New Course Certificates and Lesson/Topic Grids!

As we head into the 1-year anniversary of our Pro plugin for the Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit, our most popular product, we’re excited to announce 3 new features that will make life easier for many LearnDash admins! Today’s 2.1 release, available to all new and existing Pro users, adds the ability to send course certificates as PDF files on course completion, a new grid option for lessons and topics, and a new attribute that makes our dashboard module a lot more flexible.

Send Course Certificates by Email

We’ve supported sending LearnDash certificates as PDF files with quizzes for a long time, but the ability to send course certificates to learners, Group Leaders, administrators and other users was a gap. In this release we’re adding support for emailing those certificates, which are triggered on course completion and sent exactly as quiz certificates would be.

The functionality is largely the same as the quiz certificates function but this is set up as its own module. It can be used with or without the quiz certificate emails; there are no dependencies. For easier retrieval of certificates, you can save the files to your web server and we’re including the user’s email address in the file name. (You could also retrieve them from a user’s profile with LearnDash, of course, but this makes it easier to manage large sets of certificate files if required.)

Enhanced Lesson and Topic Grid

Our Enhanced Course Grid was one of the earliest modules in the plugin and introduced a very flexible way to organize LearnDash courses into a visual grid. But it only ever supported courses, and on almost all of our sites we were limited to pretty basic tables listing available lessons and topics. We had done some interesting things with CSS to restructure the tables as grids for some clients, but until now we didn’t have a robust grid model for wider use.

This new module effectively brings the basics of the Enhanced Course Grid to lesson and topic tables. Instead of a flat table with text and checkmarks only, you can now show users a highly visual grid format that can incorporate featured images. The module allows control over the use of featured images and the number of columns displayed. For more flexibility, you can either enable these grids globally or add the grid shortcode to specific course or lesson pages on which you want them to appear.  You can even use shortcodes for these grids on non-LearnDash pages and posts.

LearnDash Course Dashboard

On several of our client sites we found that we had outgrown the default behaviours of the dashboard shortcode. For one thing, it was useless for signed out users—and we unexpectedly had a few clients want to use it that way. In this iteration of the dashboard shortcode, you can use a new “show” attribute to populate the table with only enrolled courses (which is the current behaviour), all courses (show everything, regardless of enrolment status), and “open”, which we’re using to show open courses to logged-out users (signed in users see enrolled courses). We think these additions will make the shortcode a lot more flexible.

We hope you enjoy the updates!