy Stripe Charges API.

If you use Stripe to sell your courses within the EEA, WP Courseware has now been updated to utilize the Payment Intents API so that EU transactions can facilitate the two-factor authentication process.

If you are using the Stripe Checkout modal payment form, Stripe is no longer recommending this method of accepting payments. Stripe Checkout will continue to allow you to sell courses within the EU for the time being. WP Courseware has not removed the Stripe Checkout option and Stripe itself has built the SCA two-factor process into Checkout. However, over time you’ll want to phase the old modal out of your transaction process.

All WP Courseware Users

If SCA requirements do affect your sale of online courses using WP Courseware, we recommend logging into the Installed Plugins screen within your WordPress administrative dashboard and updating to WP Courseware version 4.6.3 immediately.

We’re also recommending that SCA-affected WP Courseware users ensure that their website’s server or host are updated to PHP version 5.6 or greater.

What About Subscriptions?

For WP Courseware users affected by SCA, any existing recurring subscriptions will not be affected. Do keep in mind, however, that while this is a general agreement among EEA banks, it is up to the customer’s individual bank to accept this exemption for existing recurring payment profiles or to reject it and require SCA for all transactions regardless of the creation date of the subscription.

For all newly created subscriptions, the two-factor authentication step will be required on the first payment and subsequent payments will be processed without re-authenticating.

Does This Affect Me If I’m Not In the EU?

It’s possible. Keep in mind that these changes affect transactions where the bank accepting the payment and the bank issuing the payment are located within the EEA. If you are accepting funds within a bank in the EEA for the sale of your courses but your business is not physically located in the EEA, you are still required to comply when the purchaser is also banking within the EEA.

Also, please note that the EEA also includes Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway in addition to the EU member countries.

Are There Exemptions?

So far regulators have stated that transactions less than €30 will bypass Strong Customer Authentication. However, a few details of this regulation are still being debated and modified within individual nations having differing requirements as well.

Is There a Deadline for Implementation?

The first deadline to comply with SCA was September 14th, 2019 and this was behind our efforts to update WP Courseware as soon as possible. However, due to massive lack of preparedness among European banks an 18-month extension has been granted for them to put the proper protocols in place. That being said, it is best to comply as soon as possible.

The post Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) Compliance Introduced to WP Courseware appeared first on Fly Plugins.

Well, Happy Summer to those of you in the northern hemisphere and if you’re in the south, we hope you enjoy some cooler weather and a break from the heat!

We’ve been staying busy here at Fly Plugins doing our best to ensure that our customers receive best-in-class WordPress plugins and stellar support.

Here are a few happenings from the last month we thought you might be interested in…

Introducing the New ConvertKit Add-On for WP Courseware

Needless to say, we’re super excited about this one!

We’ve finally been able to create an extension for WP Courseware which allows you to send student course enrollments over to one of your ConvertKit lists!

This is an update which comes with a barrage of potential marketing possibilities. That could include cross-selling existing courses, announcing new courses, announcing launches for other products like e-books, cross-promotions/joint ventures with other marketers, or anything you can dream up!

Learn More About the Integration

Want to Make Sure Your Students Are Watching Your Course Lessons?

You may have seen our announcement about this functionality which we added a few months ago, but it’s such a powerful feature we wanted to remind everyone that it’s available.

During that update, we included integration between our WP Courseware WordPress learning management system course builder plugin and our S3 Media Maestro media player and protection plugin.

Now you can choose to require your students to watch a certain percentage of your course lesson video before they can progress to the next unit, ensuring that they retain the learning points within your videos!

Learn More About the Integration

[FREE TEMPLATE!] Using Action Guides Within Your Online Course Lessons

You want to ensure that your students take away and retain as much information from your course as possible, right?

Well, one of the best tools for doing so is including a downloadable PDF action guide. In this post, we take a look at:

• What action guides are
• How they can help your students
• What to include in them
• How to create them
• AND…best of all, FREE templates for YOUR own customized action guides!

Download the Templates

Here’s to your success!

P.S. Keep an eye out for an email from us next week…we’re planning to release a really cool new front-end feature update for WP Courseware!

The post Important Fly Plugins Updates for July! appeared first on Fly Plugins.

That said, we are so excited to announce the release of the ConvertKit addon for WP Courseware. ConvertKit is one of the most popular email marketing services available on the internet and WP Courseware is now integrated with ConvertKit.

You can download the addon from the WordPress.org website and it’s 100% free!

Just because it’s free doesn’t mean that the functionality is subpar. In fact we’ve spent quite a bit of time planning and executing the functionality in this plugin.

Once the plugin is configured, you can begin to attach courses to forms, sequences, and tags. Basically when a student enrolls in a course attached to one of these elements, the student will become a subscriber and be subscribed to a form, a sequence and/or be tagged.

This is really powerful because you can create email sequences that are associated with the course and then drip out the email sequence on a schedule. You can also tag your students so that you can communicate to students associated with the tag. It’s especially helpful when marketing a new product, you can target a tag or multiple tags.

One other very powerful feature that we’ve added is the ability to create webhooks. Webhooks are basically associating a course with a ConvertKit behavior, and when the behavior is executed, the student get’s enrolled into the course.

For example you could setup a webhook to trigger when a student subscribes to a specific form. So when the student fills out the form and clicks submit, they will then receive the confirmation email (if you have double optin configured for the form). Then once the student is confirmed, they get enrolled into the course associated with the webhook.

To give you a more realistic example, you could create a mini course and use it as a lead magnet. Then a potential student can optin to the form in order to be enrolled into the course. Once their email is confirmed by ConvertKit, they are then automatically enrolled into the course and they will then receive an email with their login details. of course, it’s always good to occasionally run your current email list through a bulk email verification service to ensure you’re not paying for emails that can’t be delivered.

Checkout our tutorial video below that gives instructions on how to configure and use the ConvertKit addon for WP Courseware.

The post Engage your students with email automation appeared first on Fly Plugins.

Well, where do we start?

We crammed so much into the release of WP Courseware 4.6 that it's almost hard to list it all! If you’re interested, you can check out the release notes within the plugin.

But, we wanted to share a few highlights. We’ve always been feature-driven by customer feedback, so this release is one where we’ve tried to pick off as many as we could handle.

So…thank you to every one of you who has taken valuable time out of your busy day to help us understand how to help you!

Bundles

This has been on our radar for quite a while as many of you have asked for it, but we’ve now added the ability to wrap up multiple courses into bundles which can be sold separately than individual courses and priced differently as a whole bundle.

Installments

When we originally added payment gateway and shopping cart functionality to WP Courseware, we started with either lifetime access to a course or recurring installments. We’ve now added the ability to accept a specific number of installment payments for lifetime access.

Unit Teasers

At your request, we’ve also added functionality for free teaser lessons at the start of a course. This can be a great way to allow students to get a feel for your course prior to purchasing…especially if it’s an expensive course.

Progress Bar for Gutenberg Blocks

Many of you have asked to have the ability to place course progress bars in more than one place than just within the course outline. Well, with a little help from WordPress and the new Gutenberg block editor, we’ve finally been able to make that happen!

Drip Preview Functionality and Management

It’s been a while since we’ve introduced our drip functionality, however, when we did we didn’t include the ability for instructors to preview units which had been set with a drip schedule which had yet to be published. We’ve now addressed this as well.

Cory has also added the ability to manage the drip schedules from within the course builder as opposed to having to manage each drip setting individually within the units.

Overall, a huge update and once again, these are just highlights! Feel free to check out the changelog for more details!

The post WP Courseware 4.6 Introduces Bundles, Installment Payments, and Much, Much More! appeared first on Fly Plugins.