Use LearnDash Groups? Time to update

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Some of our plugin releases are ground-breaking, some add minor new features, some include fixes and others are a combination of them all. The Uncanny Groups for LearnDash 3.6 release falls fits the latter category; it’s a really important update for compatibility reasons but it also includes some useful improvements and new features.

New features

The Essay Management shortcode now supports a “status” attribute, with possible values of “all”, “graded” and “ungraded” (the default is “ungraded”). When the shortcode includes this attribute, it will initially load only essay questions with that status. This is particularly helpful on sites with huge essay volumes to reduce load times by only loading ungraded essay questions.

In the previous version of the Uncanny Groups plugin, clicking a user’s status on the Group Management page took Group Leaders to the Course Report. Based on feedback from current users, we are adding the option to instead take Group Leaders to the Progress Report (a.k.a. Manage Progress) instead. This will allow easier review of student progress. The Not Started status will also now be hyperlinked (previously it was not, since there was no progress to report, but if a Group Leader needs to add progress records this will now be easier).

Progress report for LearnDash Group Leaders

Search on the Manage Progress page has been improved to return matches for any part of a user’s first name, last name or email address. This will help Group Leaders more easily find students.

The user upload function on the Group Management page now supports setting usernames in the uploaded CSV file. When the column is included (it’s optional), the value will become the user’s account username (if the user is new). If the column is included but left blank, the email address will become the username.

Compatibility updates

We don’t know when it will be out, but the LearnDash 3.2 release is due out in the near future and it will make some pretty significant changes to groups. Some of these changes do cause some issues in our Groups plugin, so users of the new LearnDash version must update to use the plugin properly.

MySQL 8 compatibility has been added for users running the latest version, and WordPress 5.4.2 added some changes as well that could affect some users of our plugin. This release includes a change to improve WordPress 5.4.2 compatibility related to the REST API.

Fixes and performance improvements

This is really the core of where existing users will benefit from the plugin upgrade. Sometimes how customers use our plugin pushes it to places we hadn’t always anticipated, so for some atypical cases this update will help a lot. Here are some of the changes:

  • Performance is significantly improved for heavy group usage. We initially hadn’t expected many LearnDash sites to have over 1,000 groups or for groups to have many thousands of users—now we know better. A few days ago we found performance issues on a site that had approximately 2.5 million enrollment keys set up for groups, which made for a great example of where we have performance gaps, but the customer of course was finding the plugin difficult to use. Some indexing is added in version 3.6 that helps with this.
  • When there was a Group License product in the cart, the Group Name field on the checkout page was marked as required but could be left empty; a message has been added to clarify the behavior for users.
  • Some strings weren’t translatable. There are over 600 translatable strings in the plugin now, and we appreciate our customers letting us know if they find something that doesn’t translate properly.
  • Line breaks are now supported in essay answers in the Essay report.
  • Some of our progress records didn’t align with LearnDash reports when the LearnDash activity tables were for any reason out of sync with other LearnDash records. While this could be fixed by running data upgrades, in a few places we switched queries to align with LearnDash records.

The full changelog is available at https://www.uncannyowl.com/knowledge-base/uncanny-learndash-groups-changelog/

 

New WordPress Front End Login Options

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The Front End Login module was one of the first things we created for the free Uncanny Toolkit for LearnDash plugin. It gave LearnDash users a simple, free tool for students to use when logging in, and for us (as our business was heavily focused on consulting at the time) it was one more way that we could make site development a lot more efficient.

A lot has changed since we first introduced the module, including LearnDash adding its own login forms. There are still a lot of situations with the login form in our Toolkit is the best fit (and what we always use on sites we build), and with today’s Uncanny Toolkit 3.3 release we’re making the module even better.

Introducing Modal Login Windows

With the latest Toolkit release, you can add this shortcode anywhere on your site you want: [uo_login_modal]. That will create a link (that can also be styled as a button) that pops up a login window. No more devoting precious site real estate to giant login forms! Here’s what it looks like:

WordPress Modal Login Form

There are new options in the Front End Login module settings to change the text of the label, whether or not to dim the background when the modal is active, and text for the link to return to the page. (Make sure to turn on the new AJAX support and use the Boxed with shadow template if you want to use modal login forms.)

The new addition is incredibly powerful and flexible, it makes it practical to add login forms anywhere, but what about menu access? As long as the Log In/Log Out Links module is turned on, you’ll see a new option under Appearance > Menus in /wp-admin/ to add a modal login there:

Front end modal menu

Login forms get AJAX support

If you’ve ever wanted users to sign in but keep the page experience intact, now you can. There’s a new AJAX option (it’s disabled by default) in the Front End Login settings that allows users to submit the login form via AJAX instead.  This option currently only works with the Boxed with shadow template.

Note that this option must be enabled if you want to use the new modal login forms.

Expanded Resume support

Ever wish you could add the Resume button link in the Toolkit to a menu? Maybe somewhere else on your site, or even in your code, where a button might not make sense?

The new [uo_learndash_resume_link] shortcode returns a Resume link for users instead of a button, so you can include it in a menu or wherever else it might make sense. And with the url_only=”yes” attribute, the shortcode will return the full URL for the user, rather than a link with Resume text.

The 3.3 release includes several other changes behind the scenes as well (it has been 3 months since we last published a release!) that improve translation support and efficiency.

If you’re not yet a Toolkit user, now is a great time to give the free version a try!

 

Better LearnDash CSV Reports

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Okay, maybe they’re not pretty, but the Course and Quiz CSV reports built in to LearnDash are still extremely useful reports. They’re a simple, reliable way to get information about students, student progress and quiz results out of LearnDash and into your favourite spreadsheet for analysis.

We know a lot of users have looked at the reports, however, and thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if I could add this one more piece of data as a new column?” We’ve seen it asked a lot, so we decided to add this capability to version 3.5 of Uncanny Toolkit Pro for LearnDash.

We’re excited to introduce the Enhanced LearnDash CSV Reports module to the Toolkit Pro suite of addons for LearnDash. Its purpose is simple: add more columns with frequently-requested data to the LearnDash CSV reports. Here’s a screenshot of the columns you can add:

Enhanced LearnDash CSV Reports

Choose any columns you want to add, save the changes, and the next time you run the LearnDash export for the User Course or User Quiz Data, the extra columns will be included in the output. It’s a pretty straightforward module, but requests for custom columns tend to come up a lot and now we’ve made adding extra data even easier. Who knows, in a future release we may decide to add support for custom values from a user’s profile, if we see that there’s demand for it.

What else is in Toolkit Pro 3.5?

This is a pretty big release with a lot for all Toolkit Pro users to take in.

Among the major updates, the Enhanced Course and Lesson/Topic grids now support single-column layouts. We had a number of users explain why they needed to support a 1-column approach and we listened. The modules now support between 1 and 5 columns instead of 2 and 5.

The Duplicate Pages and Posts module now allows selecting which specific post types should support duplication. There are situations where some custom post types are better not being duplicated, so now it’s easy to turn support off for specific post types. That module also now gets improved compatibility with Elementor.

There are lots of other improvements too; here’s a partial list of the important ones:

  • The Simple Course Timer has improved support for IE 11 (though we still don’t like seeing IE 11 used).
  • The Group Registration module uses the default role set in WordPress instead of forcing the Subscriber role.
  • Translation support has been improved.
  • CSVs that contain Mac and Linux line breaks will now be accepted by the Import Users module.
  • The Import Users module supports apostrophes in email address.
  • The Done button no longer shows up in the last topic or lesson of a completed course when autocompletion is enabled.

Full details of other fixes are included in the changelog at: https://www.uncannyowl.com/knowledge-base/learndash-toolkit-pro-change-log/

We hope you like the new additions and improvements!