Lifter Elements 1.7.9 is a fixes release. The one change you may notice on a live site is that the Groups widgets and dynamic tags now follow the access rules you set in LifterLMS Groups, so a private or closed group is no longer shown to visitors who shouldn’t see it. The rest is smaller fixes and a performance gain on the front end.

The update is waiting under Dashboard > Updates if your license is active, or in Downloads on Tangible Cloud. No control keys, values or defaults change, so your saved pages carry over.

Groups content follows LifterLMS access rules

LifterLMS Groups gives every group a visibility: Open groups are visible to everyone, Private groups to logged-in users, and Closed groups to their members. Until this release the Lifter Elements Groups widgets ignored that setting. A Group Members widget or a Group Name tag pinned to a private group on an ordinary page showed that group’s members and details to anyone who opened the page.

From 1.7.9, Group Members, Group Page Course Card, Leave Group, Groups List and the Groups dynamic tags show a group only to the visitors LifterLMS Groups would show it to. Administrators still see everything, including in the editor, so your templates look the same while you build them. The Group Invitation Link widget and tag are deliberately not restricted: that is the public Join Group button, and LifterLMS’s invitation link is meant to be shared.

Two things to do after updating. Clear your page cache, so cached copies of group pages are rebuilt with the rules applied. And if a group is meant to be shown publicly, set its visibility to Open in LifterLMS, since a Private or Closed group now hides from visitors exactly as it does on LifterLMS’s own pages.

The Groups List widget changed with it. Its Visibility setting now lists only groups of that type that the visitor may see, Enrolled Only no longer lists cancelled memberships, and the editor notes how many listed groups would be hidden from visitors without access.

Smaller changes

A few widgets now take their data from LifterLMS itself instead of their own copy: the Group Page Course Card reads the course difficulty from LifterLMS, and the Registration Form and Login Form editor previews are LifterLMS’s own forms.

User Memberships has a behaviour change worth knowing about. Display only recent memberships now does what it says: one row of the student’s most recently joined memberships, newest first, under the My Memberships heading with the View All My Memberships link. It previously listed every membership, so a page using that option shows fewer cards after the update.

The shortcodes are now all lowercase, for example [le-sections-id] and [le-lessons-next-url]. The old -ID and -URL forms keep working, so nothing breaks, but they are deprecated: rendering one logs a WordPress deprecation notice when WP_DEBUG is on, and the plugin’s settings page shows the old-to-new map on its Documentation tab.

The fixes: the Elementor Pro Countdown’s Lesson drip date type renders nothing when the lesson has no drip date, and its next-lesson mode works. Course Reviews heading and message settings no longer affect other reviews on the page. Leave Group works on cached pages and shows a notice when leaving fails. The Next Lesson Link and Previous Lesson Link tags read Back to course at the first and last lesson. A widget pinned to a deleted or unpublished group, access plan or product now renders nothing instead of an error.

And one for every page view: the lists behind the editor’s course, membership, access plan and group drop-downs are now built only when the editor loads, not on every front-end request. Pages get a little faster, with no change to what they show.

Full changelog

1.7.9

Release Date: 2026-09-28

Fixes. Groups content now follows LifterLMS group access rules.

Now follow LifterLMS group access rules (Open, Private, Closed): Group Members, Group Page Course Card, Leave Group, Groups List and the Groups dynamic tags that show group information. After updating, clear page caches
Now read from LifterLMS: course difficulty on the Group Page Course Card; Registration Form and Login Form editor previews
User Memberships: “Display only recent memberships” shows one row of the latest memberships; it listed all of them
Course List: the excerpt limit is labelled “Max. Words”
Fixed: Countdown with no drip date, Course Reviews text settings affecting other reviews, Leave Group on cached pages, “Back to course” label on the Lesson Link tags, widgets pinned to deleted items
Shortcodes: lowercase -id and -url forms added; the old forms keep working
Faster pages: editor dropdown lists are no longer built on the front end

If something in this release doesn’t behave the way you expect, get in touch with support and tell us what you were building.