What POM LMS does
POM LMS turns a POM WordPress site into a course platform: courses with sections and lessons, an outline students navigate, lesson videos, progress tracking, access rules that decide who can open what, and a My courses area inside the WooCommerce account.
Courses and lessons
Two content types, with a deliberate relationship:
- A course is the landing page: title, description, featured image, and the settings that decide access.
- A lesson is one unit of content, attached to one course and to one of that course's sections.
Lessons are ordered by their order attribute, and that order is what students see in the outline and in the previous/next navigation.
Sections build the outline
A course defines its own sections — Introduction, Module 1, Practice — as a simple list of names.
Each lesson is assigned to one of them. The course sidebar then renders the outline as an accordion: one panel per section, the lessons inside it, each with its estimated time and a completion checkbox.
A lesson with no section does not appear in the outline, which is the most common reason a published lesson seems to be missing.
Access control
Access is decided per course, and can be overridden per lesson. Three mechanisms, evaluated in order:
- Login required — the course can require students to be signed in.
- A permission rule — a named rule, defined once in the theme options, that can require a role, a purchase, a subscription, or a purchase within a time window. A rule on a lesson overrides the course's rule.
- Paid course — when no rule applies, a course marked as paid checks whether the student has bought the associated product.
Preview lessons are the exception: a lesson marked as a preview can be opened by anyone, unless the course also requires login for previews.
What students see without access
Rather than an error, the student sees a message you write. It is set on the course, can be overridden per lesson, accepts shortcodes, and supports a merge tag that prints links to the associated products.
That message is where you explain what to buy, what to join, or who to contact.
Progress
Every student has a completion percentage per course, shown as a progress bar in the course sidebar and in My courses.
By default a lesson is marked complete when the student opens it. A setting switches that to manual, so students tick lessons off themselves from the outline.
Lesson video
A lesson can carry a video URL. YouTube and Vimeo links are detected automatically and rendered with the theme's video player, including a thumbnail. Any other URL is embedded directly.
The student's account area
When WooCommerce is present, POM LMS adds a My courses entry to the account menu, listing every course the student can access with its completion percentage, the reason they have access, and a link into the course.
The entry's name, its URL slug, its column label and its empty-state text are all configurable.
What it does not do
- No quizzes, assignments, grading or certificates.
- No cohorts, enrollment dates or drip scheduling.
- No email notifications of any kind.
- No course archive page out of the box — course listings are built with the theme's own tools.
- No built-in student reporting beyond the completion percentage.
What it needs
The POM theme, because the templates, the settings framework and the permission rules all come from it. WooCommerce only when courses are sold or when the My courses area is used.
Continue with Requirements and compatibility.