WordPress LMS demo for a fictional small-chain climbing gym (Bend / Boulder / Salt Lake) selling online courses — three courses with progress tracking, instructor profiles, student dashboard, certificate flow, all on Tutor LMS Free theme...

The problem

Coaches, gyms, training programs, and course creators reach for LearnDash by default ($300+/year) without knowing Tutor LMS Free covers 90% of what they need. The deeper mistake is letting the LMS plugin own the visual identity — the default Tutor archive, single-course page, and dashboard read as Tutor, not as your brand. Most demos shipping Tutor accept that and move on.

The approach

A per-demo theme with the "summit" outdoor-brand aesthetic baked in, two new shared blocks (course-card + lesson-progress) authored in the platform repo and available to every future LMS demo, and surgical Tutor template overrides via conditionally-loaded CSS that targets stable plugin class names. The setup mu-plugin dequeues Tutor assets on non-Tutor routes — same dequeue pattern bench uses for PMS, the platform-wide default for any demo with a heavy frontend plugin.

What got built

A WordPress LMS site for a fictional small-chain indoor climbing gym — five-page structure (Home, Courses, Instructors, Dashboard, About) plus three single-course pages, fifteen lessons, three quizzes, all running on Tutor LMS Free with a custom per-demo theme. Fourteenth demo on the platform and the first of the Tier 2 batch (heavier, architecturally diverse demos following the Tier 1 service-business breadth run).

Per-demo theme — outdoor brand grown up:

• Thin child of the platform _chassis parent
• Granite charcoal primary (#2A2D31), lichen-green accent (#6B8A5A), chalk-white base (#F4F0E8), dawn-pink secondary (#E8B4A0)
• Inter Display headings, Inter body, JetBrains Mono for code
• References Patagonia.com and Black Diamond product pages, not Crossfit affiliate sites
• Header carries Courses / Instructors / Dashboard / About; footer carries brand + locations + colophon

Two new shared blocks in the platform's sfp-blocks library — neither Atlas-specific:

• sfp-blocks/course-card — server-rendered grid that queries any course CPT (defaults to Tutor's courses) and renders cover, level badge, instructor row, lesson count, duration, enroll CTA. Filterable by featured-meta, level-meta, and course-category taxonomy
• sfp-blocks/lesson-progress — student-dashboard block that lists the logged-in user's enrollments with progress bars + next-lesson CTAs, sourced from Tutor's get_completed_lesson_count_by_course and get_lesson_count_by_course. Logged-out visitors see a sign-in CTA; users with no enrollments see a configurable empty message

Five pages + LMS content:

1. Home — Full-bleed hero (climber on slab), eyebrow naming the three locations, single declarative headline, featured-courses strip via course-card with featuredOnly=true, instructor strip, free-to-start CTA that names the pricing explicitly
2. /courses/ — Themed Tutor archive showing all three courses with level badges + instructor + duration + enroll CTAs
3. /instructors/ — Three instructor cards with portraits, datelines, and bios that name credentials and pedagogical style
4. /dashboard/ — The lesson-progress block. For the seeded demo-student the dashboard shows three enrollments at 100% / 60% / 0% with certificate available on the completed course
5. /about/ — Three-section brand story, explicit anti-pattern stance ("we don't have a Tier 3 add-on"), three location cards

Surgical Tutor LMS theming + asset hygiene:

The atlas-tutor-setup mu-plugin registers _atlas_* meta with REST + closure-wrapped sanitize_callbacks (PHP 8 strict-arity safety), tunes Tutor settings for the demo (free monetization, disabled emails, registration enabled), and dequeues Tutor's ~120KB of CSS+JS on non-Tutor routes — Lighthouse perf went from 66 to 91 from that one change. CSS overrides target stable Tutor class names (.tutor-btn, .tutor-course-topic, .tutor-progress-bar) rather than nested div chains — the rule we'd defend on any third-party plugin theming engagement.

Outcomes

• Lighthouse 91 / 96 / 96 / 92 (perf / a11y / best-practices / SEO) after the Tutor asset dequeue. First version was 66 perf with Tutor loading on every page; the conditional dequeue lifted perf 25 points without touching the visual design
• Two new shared blocks — course-card and lesson-progress — join the platform sfp-blocks library, available to every future LMS / course-creator client, not just Atlas
• Sample student account demonstrates the full progress-tracking flow end-to-end: enroll, complete lessons, advance to next, complete course, certificate available. The dashboard renders three distinct states (100% / 60% / 0%) from one block instance
• Surgical-CSS-override pattern for third-party plugin theming documented in writing: target stable plugin class names (not nested div chains), load conditionally on plugin routes only, dequeue assets on routes the plugin does not render
• Fourteenth demo on the platform; first of the Tier 2 batch (architectural diversity rather than service-business breadth). The platform now has LMS primitives ready for the next coach / gym / training-program client

Stack

• WordPress
• PHP 8.3
• React
• Gutenberg
• Full-Site Editing
• theme.json
• Tutor LMS
• Custom Post Types
• Apache
• AWS EC2