Overview & requirements
WooCommerce Memberships can be used with Sensei LMS and the WooCommerce Paid Courses extension to restrict course access for learners unless they have an active membership.
Restrict courses
When you set up your courses and want to control access via the membership, you’ll need to check your Sensei LMS settings, the course setup, and your membership plan setup.
Sensei LMS settings
If you’d like learners to automatically be enrolled in courses when they purchase a membership, ensure that the Auto-start courses belonging to a membership checkbox is selected in Sensei LMS > Settings > WooCommerce Memberships:
Next, ensure that any courses you want to control access to via Memberships are not tied to WooCommerce products:
Now you can restrict your course via your membership plan.
Membership plan
When setting up your membership and course access, you only need to create a content restriction rule for the course. Course access rules will trickle down to the course’s associated lessons and quizzes:
Customer views
When you let Memberships and WooCommerce Paid Courses handle content restriction, the course content will only be accessible for as long as the membership is active.
When a member who has purchased access logs in, they’ll see the courses they have access to, and can view lessons within each course:
If a member has access to a lesson, all lesson details are shown to the member.
If the member doesn’t have access, or will have access in the future, course content remains hidden.
Course videos
One special case worth mention are course videos. By default, these are pieces of public content to allow you to sell non-members on your course. As such, they’re shown to members and non-members alike.
If you’d like to hide the course overview videos, you can do so in 2 ways – by changing the way you add the video with a shortcode, or by adding an additional code snippet.
Restrict via shortcode
If you want to restrict specific course videos to your members, you can use the content restriction shortcode to do so. However, if you do use this shortcode, you can’t use a plain URL for the video — you must use the full embed link instead.
First, get the full embed code for the video. If you’re using YouTube, this will be under Share > Embed for example.
Then, when you paste this into the “Course video” box, wrap the restriction shortcode around your embed link.
This will ensure members can see the video, but non-members don’t see the overview. The shortcode method is helpful if you want to delay access to the overview video specifically as well.
Restrict all course videos
If you’d like to restrict all course videos, you can enable “Restrict course video” in the Sensei LMS settings. This will hide all course videos from non-members rather than using them as a free preview:
