Thrive Apprentice is Thrive Themes' answer for online entrepreneurs wanting to create, manage, sell and protect online courses, memberships, and other digital products.

This new update allows you to protect the files you make downloadable from your websites, like PDFs, worksheets, eBooks, and more.

Now, rather than use the native WordPress Media Library (which allows your the URL of the files to be exposed), you can upload it via the Protected Files through Thrive Apprentice.

It's a simple drag and drop interface, and once added you can name the file and assign it to the Thrive Apprentice Product you want it to be associated with, which can be a course, membership tier, webpage, post, etc.

The file will be protected until a user is granted access to the associated Apprentice product, usually when a purchase is made.

You can give visitors and customers access to protected files in 2 ways:

1. Adding the file to your online course resource list
2. providing a direct access link on any page or post

Whether your protected file is linked from the resources list in Thrive Apprentice, or a direct link in Thrive Architect, the file URL won't be exposed.

Instead, a safe link will be shown. When clicked, Thrive Apprentice will check if the user has the necessary access rights. If they do, they'll be able to download the file.

If someone clicks on the link and they don't have the right access permissions, they'll be shown your default "no access" message such as the one shown below:

Or they'll be redirected straight to the sales page where they can buy access. Of course, your default "no access" message is fully customizable.

With this new feature you can protect any type of file, such as PDFs, Jpegs, PNGs, xls, doc, csv, zip, mp3. And you'll be able to see how many times it has been downloaded by your visitors!

Like the names suggest the Post List and Course List elements in Thrive Architect allow you to refer to and list out posts and courses on any page on your website.

Prior to this update it would just be static images such as this.

Now, with added carousel display type, you'll be able to display your posts and courses lists as a carousal, so that your visitors can scroll through, like this:

This means that you can now showcase more of your posts and courses in less space.

You can also enable auto-play if you want your posts to rotate on their own. There's even an option to make a single slide fader, with a fade transition between your posts.

The Course List and Post List Carousel feature is great for people visiting your website on mobile devices, as they can easily navigate with a swipe of their thumb.

This update makes designing your website easier and quicker.

Thrive Architect comes with close to 100 pre-designed smart landing pages. These smart landing pages have smart colour technology, which means that if you include one of these pages on your website, the page will automatically detect your website's colour scheme and incorporate it into the design components on that page.

With this new update there's a similar approach for typography. The update adds a new feature to the Thrive Architect style panel, that lets you, with just one click, swap between your active theme fonts OR uniquely inherit (and edit) the default smart landing page fonts.

So, once you bring in the landing page into your website, you can chose if you want the typography on the page to be in-sync with your brand that's seen throughout your website, or have a unique typography all on its own.

Prior to this update, you had no choice but to include an email address field in your form when using the Lead Generation for field in Thrive Architect.

With this update, that is no longer the case, and have the option to delete the email address field.

As Thrive Themes points out, there are use cases for this where your if your customer base prefer to be contacted via phone, or simply don't want to join a mailing list, but they do want you to message them.

Thrive Themes suggest that this update is part of something bigger that coming in their next major release.