The Force LearnDash Security Inheritance setting (default YES) lets you control whether lessons and topics will inherit Memberium content protection settings from the course they are attached to.
In other words, rather than having to go to each lesson and topic to protect them, you can protect the course and all of the content in that course will automatically be protected the same way.
This option is exactly like our Page Security Inheritance feature except it is specific to LearnDash.
Why Would I Disable LearnDash Security Inheritance?
You may be wondering why this setting exists at all. We added this feature when LearnDash released their Shared Course Steps feature.
The shared course steps feature in LearnDash lets you share a lesson or other step in multiple courses. You can have a single lesson in multiple courses at the same time. This is useful if you have a lesson or lessons that apply to multiple courses – it saves you from having to duplicate the lesson and making updates in multiple places.
The Problem With Shared Course Steps
However, there is a slight issue with sharing course steps. Lessons, by default, inherit content protection from the course they belong to. This means if a lesson is in two courses, it would inherit protections from both courses.
Take the screenshot below as an example of two courses and their protection settings…
If a lesson was shared and used in both of these courses, by default, members/students would need BOTH Demo Membership 1 and Demo Membership 2.
This causes obvious problems as a member or student may have only purchased Course 1 and so they only have Demo Membership 1.
How Memberium Solves This Issue
If you’re using Shared Course Steps, disable the Force LearnDash Security Inheritance setting in Memberium.
This will stop the inheritance from happening meaning your lessons and topics won’t have any protections on them unless you go into each and set them manually.
The downside is that you will have to go into each manually to set the protections.
The upside is you can use LearnDash’s shared course step component.