This lesson brings the whole section together. We'll build a members-only online course. People buy a monthly subscription, get logged in, and unlock one new lesson every week. It takes five pieces: a membership site, a field that tracks which lessons each member can see, your pages, page protection, and one automation.
If you'd rather start from something prebuilt, Systems has Setup Wizards for membership sites. And the Courses and Lessons app builds a whole course for you, with course and lesson pages, a signup form and an automation, all protected by a membership site. Apps are turned on from your profile icon, then Apps, and they need a Dynamic CMS package. Building it yourself once shows you how every part works, so you can adapt it later.
Step one: the membership site. Hover over Pages, click Membership Sites, and create a new site. In the Domain dropdown, pick a domain you publish pages to. Every page on that domain becomes part of the site, so member logins work there. Add your logo, a logo link and your brand color.
Under Login redirects, choose where members land after they log in, like your course overview page. Then click Save. Ontraport creates your login, registration and reset password pages, and the emails that go with them, in your branding.
Step two: a field that tracks access. Go to Contacts, then Settings, then Field Editor. Pick a tab, add a section if you like, and click Add Field. Name it something like Course lessons, and choose the List Selection type, with values like Week 1 and Week 2. A list selection field can hold several values at once. That's what lets members keep earlier lessons as new ones unlock.
Step three: the pages. Start with the page people buy from. First, create your course under Sales, then Products, then New product. Add an order form to your page, hover over the order form block, click the gear icon, and choose Payment Settings. Click Add product and pick your course. Then open the product's settings, choose Make this product a subscription, and set it to Per month. Your default gateway is added automatically, and you can pick an invoice receipt. Click Done, then save and publish. Order forms are available on some account levels.
Next, your course pages: a course overview and one page per lesson. Create them from the Pages section of your site's settings, or click Pages in the top navigation, then New page. Make your header and footer global blocks, so one edit updates every page. On each lesson page, add a Video element with that week's video. When Lesson 1 is done, copy it in your Pages collection, rename it, and swap the video for Lesson 2.
Publish every page to your membership site's domain. Click Publish, choose your site's domain, and give each page its own file name, like slash lesson-1. Then click Save & Publish.
Step four: protection. Pages are public by default. Open a page and go to Settings, then Display settings. For the course overview, set Display this page to whom? to All logged in members. For Lesson 1, choose Some logged in members. Add a condition, choose Field is this value, pick your lessons field, set it to contains, and choose Week 1. Do the same for Lesson 2 with Week 2.
Then set Redirect users with no access to your sales page, so anyone who isn't a member yet gets an offer to join. Leave the sales page itself public, so new visitors can buy.
Step five: the automation that runs it all. Go to Contacts, then Automations, then New automation, and choose Start from scratch. If Contacts is the only object in your account, you'll find Automations in the top navigation instead. Add a Purchases product trigger and pick your course. It fires however the purchase happens.
Under the trigger, click What happens next? and choose Update Membership Access. Select your site, set Status to Enabled, and click Done. Ontraport then sends the new member a registration email with a link to create their password, so you don't need to write that email yourself.
Next, add Update Contact. Under Update the field, choose your lessons field, click Add, and select Week 1. Then add a Send an Email action to tell members Lesson 1 is ready.
Now add a Wait set to Some time passes, seven days. You can also have it wait until a time of day, in your account's time zone or the contact's.
After the wait, add another Update Contact that adds Week 2, and choose add these values to existing, so Week 1 isn't replaced. Follow it with an email announcing Lesson 2. Repeat the wait, update and email for each new lesson, and finish the path with an End element.
To give someone free access, add a Go to element below the default Added to automation trigger, and connect it to Update Membership Access. Then you can select contacts in your Contacts collection, click Automations, and add them to this one. When it's ready, click Save and publish.
Because this course is a subscription, also set a Suspended redirect in your site's settings, like a page where members can update their card. The membership support article has a recipe that suspends access when a payment is declined and turns it back on when a payment succeeds.
So: a membership site for logins, a list selection field to track lessons, an order form and course pages, display settings to protect them, and one automation that grants access and unlocks a lesson each week. That wraps up Membership sites. Next up: the PilotPress overview, for running a membership site on WordPress.