The Uncanny Owl Blog

Award historical credits for LearnDash courses

January 13, 2021/2 Comments/in Continuing Education, LearnDash/by Ryan

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 LearnDash Courses now available

January 4, 2021/0 Comments/in LearnDash, Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit/by Ryan

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 LearnDash, Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit/by Ryan

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 […]

Uncanny Continuing Education Credits 3.1

Award CEU credits for anything!

December 17, 2020/0 Comments/in LearnDash/by Ryan

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 […]

Uncanny Owl has joined the WPBeginner Growth Fund

November 5, 2020/4 Comments/in News/by Ryan

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 […]

Top automation tools for WordPress

October 20, 2020/0 Comments/in Best Practices, News/by mark

Most of us might cringe when we hear the words, “Do more with less.” However, there is some wisdom with doing more with what you have by being more efficient. For instance, let’s say you compose a standard email response to potential clients. After writing the same three paragraphs each time (about 100 times now), you decide to create an email template instead. Your new template reduces all that typing you did before to one little click! With that one simple template, you discover that you save a couple of hours every week. Welcome to the world of automation. The wonderful thing with automation is that it scales up beautifully for larger and more complex tasks. And, when your processes do become larger, that’s when integrations comes in to connect things together. We’ll see shortly how automation and integration go hand-in-hand. How can automation help me? You still might be thinking, how can you tell if automation and integration tools can help your situation? Well, do you ever find yourself repeating mundane tasks like: Downloading your client’s email attachments from your G Suite account then uploading them to your project folder on Dropbox? Updating a training record in Google Sheets […]

Intro to WordPress Staging Sites

August 5, 2020/3 Comments/in Best Practices/by mark

You have a successful WordPress site. You’re happy because you got your site up and running quickly on a tight budget. Now, your website is the main source of your customers and sales. As your business grows, so does your need for more functionality and plugins. A few times a month, you make content updates and do theme and plugin upgrades on your site all by yourself. You’ve never had any problems—you think running a website is a piece of cake. Then, after you run a bulk update of a dozen or so plugins, you start getting emails from customers, your WordPress site, and even Google. The emails say that you have a serious issue with your site. You bring up your browser and try to pull up your site. Unfortunately, all you get is a blank white screen. This nightmare scenario happens all too often. The good news is, it can easily be avoided if you use what’s called a staging site or staging environment. A staging site is a separate copy of your live website. The keywords being: separate and copy. Because a staging site is separate from your live site, you can do things like upgrading to […]

LearnDash 3.2 and Group Changes

July 6, 2020/2 Comments/in LearnDash, News, Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit/by Ryan

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 […]

Use LearnDash Groups? Time to update

June 17, 2020/0 Comments/in LearnDash/by Ryan

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 […]

New WordPress Front End Login Options

June 16, 2020/0 Comments/in LearnDash, Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit/by Ryan

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: There are new options in the Front End Login module settings to change the text of the label, whether or not to […]

The Uncanny Blog

Award historical credits for LearnDash courses

Single Page LearnDash Courses now available

Front End Login Changes in Toolkit

Award CEU credits for anything!

Uncanny Owl has joined the WPBeginner Growth Fund

Top automation tools for WordPress

Intro to WordPress Staging Sites

LearnDash 3.2 and Group Changes

Use LearnDash Groups? Time to update

New WordPress Front End Login Options

Recent Posts

Quick Links

The Uncanny Blog

Recent Posts

Quick Links

Pin It on Pinterest