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What is Lifter Elements?

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What is Lifter Elements?

Lifter Elements is a premium plugin that brings the power of Elementor’s visual editor and theme builder to your LifterLMS courses. It allows you to create templates for courses, lessons, and archive pages all within the Elementor user experience, recreating LifterLMS features, such as videos and progression, with Widgets and Dynamic tags.

How LifterLMS handles course & lesson content

LifterLMS handles content for courses and lessons by using custom post types. A Custom Post Type (or CPT for short) is WordPress' name for a type of content that isn't a built-in Post or a Page. For example, some WordPress sites have custom post types for Portfolio or Team Members. These content types often appear in distinct layouts on the front-end of websites, since they serve different purposes. The custom post types added by LifterLMS are largely similar to a page or post, but they have been configured to accept different content than a page or post would, with features such as videos, audio, progression, and more.

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Example of Courses custom post type

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Single vs Archive template

  • A single template for a LifterLMS post type applies to an individual lesson or course.
  • An archive template for a LifterLMS post type applies to the listing page with all courses (Course Catalog).

Elementor's Theme Builder

Info

Please note that the Theme Builder functionality is only available with Elementor Pro. To understand how Lifter Elements works with the free and premium versions of Elementor, please see our article on LINK TO ARTICLE.

Elementor's Theme Builder allows you to create Theme Builder templates for your course archive, courses, and lessons. Using Theme Builder templates to change the appearance of your courses and lessons lets you customize their layout globally, so that any tweaks you want to make in the future can be made in one place, while all of your courses' and lessons' content continue to come from LifterLMS.

If you're using the free version of Elementor, you can build each course and lesson one-by-one using Lifter Element's Widgets and Dynamic tags, however, you won't be able to make templates with the Theme Builder. We highly recommend using our plugin with Elementor Pro.

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100 lessons will have completely different titles, videos and text, but in most cases those elements will always be displayed in the same way in terms of font, style, position, etc. Instead of manually building each lesson one-by-one in Elementor, the Theme Builder allows you to create a single layout that can apply to all 100 lessons at the same time, dynamically displaying the correct content.

How Lifter Elments integrates LifterLMS and Elementor

Widgets

If you scroll down the widget list you will see that Lifter Elements adds a section called LIFTERLMS - GENERAL.

Our widgets allow you to interdependently position and style each element of the LifterLMS course and lesson pages. The widgets automatically understand which course or lesson they are on, so you don't have to manually specify which course's syllabus to display for a widget to display the correct one. Our course and lesson content widgets strip out the Gutenberg blocks added by LifterLMS to give you full control in Elementor. A course widget placed on a lesson will automatically display the course data of the course that lesson is in. Lifter Element's widgets work both when using Elementor on individual courses/lessons and on Theme Builder templates, but we strongly recommend going the Theme Builder route. Some of our widgets (course author and course access plan) won't work on the free version of Elementor because they rely on the Elementor Pro carousel widget.

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Theme Builder Locations

By default, Elementor Pro doesn't correctly detect the LifterLMS content, so it's missing from the list of available locations in the Theme Builder. This prevents you from creating layouts for lessons and some of the kinds of content added by various LifterLMS add-ons. With Lifter Elements, the LifterLMS post types are accessible as Theme Builder locations so you can change the style and layout of 1000 lessons at a time using a single template.

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Dynamic Tags

Elementor's Dynamic Tags allow you to insert data from your posts into Elementor layouts. Lifter Elements adds many LifterLMS Dynamic Tags you can use to insert your course data into various widgets including those not originally designed to work with Lifter Elements.

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Conditional Logic (included in Creator Edition)

Lifter Elements allows you to dynamically show or hide widgets, sections and columns (now called inner sections) in Elementor. This allows you to shape each student's unique experience with your course platform.

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Templates

We offer importable templates to get you started using Lifter Elements. They can be purchased individually, and we include some with the Creator Edition. All templates we offer are included in the Creator's Club all-access membership. Templates are a way to quickly import new layouts you can apply to your courses, lessons and catalog. They can also be a great way to see what you can accomplish using the plugin. It's possible to target different templates to different courses or lessons and have many present on your site at the same time.

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