Plagued with bugs and poor support (WPMUDev quality declining)

CoursePress Pro was one of the main reasons I cancelled my WPMUDev membership after tiring of frequent issues with sympathetic but unhelpful support.

CoursePress 1.x was an excellent LMS with good styling out-of-the-box and a lot of important built-in features that other LMS lacked (or required third party integrations), such as essay questions, a nice gradebook, and course forums. CoursePress 2.x removed the lovely accordion curriculum navigation page, which I could live with if the rest of the plugin worked. Thus, my main disappointment stems from poor support and constant issues that I have noticed since both upgrading and clean installing CoursePress 2.x.

After upgrading from 1 to 2, my preexisting students became unable to progress in their courses. When I created a totally new from-scratch site with no other plugins and a default theme, that is, the frequently (albeit impractical) suggested clean install, CoursePress 2.x is still consistently plagued with bugs. For example, currently on my clean install, my course unit modules will sometimes randomly self-delete when I edit them and attempt to save. I have increased memory limits all the way around per the usual canned advice before giving up, having recreated units 3-5 times. I’ve also tried installing and reinstalling WordPress and CoursePress

Support is sympathetic but doesn’t solve problems. They will always tell you that they’ve “reported the issue to developers” but unlike other LMS with dedicated developers, fixes for CoursePress bugs take weeks at best, months if you’re lucky (and your students can afford to wait that long), or never at worst. They will not provide ETAs, leaving you and your students hanging. This is all surely due in part to frequent changes in developers managing the plugin. I’m not even sure how developers are managed and compensated, so they might have little incentive to prioritize fixing issues.

Thus, my advise is to do yourself a favor and get an LMS with a dedicated development team. LearnDash is not as nice and functional out-of-the-box as CoursePress used to be, in my opinion, but it WORKS, they update frequently, and they FIX BUGS. WPMUDev seems to have its hands in too many different plugins these days relative to its development force and thus can no longer support any one of those plugins well, which is unfortunate given how excellent they used to be. I’m only giving this 2 stars because of the potential of this plugin.

I wish I could find a copy of CoursePress 1.x again…