AccessNow LMS is a free WordPress LMS plugin for running online courses on your own site. You build a course from units and lessons, add a quiz where you need one, and students work through it at their own pace while the plugin keeps track of where they’re up to, then gives them a certificate at the end. There’s no page builder and no outside service: everything stays in your own WordPress. 1.0 is its first release under the new name. Until now it was Simple LMS.
Get 1.0 from the AccessNow LMS project page. It is on its way to WordPress.org, and the download is the same plugin.
See it working in a free beginner’s guitar course built with it: register, take a lesson and a quiz, and see the dashboard and certificate as a student would. The project page has the same course as a download, to import into your own site.
What a course looks like
- Units, lessons and quizzes, with text or YouTube lessons, downloadable files and private notes for each student.
- Quizzes with multiple choice, true/false and fill-in-the-blank questions, a pass mark, a time limit and a limit on retries.
- Lessons in order, or in any order, with a progress bar and a “Continue” button that goes to the next thing to do.
- Certificates, points and badges, and a dashboard where each student sees all of it.
- Enrolment by the students themselves, by you, or both, with log-in and registration right on the course page and spam protection that needs no CAPTCHA.
When you change a lesson, students redo it
This is the part no other LMS we compared does out of the box. Rules, procedures and safety training change, and a student who passed the old version hasn’t learnt the new one. Turn it on for a course, for lessons, quizzes or both, and when you edit one, the students who had finished it are asked to do it again; a course they had completed reopens until they have. Their certificate is kept. When you change a lesson explains the settings.
New in 1.0
- Blocks for the course catalogue, a student’s courses and their dashboard, with a live preview in the editor.
- Quiz feedback: an explanation for each question, and a choice of when students see the right answers: never, after they pass, after their last attempt, or every time.
- Header images and styles for courses, units and lessons: a banner, a short strip or none, with lessons using their unit’s or course’s unless they have their own.
- Enrol by searching for a student’s name or email, several students into several courses at once, and CSV export of enrolments and quiz attempts.
- Copy a course to another site as one .zip file, now with the pictures and files used inside lesson text.
- Works with block themes such as Twenty Twenty-Five, which use their own header and footer on every course page.
- Accessible throughout: quizzes, progress bars and the timer work with a keyboard and a screen reader, every admin field has a label, and the colours meet WCAG AA contrast.
- Safer: stricter checks on every student action, quiz time limits enforced by the server rather than the browser, and a hardened course import.
Build your first course is the place to start.
Coming from Simple LMS
The new name came with a new plugin folder, so WordPress sees AccessNow LMS as a different plugin. Your courses, students and progress carry over. Back up first, deactivate Simple LMS, then activate AccessNow LMS, and remove the old simple-lms folder by hand. Don’t delete Simple LMS from the Plugins screen: that erases every course and enrolment. Moving from Simple LMS has each step.
What’s next
Lessons that open over time, courses that need another one finished first, and selling courses through WooCommerce are planned for the free plugin. The roadmap lists them, and you can vote for the ones you want. How the plugin got here is in two earlier posts: what a review of the plugin found and the five things it needed before launch.
Get it
Download AccessNow LMS 1.0 from its project page, then in WordPress go to Plugins → Add New Plugin → Upload Plugin. It needs WordPress 6.3 or later and PHP 7.4 or later.
