Online Courses

Online Courses is a WordPress plugin that owns a reusable "online courses" content domain. It registers the custom post type, taxonomy and essential checkout metadata needed to publish courses while leaving visual presentation to the active theme.

What It Provides

• Custom post type: course
• Custom taxonomy: course_category
• REST-enabled metadata:
  • _online_courses_checkout_url
• A WordPress admin meta box for the course checkout URL
• Editable course blocks for the block editor
• A default block structure for new courses
• Rewrite rules for /cursos/, /cursos/{slug}/ and /cursos/categoria/...
• GitHub Releases update integration through the plugin Update URI

What It Does Not Provide

This plugin does not render public templates and does not implement checkout, payments, enrollment, student areas or access control. Themes and integration plugins should consume the content domain and decide how to display or process it.

For example:

• A theme may provide single-course.php and taxonomy-course_category.php.
• A theme template may read online_courses_get_checkout_url() and render a checkout link.

Course Editor Template

New courses start with an unlocked block editor structure using Online Courses blocks for the main course content:

• online-courses/learning-outcomes
• online-courses/course-curriculum
• online-courses/requirements
• About this course
• online-courses/audience-fit
• online-courses/instructor-bio

The custom blocks store editable course content and render Design System-compatible markup on the front end. The active theme remains responsible for page composition, layout, spacing and loading the visual system.

Public Contract

The plugin keeps these identifiers stable so existing WordPress content remains portable:

online_courses_post_type(); // course
online_courses_taxonomy(); // course_category
online_courses_checkout_url_meta_key(); // _online_courses_checkout_url
online_courses_get_checkout_url( $post ); // sanitized checkout URL or empty string

Installation

1. Download the latest online-courses-X.Y.Z.zip release asset.
2. In WordPress admin, go to Plugins > Add New > Upload Plugin.
3. Upload and activate the ZIP.
4. Flush permalinks if needed by visiting Settings > Permalinks and saving.

Development

Requirements:

• PHP 8.1+
• Composer
• MySQL for WordPress integration tests
• Subversion for installing the WordPress PHPUnit test suite

Install dependencies:

composer install

Run unit tests:

composer test:unit

Install the WordPress test suite and run integration tests:

composer install:wp-tests
composer test:wordpress

Run the full test suite:

composer test

Build a public ZIP package:

composer package

Release Flow

Releases are prepared from develop and published when the prepared version reaches main.

1. Run the Prepare Release workflow with patch, minor, major or an explicit version.
2. Merge the generated release/vX.Y.Z PR into develop.
3. Merge develop into main.
4. The Release workflow validates the plugin, creates tag vX.Y.Z, publishes a GitHub Release and uploads online-courses-X.Y.Z.zip.

License

GPL-2.0-or-later.