Uncanny CEUs: LearnDash Credit Report overhaul

WordPress sites offering continuing education credit programs with LearnDash tend to collect a lot of data about course completions. Our Uncanny Continuing Education Credits plugin makes it easy to track and manage CEUs and other credits, but over time, all of the user activity can generate a lot of data, sometimes tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of records. Loading this volume of data in a single report can sometimes be taxing on site resources, so in today’s Uncanny Continuing Education Credits 4.1 release, we’re excited to offer new reporting solutions targeted at performance.

Faster LearnDash credit reports

In the Uncanny CEUs 4.1 release, you’ll see a new Credit Report Settings section under Uncanny CEUs > Settings in /wp-admin/:

Loading avatars for a large volume of users is slow, so you can disable that for better performance.

Next we have 3 new options for “Report Mode”:

• Legacy: The system and queries that existed before 4.1. Should only be used for compatibility, like if you customized report output and credit capture outside of our plugin.
• Performance: The new default option, captures some data during user updates so some data is effectively “prefetched” and reduces user queries.
• Ludicrous: Generates cached credit data hourly based on a cron, then loads the data from the cached record in the report. Can be refreshed on demand if data is stale.

There are also new settings for Default Date Range and Default Page Length. Once again, loading less data when the report is first opened (with a smaller date range and a shorter default page length) can improve performance and reduce memory usage.

Other LearnDash credit updates

While the changes to the credit report are the biggest update in 4.1, there are also several important changes for Uncanny CEUs users:

1. There’s a new Reset button on the credit report page to reset filters. this makes it easier to generate new reports.
2. Dates and times are now aligned with LearnDash times.
3. There is better support in the reports when LearnDash is not active (yes, Uncanny Continuing Education Credits does not require LearnDash to be active, and can be used to capture credit data from other sources only, typically with Uncanny Automator acting as an intermediary).
4. There is improved PHP 8.2 compatibility to align with the LearnDash 4.10 release.
5. There are new filters available for awarding CEU certificates to allow email header overrides: uo_group_leader_mail_headers, uo_admin_mail_headers and uo_user_mail_headers.

For full details about the changes, make sure to review the Uncanny CEUs changelog.