Online courses on your own website
Outline, lessons with video, progress for every participant — sold through Stripe, without a course platform taking a cut.
What is the courses module?
The courses module turns a ForgeCMS website into a small learning platform: you offer online courses with an outline, text lessons and videos, participants buy a course and learn at their own pace. The site remembers how far everyone has got.
See it live: our (German) course Building websites with Claude, a VPS and ForgeCMS. The first two lessons are free.
What participants get
- A course overview with image, short description, number of lessons and price.
- A course page with description and outline: chapters, lessons, duration. Free preview lessons are marked.
- Lessons with text and embedded videos from YouTube (privacy-enhanced mode) or PeerTube (any instance). The outline next to them, previous and next below.
- Progress: ✓ for every finished lesson, a progress bar and a "continue" button that picks up exactly where they left off.
- "My courses" with all their courses at a glance.
- Login by email link — no password to forget.
Payment
- Payment runs through the Stripe module: card, SEPA direct debit, Apple Pay, Google Pay and whatever else you enable at Stripe. Card data never touches your website.
- Before buying, the participant confirms the immediate start and the loss of the right of withdrawal, as EU law requires for digital content. Terms and withdrawal policy are in the confirmation mail.
- After payment the course is unlocked at once. A refund in Stripe removes the access automatically.
- Free courses work too: a login is all it takes.
What you get as the operator
- You write courses in Git: a course list, an outline in SML per course and the lessons as Markdown files. Embedding a video means putting its link on a line of its own.
- Participants overview: who has which course (bought, granted, test), how many lessons they have finished and when they last studied.
- Grant access by hand by email address — for workshop participants, vouchers or friends. The person gets an email and can start right away, even without an account.
- An email for every sale.
- Test mode: with Stripe's test keys you try everything with the test card, without real money. Test purchases stop counting once you switch to live.
Under the hood
- No database: purchases, grants and progress are SML files on your server.
- No third-party scripts on your pages, no tracking cookies.
- Interface in English and German; each course has its own language.
Price: €49 one-time, plus the Stripe module (€29). Minor updates included, no subscription.