Gather Grove Courses

Gather Grove Courses turns your WordPress site into a home for self-paced learning. You build a course from modules and lessons, and your members work through it in a clean, focused lesson player that keeps their place.

What you get:

• A drag-and-drop course builder. Course → Module → Lesson, reordered by dragging. Each lesson is a stack of blocks you arrange in any order: text (written in the familiar WordPress editor or in Markdown), video, audio, image gallery, downloadable file, a list of materials, an embedded form, spacers and dividers.

• A lesson player your members will like. Lesson navigation, a progress ring, “Mark complete”, a “pick up where you left off” resume point, and a native video and audio player with speed control.

• Watch-to-complete, done fairly. For video and audio you host yourself, a lesson can complete on its own once a member has actually watched enough of it. Skipping ahead does not count, and watch progress follows the member’s account from phone to laptop.

• Prerequisites. Lock a module until the one before it is finished, or a course until another course is complete.

• Enroll members your way. Switch on open enrollment and logged-in members enroll themselves from the course page with one click, or add and remove people yourself from the course builder. Selling through Gather Grove Booking and applications through Gather Grove Forms are there too when you want them.

• Free preview lessons. Mark any lesson as a preview and anyone can watch it, enrolled or not.

• A Resource Library. A Resources tab in the player lists every download in one place: course-wide sections you curate (a syllabus, a welcome pack) plus the files attached to each lesson.

• My Courses. The [gather_grove_courses_library] shortcode gives each member a page of their courses with progress, and a one-click “Starter pages” button builds a ready-made Classroom page for you.

• Preview as a member. See any lesson exactly as an enrolled member would before you publish it.

• Fonts per course. Pick the heading and body fonts the player uses, from your Elementor Global Fonts, a curated list of fonts bundled with the plugin (nothing is loaded from a font service), or the reader’s system fonts.

• Your words. Call your courses “Programs” or your members “Students”: the words members read follow your studio’s wording.

• Media Library awareness. Open any file in the Media Library to see which lessons use it, and get a clear warning before deleting one that a lesson still needs.

• Elementor support. A Course Card widget and dynamic tags (title, description, image, lesson count, progress and more) for designing course pages and loop grids. With Elementor Pro, the Starter pages button also builds Theme Builder templates for your course pages.

• LearnDash migrator. Move your courses, lessons, students and their progress across from LearnDash, with a dry run first so you can see exactly what will happen.

• Privacy tools. Watch progress is included in WordPress’s Export Personal Data and Erase Personal Data tools.

• On-brand. Styles are driven by CSS custom properties, so the player follows your site’s palette.

Part of the Gather Grove suite

Gather Grove Courses is one part of Gather Grove, a family of plugins for running and growing a creative business on your own WordPress site. The plugins share one admin, one list of people, and one look:

• Gather Grove Booking — classes, appointments and events, with online payment. Sell course access through Booking’s checkout, and a purchase enrolls the member automatically.

• Gather Grove Forms — forms and applications. Embed a form in a lesson, or require an approved application before someone can enroll.

• Gather Grove Communities — private member spaces. Members can share a lesson note with the group and discuss it there.

• Gather Grove Pulse — email broadcasts, automated sequences and a contact list that knows who booked, joined or enrolled.

• Gather Grove Companion — an AI assistant for your admin, and a chat helper for your visitors.

io.

Free and Professional

Everything listed above is free, and stays free. The free plugin has no locked features, never expires, and is not a trial.

io, for studios that run cohorts and assessments. It adds:

• Quizzes with seven question types, including listening and ABX questions with a blind mode, automatic grading and an essay grading queue

• Completion certificates with public verification links

• Cohorts, with a roster you manage from the course builder

• Drip release by calendar, enrollment date or live-class attendance

• Live-class attendance that completes the matching lesson, with Gather Grove Booking

• The full set of Elementor widgets, including Course Catalog, Curriculum and Progress Ring

• Interactive lesson blocks: flashcards, a hotspot image, a before-and-after compare and step-by-step guides, with each student’s progress saved to their account

io/docs/pricing.

External services

This plugin can connect to the following services. None of them is contacted unless you use the feature that needs it.

YouTube, Vimeo and other oEmbed providers — when you paste a YouTube, Vimeo or other video link into a lesson, WordPress’s oEmbed system asks that provider for the embed code, and the provider’s player then loads from its own servers when a member opens the lesson. The member’s browser connects to the provider, which receives their IP address and whatever the provider’s player collects.

com/t/terms

com/privacy

com/terms

com/privacy

Postmark — used to send your site’s email through your own Postmark account, only after you connect one under Gather Grove → Settings → Email delivery. When connected, your server sends Postmark your key, your sending domain (to register it and check its DNS records), and each email it is asked to send: sender, recipients, subject, body and any attachments. If you also switch on “Send all your site’s email through Postmark”, every email your site sends goes this way.

Postmark then posts delivery, bounce, open, click, spam-complaint and unsubscribe reports back to a secret address on your site. Nothing is sent unless you connect an account.

com/terms-of-service

com/privacy-policy

Web push services (Google, Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft) — when a member turns on phone notifications, their browser registers with its own push service, and your site sends each notification to that service for delivery. The notification carries a short title and a link. The push service receives it with the member’s browser subscription address, and with your site’s admin email address, which the web push standard requires as a contact for the sending site.

Nothing is sent unless a member turns notifications on.

com/privacy

org/privacy/

com/legal/privacy/

com/privacystatement