Thrive Apprentice has been a course platform for building, organizing, and connecting with third party tools to sell access to courses for several years. Over time its features have evolved to make it one of the best course platforms for WordPress, but it was always missing one key element that made it reliant on other tools: The ability to protect more than just courses.
That has all changed with the 4.0 update.
Thrive Apprentice is now a fully-functional membership plugin for WordPress with the ability to organize, protect, and sell any content on your site.
I want to go through each of these main points and showcase how Thrive Apprentice is now my favorite and perhaps even the best membership plugin for WordPress.
Create Membership Content in Thrive Apprentice
When you think about “memberships” in the sense of content in a WordPress site, you typically think about content that gets associated with a membership level. Content gets locked behind it so that only users with accounts granted access to that level (through a purchase or other means) get access.
Thrive Apprentice’s version of membership levels are products. Think of products figuratively like a box or container. It helps that their imagery illustrates this. You put the content inside the protect and only people who get access to the product can get at what’s inside.
Products can contain courses and “other content” which is basically any other content on your site. If you have an all-access membership like I do with Convology Pro, you would put everything you sell access to into a product and call name it as you wish.
If you have a membership level that gets access to one course then you would name that membership level whatever you want and add the one course.
See what I’m getting at here?
Thrive Apprentice products are ridiculously convenient compared to other membership plugins because you can do it all within the one single product interface.
You just click the type of content you want to add (course and something else) then you check the boxes next to that content or do a search for it if your site is large. Check the boxes, click add to product, and you’re done!
Protect Membership Content in Thrive Apprentice
The protection side of Thrive Apprentice is mechanically very simple. You’ve already made the products, and products are by nature going to restrict access.
Once content is in a product, you just need to determine what mechanisms give someone access. Is it a WP user role, a purchase from ThriveCart, or something else?
Access restriction rules allow you to decide what happens when someone tries to access to your content. Again, this is very simple in Thrive Apprentice. You can set these are the default level, or based on the product. For memberships, this means you can give different messages to different membership levels.
In my earlier example I mentioned the all-access membership. If you have a less-access membership you may wish to use language that encourages them to upgrade or get access to more by leveling up their membership.
None of the Annoying and Clunky Settings/options
One of my personal frustrations with every other membership plugin for WordPress is the unfriendly nature of the interface and the workflow for protecting content.
Other plugins make you go into each page and configure protection settings, and/or they have a very dated “in WordPress” feel to the management side of content on a hard-to-navigate list that resembles the WordPress page list interface. If you’ve ever used one of these plugins you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Thrive Apprentice has streamlined the options interface.
Sell Memberships with Thrive Apprentice
Thrive Apprentice directly integrates with ThriveCart, WooCommerce, and SendOwl. You can technically integrate with other tools and membership plugins.
Selling a membership allows the a payment gateway like ThriveCart to handle all of the billing and subscription side, and simply tell Thrive Apprentice whether someone has purchased, refunded, etc.
I personally prefer ThriveCart‘s integration, and find it handles the integration with autoresponders/email marketing systems, payment providers like Stripe or Paypal, and more complex systems via Zapier extremely well.
Display Content Only to Members Even on Public Pages
A new feature added to Thrive Apprentice is the ability to link a membership level to what the user can see on a page. Thrive call’s this “Conditional Display”.
Imagine having content on a page and choosing who can see it.
You can have three different calls-to-action on the same page based on what the user has access to. If they’re not a member they see one CTA. If they only own a course they see another CTA. If they’re in your all-access maybe they see no CTA at all or see a note about your 1-on-1 coaching program.
You can sell access to a particular part of your content, too, by having content show only to members who buy access.
Conditional Display can be used to create entire areas of your site restricted just to members, including unique headers, member dashboards, etc.
Technically, you can completely design your entire site around the access someone has to your membership.
This is a feature you can’t find in any other membership plugin.
Thrive Suite Enhances Thrive Apprentice’s Membership Features
Thrive Apprentice has the advantage of being part of the broader Thrive Suite.
- Thrive Theme Builder – Craft your entire site exactly how you want it
- Thrive Architect – Design pages, landing pages, and membership experiences with no coding & no hassle
- Thrive Automator – Connect and integrate with almost any external tools
This synergy within the Thrive Suite takes an already awesome Membership Plugin like Apprentice and elevates it to an entire ecosystem.
Yes, this does mean you rely more on one company’s tools. But they’re still tools on your WordPress website vs. an all-in-one SaaS tool. You can still use or not use any of these features.
If you’re looking to streamline your tech stack, remove the frankenstein monster you had to duct tape together, and avoid the non-stop frustration, I highly recommend the Thrive Suite ecosystem for your membership site.