Migrating from LearnDash to LifterLMS? Discover a step-by-step guide to move your courses seamlessly—no data loss, no downtime.

In this show, we guide you through the essential steps for migrating your online courses from LearnDash to LifterLMS. Discover the key differences between these two platforms, and learn how to seamlessly transfer your content, quizzes, and user data without losing any vital information. Whether you’re enhancing your course’s features or improving user experiences, this migration process is crucial.

This Week’s Sponsors

LifterLMS: LifterLMS

Rollback Pro: Rollback Pro

The Show’s Main Transcript

[00:00:16.920] – Jonathan Denwood

Welcome back to the Membership Machine Show, folks. This is episode 180. In this show, we’re going to be discussing how you migrate from LearnDash to LifterLMS. We’re having a few inquiries from people looking to move from LearnDash to LifterLMS. Um, some of the advice out there is a little bit outdated. Um, I thought, um, it would be a good subject for us to cover. Um, got my co-host Kurt with me. So Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself?

[00:00:54.370] – Kurt von Ahnen

Sure, Jonathan. My name is Kurt von Ahnen. I own the agency called Mañana No Más, and we do a lot of great work with the team over at WP-Tonic as well.

[00:01:03.700] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah. And I’m the owner of WP-Tonic. We’re hosting support and a quasi-agency as well. So let’s go into it. But before we do that, I’ve got a message. From a couple of our new sponsors, which are much appreciated. So we’re going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we’ll get into the meat and potatoes of migrating from LearnDash to LifterLMS.

[00:01:36.370] – Show’s Sponsors

WP-Tonic is sponsored by Jetpack. Managing WordPress sites shouldn’t mean stitching together a pile of disconnected plugins. Jetpack brings security, performance, publishing, growth, and AI tools together in one WordPress-native toolkit. Use what you need: Backup, Scan, Boost, Social, Videopress, Stats, and more. All with modernized dashboards built into WP Admin. For your site or your clients’ sites, see what Jetpack can do. Jetpack.com. WP-Tonic is sponsored by Ninja Forms, and let’s talk about one of their powerful tools, conditional logic. Conditional logic is the clearest example. Every rule for the entire form lives in a single panel instead of being buried field by field. On client work, build speed and low maintenance are part of your margin. A form that is fast to configure and that a client can run afterward without coming back means less friction during build and less support load after the handoff. Ninja Forms, powerful and genuinely easy to work with without being dumbed down. To learn more, go to ninjaforms.com.

[00:02:55.940] – Jonathan Denwood

We’re coming back, folks. Wanna point out we’ve got some great special offers from the sponsors, plus a curated list of the best WordPress technology services all on one page. How do you get all this info and offers? Well, you go over to wp-tonic.com/deals, or you can do wp-tonic.com/deals, and you get to the same page. And all the offers are on that page, folks. Plus, we offer a really inexpensive course done by Kirk himself that shows you how to build a whole course using LifterLMS. So let’s go straight into it. So the introduction. So, if you’re doing the intro on this, what would you initially say, Kurt?

[00:03:49.770] – Kurt von Ahnen

I think the first thing in the intro for the subject matter is why, like why are people trying to go from LearnDash to LifterLMS? I mean, I’ve been a fan of LifterLMS for over a decade now, but I’ve got clients on LearnDash and some other tools, and LearnDash seems like a fine product, so you go, “Well, why?” I think if we’re honest, I mean, if we’re just really transparent on the show, LearnDash hasn’t really come out with any new features or products in recent years. LifterLMS has, right? So they’re actively developing LifterLMS. The customer service at LifterLMS, as far as I’m concerned, is superior. Of course, I’m part of the team, so I’m a little biased. But they recently consolidated products at their parent company, and the LearnDash site, blogs, knowledge base, and all that just seemed to vanish, which seemed to cause an uptick in people who wanted to migrate away. So the subject is very timely, and there are a lot of people in that space thinking this way, and I didn’t want people outside that space to wonder where the topic comes from or why we’re even talking about it.

[00:04:58.350] – Kurt von Ahnen

So that said, it’s like, when the needs assessment comes, right? So what state is your learning project in? Was it in development? Do you have active students? Do you have a large audience? Is it a small audience? And then figure out what the expectations are from the client or the course creator, because there are different ways to migrate and different things that would be included in a migration. And that’s important to know which pathway you want to take and how much effort you need to put in.

[00:05:28.330] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, it’s a quite fluent situation, you know, to move from one, um, there’s half a dozen WordPress, WordPress-based learning management systems out there. It’s probably more, but I would say there’s about half a dozen that are, I think, are reasonably active. And it’s It’s not going to be totally straightforward with a WordPress system, but it’s going to be more feasible than if you’re— than you were on a SaaS. But that’s changing as well, which we’re going to be discussing later on during this show. The possibility of moving from a SaaS to LifterLMS, in my opinion, has become easier. Because of new technology. But it’s definitely the size of the membership, how you’re going to deal with moving to a new learning management system with the subscriptions. Um, you’re probably going to be able to move most of the data across, like the quizzes, but it has to be looked at. Did you— because it’s mostly around, have you had a lot of customization done because the more customization, the more, um, automatic systems that are out there, which we’re going to discuss, probably ain’t going to work. So there has to be a discussion, and then there has to be a certain looking over the website, looking over the database, looking over things, because depending who the people hired before, there probably is probably no documentation that’s been done of any importance, and it might have been done years ago, and they prob— they might have hired other developers to work on it, and it’s probably— if that’s the case, there’s probably not been any paperwork provided, um, as you know, Kirk, um So, but that has to be paid for, that time to check out, check it over, right?

[00:07:46.210] – Jonathan Denwood

Which a lot of clients don’t understand, do they? They just think you should be able to log in, spend a few minutes, and then give them a quotation, don’t they?

[00:07:58.190] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, yeah, it’s— that falls under that expectation clause I was talking about earlier, right? It’s really important to understand the scope that a customer or course creator is looking for in the space. And then to your point, you know, do a valid needs assessment in the back of the site, right? So actually sign in, look at things, look at, you know, custom CSS, look at, you know, different things to see what you’re getting involved in. A good example of this is a recent project I’ve been working with. And originally, you know, it’s like, well, we’ve got so many course tracks and so many courses and, you know, so many lessons per course. And so then the average builder is going to think to themselves, okay, well, if that’s, you know, turns into 100 lessons, I’ve got 100 videos to embed and, you know, text to format, right? And you think of that time, you go, okay, we could do that in this amount of time. And then when you get into the project, you find out that the customer actually has 4 videos per lesson. And you go, well, that’s video hosting at 4x. That’s video embedding at 4x.

[00:09:07.410] – Kurt von Ahnen

That’s all of that takes time. And so you want to make sure that when you’re doing a needs assessment and you’re looking at these projects, you’re really looking at the project from an overall perspective and not making assumptions as to what’s normal. Because when you get into the e-learning space, you quickly learn that nothing’s normal.

[00:09:26.780] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, you’re describing it as needs. I describe it as paid discovery. Yeah, same term, isn’t it?

[00:09:35.690] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, paid discovery hurts more when you say it because it means they’re going to swipe a credit card.

[00:09:42.980] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, in some ways, yeah. And that varies. The minimum at WP-Tonic is $500, but it could be a lot more. It could be a couple of thousand. It could be up to 5,000. $100,000 depending on the size, um, how much time is going to have to be paid in this process. But anybody apart from a very, very small migration, in my experience, there are no small migrations. There’s always additional things they want to do after you start discussing with them. Um, it always, always escalates what the requirements of the project there’s things that people don’t recognize, right?

[00:10:31.390] – Kurt von Ahnen

And, and so there’s a lot of, um, agencies, there’s a lot of freelancers out there where if you would say, yeah, I want to, I want to migrate my course from this site to this site, they’d say, okay, yeah, we can do that for you. And they’d quote you a migration and you’d think, okay, cool, I’m handled. Um, and then you’d, they’d say you’re done and you’d sign, you’d be like, well, where are my users? Where, where are the previously issued certificates? You know, where, where’s the subscription agreements for people that were subscribed on recurring billing? Where did that go? Um, those are all separate things. And so that has to be part of the discussion as to what is actually coming in the migration. Um, I know that you’ve got a couple of tools on our show notes, but there’s one tool in particular between LearnDash and LifterLMS, whereas if you need to bring over you know, quizzes, evaluations, assignments, courses, lessons, user database, like all of that migrates, right? But it’s, it’s a much more involved, like as you said, checking over the site. When that’s all done, you got it. You, you got to audit the site pretty well to make sure everything fell in the right category where, and you know, in the right space in the database to make, make things matter.

[00:11:42.140] – Kurt von Ahnen

Now, before we go too far, Jonathan, this is a really good opportunity to mention to people you don’t always have to migrate and keep everything the same. This is a really great opportunity. Let’s say that you wanted to upgrade your user experience, your student experience. You want to upgrade the copy in your website. You want to change your branding or your overall look and feel. Maybe migration isn’t even on the platter. Like, a lot of people use the term migration thinking they have to migrate, when in reality you’re just you’re just going to build a new site and then transfer the URL over when it’s ready to go public. So it’s really important to look at, like, your opportunity as a business or a course creator. Like, is this your opportunity to rebrand and put out something new? Or do you really need to bring forth that legacy content and legacy data and move that forward into a new environment?

[00:12:37.420] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah. So let’s move forward. Key differences between LearnDash and LifterLMS. Are there any key differences in fundamentally how it works that people got to be aware of, Curt?

[00:12:55.210] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, I use these tools quite a bit, and so for me, the main difference between LearnDash and LifterLMS is the way that membership is treated. Because not only does LifterLMS include the membership management as part of its core, but as part of that core, it also covers the content restriction. And so, uh, LearnDash folks typically use a third-party member management system, uh, to manage who actually accesses their platform, and then usually brings in like Content Restriction Pro or something like that if they’re using content restriction in the site.

[00:13:31.530] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, You’re right, but where it gets tricky, and based on my experience, and I don’t think this is fundamentally changed, there’s a number of membership plugins out there, and most people with LearnDash, they use a membership plugin. And where it gets a bit tricky is if they’re using MemberPress, because MemberPress doesn’t— it uses a very, very effective— it’s a very effective plugin, but they use a restriction system that’s slightly unusual compared to other plugins that are generally used. And if they’re using MemberPress, that’s when it can get a bit tricky.

[00:14:18.810] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, yeah. And since LifterLMS has that as part of their core, it’s very fundamental in dealing with students, enrollment, roles, memberships, it all flows very well. Whereas in LearnDash, people have been using extra tools to try and strategize their own work methods, their own workflows, and that can create complication.

[00:14:43.030] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, I’ve learned is in some strange way it’s easy if they’re using it with WooCommerce because actually, because WooCommerce deals with the subscription and that. Um, but I say that, you— it still can be a bit tricky because on the WP-Tonic website I started off using a membership plugin, and then I, I’m still having to use it because it’s going to be— even though I’m using WooCommerce, it’s going to be a little bit tricky. Um, I like to get that fixed, um, and just use WooCommerce basically. I will look into that in the next couple of months. I think the other tricky thing— so the key ways to get your website courses ready for transferring to Lift NMS, is there any insights about that?

[00:15:44.280] – Kurt von Ahnen

I don’t have a ton of insight in this area. The best thing that I have for people is like, this is a great opportunity. To evaluate the current state of your training and then clean things up. Right. This is your chance to put your best foot forward. A lot of people, and let’s just call it lazy, Jonathan, they just go, oh, one and done, and they’ll keep flogging that same mule until it falls over dead and nobody signs up anymore. But this is your opportunity to freshen things up, maybe put in a new welcome video or a new intro or something. So in that respect, I think in those terms. The other thing is, um, and it’s now— I— now I’m having a hard time remembering how they do it. LifterLMS uses, um, lessons, sections, courses, membership, course tracks, like has a hierarchy in, in the way that it works. Uh, LearnDash has an extra thing in there. It’s, it’s like lessons— and I, I forget, it’s like type or tag or something.

[00:16:52.710] – Jonathan Denwood

They also have groups as well.

[00:16:55.190] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, it was a way to separate the learning content. I’m not talking about like memberships or groups. It was a way to separate the learning content, the lessons. And so knowing that LifterLMS doesn’t have that, um, LifterLMS has sections, but the sections are blank. They don’t hold any data. They’re just like titles for a new area of learning, right? LearnDash has something else there that they use. And I, and, and so, um, I, uh, I have had customers come to me and ask me to work with that or to custom develop LifterLMS, and I’ve turned it down every time. I’m like, nah, I don’t see the sense in it. Um, so I’ve never had to work with it, but there is that, that extra level that LearnDash people have. You want to clean that up before you move.

[00:17:40.500] – Jonathan Denwood

And it kind of overflows into the next question. I think we deal— we still got time to deal with it, and that’s how to manage existing users, subscribers. And this is where they always— the best way of, in my opinion, is get existing subscribers to resubscribe. It’s the cleanest way. Offer some inducive, offer some freebie, offer, you know, next time they sub— you know, um, they get a 10th. I don’t know what inducement you offer, but based on my experience, it’s just easier just to get, you know, obviously if they’ve— the thing with it is depends, you get resistance because, you know, um, you have to look at how much of the course they paid yearly, how much have they paid because you’re going to have to give them— you’re going to have to make a decision how much. It’s normally best to be a bit generous about them re-signing up and offer them a little bit extra time or whatever, but it’s just going to be easy if they sign up. But almost always you get pushback. They don’t really like that idea. They want the subscriptions to be migrated to the new platform, and somebody subscriptions just to seamlessly run and the person be able to look up and when it comes to renewal, it’s going to renew just as normal.

[00:19:14.200] – Jonathan Denwood

And that’s tricky, isn’t it, Kurt?

[00:19:17.160] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, it’s more than tricky. It’s, you know, a lot of the payment gateways specify that you can’t do that, you know, that you, that whenever you change product or change methodology that you need to get new financial approval from the end user. And it makes total sense. I know that some people say, man, I don’t want to do that because, you know, based on attrition, we’re going to lose 30% of our user base. Well, that’s a really giant red flag, Jonathan. If you’re afraid you’re going to lose 30% of your user base because they have to, you know, reinitiate the charge, that tells you your product’s probably not valuable enough. You know, the changing the website’s not the problem. It’s the, it’s the content or the way that you treat your, your tribe that is the problem. Um, so yeah, people need to— this happens with payment gateways too. So this is important to consider. If you were on the LifterLMS native payment gateway and then you switched to WooCommerce, um, if you turned off that LifterLMS payment gateway, it’s not automatically going to carry over to the WooCommerce. They would have to re-up.

[00:20:24.350] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I think that’s a good place for us to go for a middle break. I think we’ve covered some good insights. I think we’re given a good landscape about some of the things you’ve got to understand and that. So we’re going to go for a middle break, and when we come back, we’ll be looking at some of the tools, some other things that you need to know to have a successful migration from LearnDash to LifterLMS. We will be back in a few moments, folks.

[00:20:53.080] – Speaker 4

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[00:21:30.390] – Speaker 1

This podcast episode is brought to you by LifterLMS, the leading learning management system solution for WordPress. If you or your client are creating any kind of online course, training-based membership website, or any type of e-learning project, LifterLMS is the most secure, stable, well-supported solution on the market. Go to lifterlms.com and save 20% at checkout with coupon code PODCAST20. That’s PODCAST20. Enjoy the rest of your show.

[00:22:08.020] – Jonathan Denwood

We’re coming back, folks. Want to point out Also do a fantastic newsletter, um, covers a topic around membership. And also I do a review of some of the best tech stories that come on my radar, and I give you about 3 or 4 of those stories. And it’s all done by myself. You can sign up for the newsletter, it’s totally free, by going over to wp-tonic.com/newsletter. Wp-tonic.com/newsletter. So let’s go into the second half. So, um, tools. Now, I did a reasonable review what was coming up, and you got Transfer Bot Honors WP, and you got WP All Export Pro. They seem to be the two leading ones. Are there any tools that you want to mention as well?

[00:23:12.660] – Kurt von Ahnen

It comes down to what are we moving again, right? If I wasn’t worried about the user information, if I was just moving the course, I know we’re going to talk about how Chris Badgett showed that video.

[00:23:27.660] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, well, that’s the next part of this.

[00:23:33.010] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah., but I wanted to go just even simpler than that, right? If you use the import-export tool in WordPress, you know, you can export the lessons, you can export the courses, you can export things and import them over. And so there are tools where if you just want certain elements of content, you can completely do that. If you have a simple course, this is the one where everybody like loses their mind, you know, and just go, pshh. You might not have to do like a migration, quote unquote. If you have a very simple course, 10 lessons, and it’s one course, 10 lessons and a quiz, copy and paste, man. Jump in there, copy, paste, copy, paste, copy, paste, boom. You do that 10 times, you got your course and it’s done. You set up the access plan through Lifter. You set up your membership, you know, kind of structure that you want. And you launch, you just relaunch. It’s, it’s, that’s what I was talking about earlier where like this is your chance to rebrand, relaunch, redo. Um, for some people that’s the magic, like that’s just perfect. And so I wanted to make sure that we, that we brought out the obvious, right?

[00:24:45.000] – Kurt von Ahnen

Like, yeah, you could copy and paste and redo something and it would be fine. But if you want to jump into user transfer and, um, you know, certificate transfer and all that stuff, then I think Transfer by HonorsWP is by and large my go-to.

[00:25:04.860] – Jonathan Denwood

Which one, sorry?

[00:25:06.870] – Kurt von Ahnen

Transfer by HonorsWP.

[00:25:09.190] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, you’ve actively used it, have you?

[00:25:12.880] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, I’ve actively used it, like paid for it, used it. The folks that make it are, they’re great folks. I mean, they’re just really fun people. I met them at WordCamp. We stayed in touch through the Lifter ecosystem. I did a podcast with them when they first launched Transfer. And they’ve made a lot of improvements since that launched. So it’s, it’s a much more seamless process now.

[00:25:36.690] – Jonathan Denwood

Where is it used? Also mostly with WooCommerce and other migrations.

[00:25:44.180] – Kurt von Ahnen

So I’ve always used LearnDash and Lifter, but Transfer works with other products. So there, there’s a gambit of them. There’s like a menu and they’ve expanded that some. So I don’t want to speak on it and speak incorrectly. I’ve only used the LearnDash to Lifter. The first one I did, be honest with you, first one I did, I had problems and I was glad I was on a paid version and not a free version. The guys are really generous and they offered to let me have a copy for free, but I was doing client work. I didn’t think that was ethical, so I paid for it and I’m glad I did because I needed their support. And second time I did it, flawless. Third time I did it, flawless. So I’ve been really happy with the product.

[00:26:25.400] – Jonathan Denwood

And you’ve got any experience with WP-All Export Pro?

[00:26:29.960] – Kurt von Ahnen

I have, uh, you know, Emily from LifterLMS, uh, I’ve, I’ve talked to her about it a few times. Um, I have used it once, uh, but I wouldn’t call that in anger. It was a very simple project. Uh, but it seems like a very straightforward, uh, way to go. It’s just very exacting. Like it’s, it’s very particular. You want to select, select certain things, select other things. And then when you bring over the import, I go back to this is one of those that you want to audit and make sure it did what you thought it was going to do.

[00:27:02.210] – Jonathan Denwood

All right, so let’s move on to Chris Badgett, one of the founders of Lifted LMS. Recently he did a video using AI and Claude to migrate a course. So I think where this applies I personally, if you were looking to move from LearnDash to LifterLMS, I would either— if it’s a simple thing, I would listen to— I would just— you’d probably be okay using the ex— the WordPress export, um, functionality. Um, if you’re dealing with a bigger course, you probably want to hire WP-Tonic Speak to Kirk, and we probably use a tool like Honest WP. But where Claude AI really shines is if you are on a SaaS like Kajabi or Teachable, or, or, or there’s over a dozen that I think are serious platforms, and you wanted to move in WordPress. And you had a reasonably large course structure and a number of students, it was a mega undertaking, you know, um, not something— I, I think AI and Claude does offer— it’s still going to be undertaking, but it’s a more plausible undertaking. That’s my take on this. What’s your views, views on Chris’s video and your own view about using AI and Claude in the migration process.

[00:28:52.400] – Kurt von Ahnen

I’m sure Chris knows how I feel on the inside about these videos he’ll do sometimes. He gets very, very excited and I get it. It’s, it’s AI is fun. There’s a, and he’s growing in his AI journey at a rate that is, you know, exponential to my own. He’s doing, he’s doing a lot of really cool things. Um, I always get worried when we portray something to people as if like, hey, all you got to do is type this in and wickety whack, it’s good to go. Um, that always freaks me out. And what really freaked me out with Chris’s video here is that, you know, he has the benefit of working in demo websites, right? If he breaks something, he spools up another demo site. If something goes wrong, he spools up another demo site. Um, when we are talking to customers, when we are talking to agencies, I think it’s really important to mention like, hey, you want to play like this, that’s fine. Go do that in a staging site or go to that sample site.

[00:29:47.790] – Jonathan Denwood

You make it a good point there, folks. You never, never want to do any of this initially on your production live website. You want a staging site and you want to do it twice. You really got to do it on the staging site. We, if we were doing this for you, we, we would not do it on your production site. We would fully test it on the staging. That’s why the quote we would give you is probably a little bit higher than you thought, because we’re not, we’re not doing it on your— we’re going to have to duplicate all this. But because it’s our responsibility to make sure that this all runs you know, and we’re going to want to put it, you know, preferably on a live site on a different server. So we’ve still got the old site as a backup and we just changed the DNS records. And if something really turns up, we can do all the checking we like, but some things only turn up when you’re actually running, running the site, because otherwise we’re going to have to do so much testing that it doesn’t become economic to do it.

[00:31:01.410] – Jonathan Denwood

But so it’s always best if you’ve got, um, you’ve got the existing site and you’re, you’ve moved it to a new server, you’re paying for a couple months for the hosting, for the previous hosting. Um, that’s what I would advise you. What, what would you, what’s your response to what I’ve just said?

[00:31:25.000] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, right, right on the money. I, I’m, I’m very, very cautious, especially with You know, I’m less cautious with my own stuff, which you know firsthand from being friends with me, Jonathan. I’m less cautious with my own stuff. When it’s client stuff, man, dot the i’s, cross the t’s. It’s got to be right. And so, yeah, it would be a staging environment, all that stuff. Now, the thing I really liked about Chris’s video was he didn’t— it wasn’t smoke and mirrors thing. Like a lot of these AI brows, on YouTube are like, well, you know, all I did was tell it this and tell it that, and boom, Bob’s your uncle, I got this and the other. Um, he actually said, you know, here’s the prompt.

[00:32:07.590] – Jonathan Denwood

I’m going to put the prompt in the, in the lesson, in the, in the, um, well, you know, you know, straight away it’s not real if they don’t provide the prompts in the description or provide a link to the result. If they’re not providing step-by-step instructions and prompts and It’s one of these videos that they’re showing you and then boom, a third of it’s missing. You know it’s smoke and mirrors. You know that it’s just nonsense really, isn’t it?

[00:32:41.440] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, I think the inspirational takeaway from the video that Chris had done was I took a lot of what he did in that video. What was interesting to me was he uploaded the whole zip file of LifterLMS, the plugin, to Claude and said, this is what you’re going to use to build this. This is the entire, you know, this is the entire file on LifterLMS. So you understand how the code’s written and all that kind of stuff. So when you build something for me, it’s going in your X and you give me a JSON file, we know it’s going to work in this platform. And I think that that set a guardrail in the AI to make sure that he got something that was usable when he was done. It didn’t pull in data from other things ’cause he said, you know, you have to use the zip file and stay within these parameters. If you are using an AI tool that doesn’t allow you to upload the zip file that is that large, you could tell the AI to go to LifterLMS and GitHub and take those files from the GitHub ’cause they’re there, right?

[00:33:41.330] – Kurt von Ahnen

So there’s always a workaround to get to that space., but Chris did the video and he gave everybody the prompt. And then I thought, doing something similar, I’m gonna use Claude and I’m gonna have it write me a course for XYZ. And so, so I, I said, hey Claude, I want you to ask me some questions about, for me, I did it for bicycling. Ask me some questions about bicycling. I wanna make a course about bicycling that encourages parents to get their kids on bikes. Claude made the whole course, put in placeholder videos and everything, just gave me everything on a JSON file. I imported that into my sample website and everything worked like a dream. Like it was a really cool way to create something. And I think Chris really unlocked the door for a lot of course creators through that exercise.

[00:34:29.050] – Jonathan Denwood

I haven’t tested this; I’m only surmising, and really I should test it. But I think what also interests me is to look at one of the Kajabi or Podia example course websites, then have Lifter, and then ask Claude to scan that Kajabi website, import it into this, and give admin access to the Lifter LMS. And they import it, attempt to import everything in Kajabi, modify the course structure, and put it into Lifter. And I’ll be just, it won’t, it won’t work straight away, but I would surmise that you might be more impressed than you think, actually.

[00:35:24.970] – Kurt von Ahnen

I think the issue there is that the AI, Claude, or whatever tool you’re using, doesn’t have the login access to get the data. Like in Chris’s example, you had to go into LearnDash to export the course and provide the export. And then it took that and, uh, refactored that JSON file based on LifterLMS’s plugin folder, right? Um, if you tell it to go look at a course in Kajabi without having a way to export that course to give it that content, or to export a Podia course, I think you’re going to run into roadblocks where it’s going to say I was unable to access that content; I don’t have logins or whatever.

[00:36:08.980] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, you would have to grant admin access to the bank, but you have no access to the database. But yeah, it would— but you took some screenshots and that. But I think, I think you might be more surprised than you think. I’m not saying it’d be flawless the first time, but I, I think— because otherwise the only alternative you’ve said to people is you— it’s, um, copy and paste, isn’t it? Yeah.

[00:36:35.360] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, and interestingly enough that you bring this up, I am actually looking at bringing on a Kajabi migration project in the next couple of weeks. And so maybe I’ll have an update for the show.

[00:36:47.470] – Jonathan Denwood

All right. Any final thoughts?

[00:36:52.570] – Kurt von Ahnen

If I had to pick a final thought, it would be this. I mean, for people who are hearing us talk about these platforms and not sure what, you know, because you might hear TutorLMS, LifterLMS, LearnDash. Moodle, you know, LearnUpon, Bridge, all these different things. Sample it. Sample it. You know, LifterLMS has a demo trial site package. It’s like a dollar, right? Spend the dollar. They host it for you. It’s populated with courses, lessons, and users. It’s like a fully blown LMS that you get to play with so you understand what you’re actually building and what its capabilities are. I think that’s important. Because I think a lot of people might listen to shows like this, Jonathan, but if they’re not actively like in it, if they’re not up to their knees in LMS and databases and learning content and we’re having this discussion, it’s interesting, but it’s not compelling, right? It’s more compelling if like you go, hey, if I wanted to make my own course, how would I do it? Get that demo site, give yourself a quick little tour of a site that’s fully put together, and then you know what it is you’re actually building.

[00:38:01.710] – Jonathan Denwood

I think that’s a great point. So what’s the best way to find out more about you and what you’re up to, Kurt?

[00:38:07.620] – Kurt von Ahnen

I’m usually available on LinkedIn. I’m the only Kurt Van Ahnen on LinkedIn, but I do need to put a disclaimer down this week. I have gotten an incredible amount of spam through LinkedIn in the last 2 weeks, and it’s taken me forever to get back to folks.

[00:38:22.750] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah. And if you want to contact me, folks, I’m active on Twitter (X) and LinkedIn. Um, obviously LinkedIn, Twitter, X, and on YouTube, the WP-Tonic YouTube. But they’re the 3 main platforms that I’m reasonably active on. Or you can just email me at [email protected]. You can do that as well. We will hopefully be back next week with another topic you’ll find useful. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.

[00:38:58.000] – Speaker 1

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