Courses, lessons and quizzes

MembersIntel can write a course outline for your membership site: the course title, the sections it breaks into, and a title and short brief for every lesson. You read the outline before any lesson body exists.

That is the whole of what a course generation produces today. It does not write the lesson bodies, and it does not make quizzes — the limits at the end of this article say where both of those stand.

What a course costs

200 credits, charged once, however many lessons the course has. A twelve-lesson course and a three-lesson one cost the same. You are paying for the course as one thing rather than per piece of it. See Credits for where credits come from and how to check your balance.

The lesson count you enter is not a price — it is the size of the course, and it is the lesson budget the one course price covers. It is required, it has no default on the server, and every surface shows it to you before you spend anything.

Before you start

Generation is a Pro feature. So is writing a course to your site.

Both MemberPress and MemberPress Courses must be active on the site. If either one is missing or inactive you get “This site needs both MemberPress and MemberPress Courses active before course content can be written to it.”, and nothing is created.

Someone has to have chosen which WordPress user MembersIntel authors as. This is the same one-time setup step that catches people out with posts and pages, and it is done in the same place — see Generating pages and posts. Course writes use the same author.

Keep the MembersIntel Connect plugin up to date on the site. Courses arrived later than posts and pages, so a site running an older plugin is told to update rather than being sent content it cannot handle.

Starting a course

In MembersIntel chat. Ask for a course. The advisor proposes one as a card you can act on, and the card carries the lesson count — editable, on screen, before the click that spends credits. It never sends a number you have not seen.

In wp-admin. Open MembersIntel → Content on your site, choose Course outline as the type, and set the number of lessons. The price is fetched and shown before the button will do anything; if the price cannot be read, the form stays disabled rather than guessing that generation is free. The plugin’s Chat tab can start a course too.

Through a connected AI assistant. If you have connected MembersIntel as an MCP tool (Settings → Connect an AI assistant), it can start a course, and it is where writing a finished course to your site happens — see below.

What you get back

The outline is a course title and its sections, each section carrying its lessons as a title plus a short brief. Every section has at least one lesson — an outline with an empty section, or no sections at all, is treated as a failed generation rather than a small one, and a failed generation is not charged.

Nothing has touched your WordPress site at this point. The outline is something you read first.

Writing the course to your site

Sending a finished outline to WordPress creates a draft course and its sections. It costs no credits — the credit was spent generating the outline — and running it twice does not create a second course.

Today this runs through a connected AI assistant, using the outline’s generation as the target. The Generations screen does not offer it for a course yet — a course generation there has no send button.

The section lesson titles are deliberately not written. Sections are created empty, because a generated lesson attaches to a section rather than filling in a placeholder. Writing the titles now would leave an empty lesson sitting beside every real one with the same name.

Nothing about this publishes anything. The course, its sections and every lesson land as drafts, invisible to your members until you decide otherwise. There is no status to set on this path and no way to ask it to publish.

Publishing a course

You publish a course in WordPress. MembersIntel’s own publish confirmation — the second, explicit click that states the page will be publicly visible — covers posts and pages, and a course generation is refused there.

Everything in Publishing, and what you approve about your own connected site holds here: nothing goes live on its own, and the advisor cannot publish. Once the draft course is on your site it is an ordinary MemberPress course, and it goes live when you say so, in WordPress.

When something goes wrong

What you see	What it means	What to do
This site needs both MemberPress and MemberPress Courses active before course content can be written to it.	One of the two plugins is inactive on the site	Activate both, then try again
Nobody has chosen which WordPress user MembersIntel authors as. Pick an author on the site’s MembersIntel settings page.	The one-time author step has not been done	Pick an author in wp-admin → MembersIntel → Settings
The WordPress user MembersIntel authors as no longer exists. Pick a new author on the site’s MembersIntel settings page.	The chosen author was deleted from WordPress	Pick a new author in the same place
This site’s MembersIntel Connect plugin is too old to accept drafts. Update the plugin on the site and try again.	The plugin predates course writing	Update the plugin on the site
The connected WordPress account can’t do this - check with your site administrator.	The chosen author is not allowed to create courses	Choose an author who is, or ask your administrator
The draft this generation wrote has since been published, scheduled or trashed, so it wasn’t touched.	Something this course write already created is no longer a draft, so the write leaves the whole course alone	Nothing more is written for it; generate a new outline if you need one
Not enough credits for this generation	Your balance is below the course price	Wait for the monthly reset, or buy a top-up

What is not available yet

These are current limits, not decisions about how courses should work.

• Lesson bodies and quizzes cannot be generated. No surface offers them — not chat, not the app, not wp-admin. A course generation gives you the outline, and the lesson titles and briefs in it are a plan for lessons you write yourself.
• Nothing attaches generated content into an existing course yet. The groundwork is there: the site accepts a lesson or a quiz being added to a section of a course MembersIntel created, and since a fix in the Connect plugin it accepts that whether the course is still a draft or already live. What does not exist yet is anything on the MembersIntel side that generates a lesson to send. Keep the plugin up to date on the site so you are ready when it does.
• A course cannot be started from the content queue on the Generations screen. Starting one there reports “Generating a course from the queue isn’t supported yet.”
• Regenerating a single lesson in place is not offered.

One thing to know before that lands. MemberPress Courses counts draft lessons when it works out whether someone has completed a course, so adding a draft lesson to a course that is already live makes members who had finished it read as unfinished until they complete the new one. That matters if you have certificates or drip content behind completion. It is not specific to MembersIntel — drafting a lesson by hand on a live course does the same thing — but it is worth knowing before you add to a course that has members in it.

Things worth knowing

Read the outline before you build on it. MembersIntel writes confidently and can be confidently wrong about your subject. It works from what your site tells us, so anything your site does not say, it is guessing at.

A failed generation costs nothing. Credits are reserved when a generation starts and charged only when it succeeds.

The outline is yours to change. Nothing expects you to keep the sections or the lesson titles as written. Edit them in WordPress, drop the ones you do not want, or use the outline as a plan and write the course yourself.