Order lessons with published date

Lessons in a course (and section lessons in a training track) are ordered by their published date, ascending — earliest first. There is no separate "lesson number" field; the theme sorts siblings by published_at. This keeps ordering simple, but it means you must set the publish date deliberately rather than relying on when you happened to click Publish.

In Ghost Admin, open a lesson, go to the post settings (the gear icon), and set the Publish Date explicitly. Give lesson 1 the earliest time, lesson 2 a slightly later time, and so on. A reliable convention is to space lessons a fixed interval apart — for example ten minutes — so there is room to insert a lesson between two others later without renumbering everything.

Lesson 1  published_at: 2026-02-05T09:10:00Z
Lesson 2  published_at: 2026-02-05T09:20:00Z   (+10 min)
Lesson 3  published_at: 2026-02-05T09:30:00Z   (+10 min)
...
Course/track landing post: publish it FIRST (earliest of all), so it leads.

Publish the course or track landing post at the earliest time of the set, so it sorts ahead of its own lessons. Then each lesson follows in the intended sequence. If you later need to insert a new lesson between lessons 2 and 3, give it a date between theirs (for example 09:25) and it slots into place — no need to touch the others.

Two practical tips. First, keep dates in a consistent timezone (UTC is safest) to avoid off-by-one surprises. Second, if you import content in bulk, set fixed, spaced dates in the import file rather than letting them default, because imported posts with identical timestamps sort unpredictably.

That is the whole ordering model: set spaced publish dates, land the course post first. With structure, nesting, and order covered, the last authoring doc for courses explains how to mark a course free or members-only.