The Gutenberg Guide to WP Courseware and S3 Media Maestro

Unless you’ve lived under a rock for the past 2 years, you’ve likely heard that the classic WordPress editor is getting a facelift and its name is Gutenberg.

The WordPress Gutenberg editor has been in the making for a couple years now and is finally ready for prime time….well, errr, for the most part. Thankfully, the release date was pushed out to the flip side of “Black Friday”. Not that I have a lack in confidence with team Automattic, but the process of fully transitioning to the Gutenberg editor has been a massive project and a bit of a rocky road.

Whether you’re a fan or not, it does bring a lot of great features which will help you construct your page layout on the back end. You can now visually compose your pages and posts with “blocks”. Also, the HTML5 output is better than what was generated with the classic editor.

This is a major change in how WordPress functions and how you compose pages and posts. That said, it effects a number of plugins including WP Courseware and S3 Media Maestro.

WP Courseware and Gutenberg

WP Courseware has two custom post types (at this point in time)…one for courses and one for course units. The courses post type doesn’t really require an editor because its interface only consists of the course builder and the course configuration options.

However, course units can now be edited using the new Gutenberg editor. We’ve also introduced four new blocks for WP Courseware.

• Course outline – This displays a basic outline of your course. Anyone (logged in and logged out users) can view the outline, however, the links are only clickable if the user is logged in and enrolled into the course.
• Course progress – This will display an accordion-style outline for each course a student is enrolled in. If the student isn’t logged in, they won’t see any outline for that particular course.
• Course listing – This will display a listing of all published courses. You can include the course title, course description, featured image, and enrollment button (or purchase button if you’re charging for the course).
• Course enrollment button – This block simply allows you to setup an enrollment button for a course. You can configure the message that appears in place of the button if the student is logged in and enrolled into the course.

Each one of these blocks are simply shortcodes. We’ve utilized the Gutenberg interface to configure and insert the shortcodes along with a preview.

S3 Media Maestro and Gutenberg

S3 Media Maestro does have its own block option to embed audio, video, or downloadable files.

When you add an S3 Media Maestro block, you can click the Add S3/CloudFront Media button to trigger the shortcode builder. Once you insert the media file, you will get a live preview.

For a detailed explanation for each Gutenberg block, check out the video at the top of the page.

If you found the video helpful, would you show us some ❤️ and subscribe to our YouTube channel below? Subscribe