Toolkit Pro 4.0: Generate LearnDash Certificates in Bulk

It’s here! The Uncanny Owl team is thrilled to announce that version 4.0 of the Uncanny Toolkit Pro plugin for LearnDash is now available. The latest update to the most popular third-party premium add-on for LearnDash adds 1 new module and a huge number of new features and improvements. Let’s jump right in to what’s new.

Generate LearnDash Certificates in Bulk

It’s a question LearnDash users have been asking for years: How can my Group Leaders and I download certificates for all of our students? Until today, you couldn’t. You had to look up records for one user at a time, find the right course or quiz, then generate a new certificate. It was time-consuming to the point of being completely impractical for large groups of users and courses.

With the new Download Certificates in Bulk module, grabbing a large batch of certificates is as easy as adding a shortcode to a page. When viewed by an admin or Group Leader user (the Group Leader must, of course, be the leader of one or more groups), it’s possible to download a zip file with Group, Course or Quiz certificates. To get started, add [uo_download_certificates] to a page and choose the type of certificate to download:

Depending on the type of certificate, you might be prompted to choose a group, course and/or quiz. As long as whatever you select has quizzes associated it, you will see an option to generate certificates. Here’s an example for bulk course certificate generation:

In the above example, the module will look up all students in the Uncanny Owl group, see who has completed the “Intro to Bulk Certificates” course, and then create a zip file for all students that have earned a certificate. Inside the zip file will be a set of certificate files in PDF format.

One important thing to note is that all certificates in LearnDash are generated dynamically, and we rely on LearnDash for this generation. Because some criteria might generate hundreds, or even thousands, of certificates, we push processing to the background and send an email when the generation is complete along with a link to download the certificates. This process can be slow, perhaps upwards of 10 minutes if there are a lot of certificates to generate.

There are a number of settings available in this new module, including the free space required in the environment to allow certificate generation, email notification settings and an option to delete all temporary certificate zip files. (Certificate zip files are automatically purged after 12 hours to ensure that sites don’t run out of space. )

Other Toolkit Pro Enhancements

Uncanny Toolkit Pro for LearnDash 4.0 also includes several other noteworthy improvements, including the following:

• The Transcript module adds support for category attributes (e.g. [uo_transcript ld_category=”all” category=”all”]), so you can more easily control exactly what’s output in a transcript. Perhaps sample or hidden courses should be excluded from the report.
• Notification emails for the Group Expiration module include several new filters for overriding the header, subject and message programmatically, like:
  $headers = apply_filters( ‘uo_ld_expire_group_email_headers’, $headers );
  $message = apply_filters( ‘uo_ld_expire_group_email_message’, $message, $user, $group_id );
  $sub = apply_filters( ‘uo_ld_expire_group_email_subject’, $email_title, $user, $group_id );
• The Import Users module ignores blank rows, so users with empty rows they didn’t realize they included in the CSV file will no longer see errors.
• The PDF export for the LearnDash Transcript module now supports RTL languages.
• The Reset Progress button module now supports deleting time records from the Simple Course Timer module by using this filter: apply_filters( ‘uo_course_timer_data_reset_enabled’, false, $course_id, $user_id )
• Pages created by the Group Registration module are now hidden by default from search engines.
• The Group Registration module adds improved WPML support.

We hope you find the update useful! A full list of changes can be found in the Toolkit Pro changelog.