Rise to Wordpress

I am also interested in having a Rise course available to the public on WordPress. Looking forward to elegant solutions!

I think this thread is a bit confusing because contributors are discussing slightly different things in their implementation... The core question is "What is the best way to make RISE courses available to the public from a WordPress site?"

So let's start with the basics. Can I run a RISE course on a WordPress site? The answer is obviously - Yes! You publish the course for the Web and you can load that course as an HTML page on your WordPress site. When you access that page you see the RISE Course and the Lesson menu.

But, what if I want to sell that course and charge a subscription fee for viewing it. Well, then I need some kind of Membership/Subscription plug-in that will take payment and control access to my course. Probably the most common plug-in people are using is MemberPress. You define different 'memberships' - each membership can be free or you can take payment through Stripe or PayPal.

MemberPress has a built-in Courses feature, but it’s really designed for creating courses inside WordPress using its own LMS-style layout and lesson builder. It’s great if you’re building your content natively within WordPress, but not particularly useful if your course content is built in Articulate RISE and published as a standalone HTML package.

However, you don’t have to use the MemberPress Courses feature at all to protect your RISE content. Instead, you just:

1. Publish your RISE course for the Web (from Articulate),
2. Upload the course to your WordPress site, either to a subfolder or inside a custom plugin/theme directory—or you can even host it externally and embed it with an iframe,
3. Create a WordPress page that links to or embeds the course,
4. And then use MemberPress rules to restrict access to that page based on the user's membership level.

This gives you full control: you can charge for access, set up subscriptions, drip content, bundle multiple courses together, and so on - all without having to rebuild the course inside WordPress.

One important thing to understand: when you publish a RISE course for the Web, you're not using a Learning Management System (LMS) - so you’re not going to get LMS features like user progress tracking, completions, quiz scores, or reporting. The course behaves like a website: users can navigate through it, interact with the content, and take quizzes, but none of that data is tracked or stored.

That said, for many public-facing courses (especially free ones or low-cost lead magnets), this is totally fine. You're basically offering a polished, mobile-friendly learning experience—without the overhead of a full LMS.

What if I do want to track learner progress?

If progress tracking is important—like marking lessons as complete, collecting quiz scores, or issuing certificates—then you’re going to need a proper LMS that supports SCORM or xAPI content.

In that case, RISE gives you the option to publish your course as a SCORM or xAPI package, which can then be uploaded into an LMS that supports those formats.

Some popular WordPress LMS plugins that support SCORM/xAPI include:

• LearnDash (with the GrassBlade LRS or Tin Canny plugin for SCORM/xAPI support),
• LifterLMS (though SCORM support is more limited),
• WP LMS (some support depending on setup and plugins).

This setup adds a lot of functionality, but also more complexity and cost.

For many creators, especially if you're focused on marketing, lead generation, or paid access to content (without needing analytics), the “RISE course + MemberPress + WordPress” approach is a great lightweight option.

BUT – and it’s a big but...

An LMS like LearnDash has its own course structure—Courses > Lessons > Topics—and that comes with its own built-in navigation menu. So when you embed a RISE course (which also has its own lesson menu), you end up with two menus, which can be confusing for users.

This creates a bit of a UX clash:

• The LearnDash menu tracks progress and controls navigation from the LMS side.
• The RISE menu lets users jump between sections inside the RISE course, but it doesn’t sync with the LMS.

Now, RISE does allow you to suppress its sidebar menu when publishing (under Export Settings > Navigation), so you can streamline the experience a bit—but that comes at the cost of user control inside the RISE course.

So you have to decide:

• Do you want a tight LMS integration (with tracking, completions, progress bars, certificates, etc.) and are okay with losing some of RISE’s native navigation?
• Or do you want to let RISE do its thing and just gate access through WordPress (MemberPress, etc.), skipping the full LMS layer?

There's no perfect solution here—it depends on your priorities. But understanding this trade-off early can save you a lot of design headaches later.