What's new

New

• A redesigned front end. The catalogue, course page, checkout, learning area, quiz player, and instructor profile have been rebuilt on one set of design tokens.
• The student dashboard has been rebuilt, with a new Activity tab and a printable invoice for every order.
• Category, level, and price filters on the course grid.
• Instructor profiles have their own reviews page, and sites can word what an instructor’s years of experience mean.
• Sign-in and registration have been rebuilt, and the become-an-instructor application with them.
• The course grid takes shortcode attributes: choose which filters appear, hide individual ones, and set what each starts on.
• Four more ways to sort a catalogue — most popular, top rated, and price in either direction.

Improved

• Q&A threads open in place, with helpful votes and a best answer. Q&A on a quiz is now opt-in per quiz, off by default.
• Course progress is summarised on the enrolment row, so a dashboard of many courses is no longer many queries.
• Withdrawals can be cancelled while pending, name the destination they will be paid to, and explain a rejection.
• Most of the plugin’s text is newly translatable. Around 700 strings are newly available if you maintain a translation — the previous template was missing the whole student and instructor dashboard.

Fixes

• Quiz answer review marked every option as the student’s answer on some question types.
• Courses are now attributed to the instructor who teaches them. A course an administrator created and handed over stayed authored by the administrator, so anything that asked WordPress whose course it was got the wrong answer.
• A page using a feature from an addon that is switched off no longer prints the shortcode’s own syntax at customers.
• Subscription and membership settings no longer take effect when nothing is installed that can sell them.
• Live class times are shown in the reader’s own timezone rather than the server’s, and a host can end a session early.
• Manual payments require their instructions to be filled in. A payout control that wrote nowhere has been removed.
• Import and export work on Windows. Every job failed with “Invalid file path” on WAMP, XAMPP, and IIS, because the plugin compared its own folder against itself using the wrong kind of slash.
• A newly published course no longer goes missing from the Top rated sort.
• Smaller fixes to the wishlist, the catalogue’s level filter, instructor visibility in Q&A, and who may export.

Security

• Escaping, input sanitising, and prepared statements were reviewed across the plugin against the WordPress coding standards.

New

• The assignment screen has been rebuilt. An assignment closes once its deadline passes, and marked work appears on the student’s My grades tab and counts toward the course grade.
• The subscriptions dashboard tab has been rebuilt and filed under Account. Checkout shows the plan’s features and terms.
• A host can end a live session early, and scheduled sessions are named on the order receipt and in the course sidebar.
• Badge progress and payout appear on the student dashboard, and assignments and badges contribute to the activity feed.
• Advanced Reports adds the teaching, earnings, and withdrawal figures to the instructor’s own dashboard, not just the admin screens.

Improved

• A bundle that refuses a course says why instead of silently dropping it, and bundles appear under the catalogue’s price filter.
• An expired Zoom token is renewed automatically instead of failing the request.
• The bundle course picker is capped rather than loading every course on the site.

Fixes

• AI Studio’s text carried the free plugin’s translation domain, so none of it could be translated. Ninety strings are newly available if you maintain a translation.
• Leaderboard totals counted completed courses from the wrong table.
• CSV export now passes an explicit escape character. This changes how quotes inside exported data are written, and keeps behaviour stable on PHP 8.1 and later.
• Report queries no longer log a warning on every load of a report with no search term.
• Values placed into import error messages are escaped, including a taxonomy name taken from the imported file.
• Pro no longer switches itself off when the free plugin is deactivated. It stays installed and inert, keeping its licence and addon settings, and explains what is missing with a button that installs or activates the free plugin.
• Social login buttons sit above the sign-in fields rather than below them.
• An assignment’s facts no longer leave one card stranded on a row of its own.

New

• Audio lessons. Add an audio track to a lesson and it plays in the learning area, with the lesson completing itself when the track finishes.
• One player for every video source. Self-hosted, YouTube, and Vimeo lessons now share the same controls, and a lesson marks itself complete when the video reaches the end — which YouTube and Vimeo lessons never did before.
• Export and import. Move settings between sites as a portable file, with a job runner that resumes where it left off and can undo an import that went wrong.
• A setup checklist on the dashboard, so a new site can see what is left to configure.

Fixes

• An unexpected error during checkout no longer fails as a blank page. Requests that go wrong now return a proper error the site can act on, instead of a PHP fatal that could also print server paths when error display is switched on.
• Instructor invitations work. The acceptance link was broken, and accepting one did not finish setting the account up.
• A video lesson could not be saved in some cases.

New addons

• Subscriptions and memberships. Sell recurring access to a course, a category, or the whole catalogue, with plans, trials, renewals and cancellations, and earnings attributed per item.
• Enrollment. Enrol many students at once or import them from a CSV. The run is reported row by row, and a retry after a dropped connection covers only the rows it never reached.
• Social login. Let students sign in with an existing Google or Facebook account. The code exchange happens on the server, never in the browser.

That takes Pro to fifteen addons, all included in every plan.

New: AI Studio

• Write any field from a brief, or rewrite what is already there — eight ways, on course, lesson, and assignment fields.
• Generate a whole course from a topic: five modules of four to five lessons, each closing with a quiz and an assignment. Reviewed before anything is created, and regenerable a section at a time.
• Generate quiz questions from a module’s own material, in every question type the plugin supports.
• Generate a course thumbnail, previewed before it is applied.
• Bring your own API key. Usage is tracked per person, with monthly spending caps and per-minute rate limiting.

New: import and export

• Move courses, lessons, quizzes, questions, curriculum, terms, and media between sites. The free plugin carries the screen and moves settings; these are the handlers that move the content.

Improved

• Notification mail is queued rather than sent inline, so a slow mail server no longer holds up the request that triggered it.
• Bundles can be sold alongside subscriptions, and the checkout describes what each line covers.
• Ungraded assignment submissions are counted in the dashboard’s “needs your attention” card.

Fixes

• Assignment management is scoped to an instructor’s own courses. It previously recognised co-instructors only, so a course author could be refused, and the listing was not limited to courses the instructor teaches.
• Assignment access is resolved before enrolment is checked, and a denial reason is honoured rather than treated as access granted.
• Bundle sales attribute earnings to the right instructor again.
• Deleting a bundle deletes it, instead of leaving it in the trash.

New & improved

• Course pages now use your theme’s fonts. The plugin no longer forces its own font family on the frontend, so changing fonts in your theme or global styles takes effect everywhere.

Fixes

• The course builder now sends the course along with content drip requests, so drip rules can be set on a lesson while it is still being created.

New & improved

• Bundle cards now show the owner’s avatar, linked to their instructor profile, matching course cards.
• Leaderboard and points widgets now use your theme’s fonts instead of forcing their own.

Fixes

• Instructors can set content drip rules on their own courses again. The permission check only recognised co-instructors, so the course author was refused.
• Content drip rules can now be set on a lesson while it is being created, before it has been added to a section.

First release of CourseGlade Pro — all 12 addons, included in every plan. See free vs Pro for the full breakdown.

Security

• Restricted the enrollment REST endpoints to administrators (they were reachable with an instructor-level capability).
• Escaped instructor-application data returned by the REST API.
• Closed several per-course ownership gaps and stopped quiz endpoints from exposing answer keys.
• Added login throttling; the instructor user-picker now searches by name only and no longer exposes emails.

New & improved

• Course cards show the instructor’s avatar, linked to their public profile.
• Maintenance mode now also covers the course archive and category/tag/difficulty pages, with a new filter to adjust its scope.
• Real avatars now appear in quiz grading, submissions, and order details.

Fixes

• Scheduled tasks (cache cleanup, stale-order cancellation, enrollment expiry, stats refresh) now run reliably on cron.
• Order and withdrawal status transitions are atomic, preventing duplicate processing.
• Blocked creating a duplicate order while one is still pending for the same course.
• Numerous settings, learning-mode, and responsive-layout fixes.

Performance

• Removed N+1 queries from the instructor and order lists and batched dashboard revenue calculations.
• Per-order options are no longer autoloaded on every request.

First public release of CourseGlade — the complete WordPress LMS with courses, quizzes, multi-instructor support, and built-in payments. See the features page for everything included.