Entries by Ryan

Toolkit Pro 3.7: Usermeta in reports, transcript changes and more

February 12, 2021 /0 Comments/in , /by

We try to avoid Friday releases where we can, but with the upcoming holiday weekend in Canada and some exciting changes from LearnDash, we couldn’t wait to get version 3.7 of the Uncanny Toolkit Pro plugin out. It’s a big release with several really compelling new features. Group Drip notification changes We do need to start the list of new features with a change that Group Drip users may need to make on their sites. LearnDash is releasing version 1.5 of their Notifications plugin next week, which is a big overhaul and improvement. That’s great news, but because of how it was rearchitected, it does break compatibility with existing notifications linked to our Group Drip module. Any current notifications on sites set up to alert users when lessons are available to the group will stop working, but there is good news: we have a new trigger available to support Group Drip notifications. If you upgrade to LearnDash Notifications 1.5 and want notifications to be sent to group members when lessons become available via group drip, you must create new notifications with this new trigger: “A scheduled lesson is available to user with Uncanny Drip by Group”. If you don’t use group drip […]

BuddyBoss Group Sync

February 3, 2021 /0 Comments/in /by

The Uncanny Groups 3.9 release added the ability to sync changes made to LearnDash groups using this plugin to be synced with BuddyBoss social groups. This means that when users are added or removed from groups using our Group Management page, or LearnDash groups are created by our plugin, these changes can be reflected on the BuddyBoss side too. For this to work, the LearnDash Group Sync and Auto Create Social Group settings must be enabled under BuddyBoss > Integrations > LearnDash on a BuddyBoss site. This is not set up or managed in Uncanny Groups, we detect the settings for BuddyBoss and use those. Please see the screenshot below for reference. When these settings are enabled, the following things will happen on the Uncanny Groups side: When a LearnDash group is created by the Uncanny Groups plugin, an associated BuddyBoss social group is created. When a user is added to a group from the Group Management page in our plugin, the user is added to the associated BuddyBoss group. If the user is a student they are added as a “Member”. If the user is a Group Leader they are added as an “Organizer”. This works for adding single users, adding multiple users and adding […]

Uncanny Groups for LearnDash 3.9 Update

February 2, 2021 /0 Comments/in /by

The version 3.9 update of the Uncanny Groups for LearnDash plugin includes some interesting updates that may really transform how the tool is used by some customers. Given the magnitude of the changes, this is also one that we recommend testing on a Staging site first. Let’s jump right in to what’s new in the release and how it might affect your site. BuddyBoss Social Group sync You asked, we listened. A lot of people use the BuddyBoss theme and platform with our Uncanny Groups plugin. BuddyBoss does include a sync tool for LearnDash groups, but it doesn’t work properly when users are added or removed from groups managed by our plugin. It also doesn’t sync LearnDash groups created with our plugin to new BuddyBoss groups. So, in the Uncanny Groups 3.9 release, here’s what’s new if LearnDash Group Sync and Auto Create Social Group settings are enabled in BuddyBoss > Integrations > LearnDash on a BuddyBoss site: When a LearnDash group is created by the Uncanny Groups plugin, an associated BuddyBoss social group is created. When a user is added to a group from the Group Management page in our plugin, the user is added to the associated BuddyBoss group. If the […]

Generate Historical LearnDash Course Credits

January 13, 2021 /0 Comments/in /by

Version 3.2 of the Uncanny Continuing Education Credits plugin adds the ability to generate missing credit records. This means that students who completed LearnDash courses before installing of the plugin and/or before credits were assigned to the course can have a permanent record of the completion stored and a credit value assigned. To generate historical completion records, perform the following: Edit a LearnDash course in/wp-admin/ and make sure it has a credit value assigned. Navigate to Uncanny CEUs > Generate CEUs  as in the screenshot above (this may have different text depending on what you call credits in our plugin). Choose a course from the drop-down list. Click the Add missing records button to generate missing credits and completion records. Please note the following when using this tool: Credits are only awarded for students that have a LearnDash completion record but no credits for that completion. It will not modify CEU values for existing users that already have credits assigned. In other words, if a course had a credit value of 2.0 assigned, a user completed the course and earned 2 credits, then you change the value to 3.0 and run the Generate CEUs function, the student will continue to have 2.0 earned […]

Award historical credits for LearnDash courses

January 13, 2021 /2 Comments/in , /by

Our Uncanny Continuing Education Credits plugin has historically been our least popular plugin and not nearly as capable as some continuing education providers would like. Organizations in this space tend to have very specific requirements and outgrow general-purpose solutions quickly. With the 2 most recent updates to the plugin, however, we have completely transformed what’s possible with our CEU product. The 3.1 release added the ability to track credits for anything, even learning activities that were not associated with LearnDash. And with our Uncanny Automator integration, we can simplify awarding credits even further, automating credit activity for live events, forum participation, purchases–if it can be captured online, Automator can almost certainly link it to credits in this plugin. Capture historical completion records There’s always been one big limitation in the Uncanny Continuing Education Credits plugin: it only starts tracking credits for new LearnDash course completions once it’s installed and credits are assigned to the course. For most sites, this meant a disconnect between users that completed courses before plugin installation and users that completed them after setup. In today’s Uncanny Continuing Education Credits 3.2 release, we’re adding a very important new feature: the ability to generate credits for historical course […]

Single Page Courses

January 4, 2021 /9 Comments/in /by

The Single Page Courses module, added in the Uncanny Toolkit Pro for LearnDash 3.6 release, makes it possible to create courses that have no lessons or topics. Normally, LearnDash requires that every course have at least one lesson. Lessons and topics are how LearnDash calculates progress in a course and facilitates course completion. For many users, this made microlearning difficult and forced course designers to use a nested structure that didn’t always make sense. This module allows courses to consist entirely of a single page. To create courses that include the course page only, enable the module to add these settings to your course edit pages: Enabling the Single Page Course when saving the course creates a hidden lesson that is invisible to users, it is not shown in the front end and students won’t know it exists. It allows the plugin to make LearnDash think the course has a lesson that users are completing even though they are not. By default, a Single Page Course adds a Mark Complete button to the course page (since it is just the single page). When clicked, it marks the hidden lesson as complete and reloads the page, thereby completing the course. Everything […]

Single Page LearnDash Courses now available

January 4, 2021 /0 Comments/in , /by

LearnDash course structures have always been very straightforward and rigid, which did limit flexibility but also made building courses more consistent. Courses must have lessons, and lessons can optionally have topics. The 3-level hierarchy evolved a bit when LearnDash added sections to organize things, but progress was always based around the completion of lessons and topics. For many users, this was good enough. For years we heard from people that didn’t want to use lessons. Maybe they used micro-learning or all course content was self-contained in a single video; splitting the content up into lessons just didn’t make sense. We largely pushed back on such requests because they didn’t fit the “LearnDash model”, but after building a solution for a consulting client we started wondering what might be possible with a public plugin. The Single Page Course module In today’s Uncanny Toolkit Pro for LearnDash 3.6 release, we’re adding a brand new module that addresses this gap: the Single Page Course module. When enabled, it gives course creators the ability to create LearnDash courses that don’t have any lessons. It adds a Mark Complete button to the course level and enables course structures that are simply just that page. Here’s how […]

Front End Login Changes in Toolkit

January 4, 2021 /0 Comments/in , /by

We’re excited to announce that today’s Uncanny Toolkit for LearnDash release includes some pretty big Front End Login changes (and we wanted to beat the upcoming Toolkit Pro and Automator 2.10 that announcements that will steal the thunder!). The Front End Login module has gotten increasingly capable, to the point that we see people using it on WordPress sites even if they’re not using LearnDash. Today’s release adds even more reasons to use it for login on any WordPress site. Changes to user verification We added the ability to verify users before login was allowed a very long time ago, but the module never had a great way to manage email notifications when users were approved for access. With user verification enabled, site users would have to be approved by an administrator before they could sign in, but how would the admin control the user notification and content? The Uncanny Toolkit 3.4.1 release adds a new customizable email system (see below) as well as an easy way to suppress user verification emails entirely. Emails can also now include tokens (variables) with information that might be useful to approved users, like site name and the user’s name. Login redirect changes Ever […]

Add and Remove Credits

December 18, 2020 /0 Comments/in /by

The Uncanny Continuing Education Credits 3.1 release introduced the ability to add and delete credits. Credits can be added both for LearnDash courses and non-LearnDash activities, perhaps including live events, third party training and more. Adding and deleting credits is done from the Credit Report. To add credits, click the Add Credits button. This will show a modal where details of the new credit can be entered. If the credit assigned is a LearnDash course, you will be given the option of completing the course; assigning credits based on a LearnDash course require that the course have credits assigned to it, and the number of credits granted match whatever is assigned to the course and the assignment will be today’s date (assuming the course is also marked as deleted when the credits are added). See below for an example of the fields. If the credits are not related to a LearnDash course, a title, number of credits and the date/time for awarding the credits must be entered. While credits can be awarded against a future date, note that these won’t show up in the report unless a custom date range is used with a future end date populated. To delete credits, use the […]

Award CEU credits for anything!

December 17, 2020 /0 Comments/in /by

Today’s 3.1 release of the Uncanny Continuing Education Credits plugin is probably our biggest change to that plugin in the past year. It adds a number of changes based around this concept: credits can be awarded for anything. Yes, it is still a LearnDash plugin and does still require LearnDash. Credits are no longer tied to LearnDash courses, however. Admins can now add and remove credits for anything they want—that might be a classroom training session, attending a virtual event, completing third-party training, etc. There are no limits to how this might be used. Add and delete continuing education credits Here’s what users will now see when adding credits from the Credits Report: From this page, you can choose a user to assign credits to, the number of credits, the date and time for the credits, and whether or not the credits are for a LearnDash course. If they are, you can choose to mark the course as completed when you assign the credits. If the credits are not for a LearnDash course, you can assign a label to the credits so they’re easy to identify in reports. (For LearnDash courses, the title is automatically the course name.) Deleting credits is […]