Entries by Ryan

Award historical credits for LearnDash courses

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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!

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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 […]

Actions/Filters for Developers

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Tin Canny Reporting for LearnDash provides the hooks below for advanced developers to use when developing custom functionality that integrates with the plugin.  No support is provided for the use of these filters. add_filter( ‘uo_tincanny_reporting_capability’, function( $capability ){ // Here check current user role and other conditions $capability = ‘read’; return $capability; } ); add_filter( ‘tincanny_view_all_reports_permission’, function( $capability ){ // Here check current user role and other conditions $capability = true; return $capability; } ); add_filter( ‘tincanny_can_get_data’, function( $capability ){ // Here check current user role and other conditions $capability = ‘read’; return $capability; } );

Uncanny Owl has joined the WPBeginner Growth Fund

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We’re excited to announce that Uncanny Owl has joined the WPBeginner Growth Fund. This means that we’re partnering with Syed Balkhi, founder of WPBeginner and co-founder of popular WordPress plugins including OptinMonster, MonsterInsights, WPForms and more. It also means that Uncanny Owl is now part of the Awesome Motive network of companies. Why we joined Ken and Ryan co-founded Uncanny Owl in 2013, and over the past 7 years we have grown the company to a team of 10 people with 8 popular plugins, a hosted learning platform product and a thriving consulting business. With so many products and significant growth this year, we found scaling difficult and we were pulled in too many directions. After working with Cory Miller for help planning our future, we connected with Syed and began to explore what a relationship might look like. What sold us on the idea and benefits of a partnership were our discussions with current companies in the Growth Fund, including Blair at MemberPress and Steph and Steve at Formidable Forms. Both teams had only fantastic things to say about Awesome Motive and the growth, vision and work-life balance improvements that Syed had helped them achieve. What this means for […]

Quiz Completion Advances to Next Step

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The Quiz completion advances to next step module automatically advances the user to the next “step” in the course when the user clicks the “Click here to continue” button at the end of a quiz: The next “step” in the course is defined by LearnDash.  In the case of a quiz embedded in the last topic of a lesson, the button will move the user to the next lesson. Important: Enable the Topics Autocomplete Lessons or Autocomplete Lessons and Topics module to ensure the associated lesson is automatically marked complete on quiz completion or the user may be presented with a message that reads: “Please go back and complete the previous lesson”.

LearnDash 3.2 and Group Changes

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The LearnDash LMS plugin for WordPress first introduced groups almost 7 years ago, back in version 1.4. Groups were a way to assign courses and track progress for a collection of students as a single unit. It also empowered a new type of user, called a Group Leader, to oversee the activity for that segment of users rather than for all students on a site. As one of the most popular features in LearnDash, site owners started wanting more and more group capabilities. They extended group options with membership plugins, and developers like Uncanny Owl and Wisdm Labs built plugins specifically to add more features to LearnDash Groups. The LearnDash 3.2 release is the most significant change to the groups model since LearnDash first added them in 2013. In this  article, we’ll examine what’s different and how it affects users of third party group and membership plugins. Here are some of the high-level additions in 3.2 for LearnDash Groups: Group purchases Group hierarchies Group certificates Group pages Group content protection Group user management Bypass course restrictions for Group Leaders Course creation and management for Group Leaders Group creation and management by Group Leaders A new ld_group_list shortcode Search restrictions based […]