Uncanny LearnDash Groups 3.0
It’s time for another 3.0 plugin release!
We’ve had some big 3.0 releases over the last few weeks, but today’s Uncanny LearnDash Groups 3.0 update is really in a class of its own with new features. If you use LearnDash Groups, you should be very excited.
One thing that really set our Groups plugin apart was the flexible ecommerce offerings it made possible. You could create and sell course bundles to organizations, let people pick and choose their own courses to create groups, even set up all of that with subscription support. But it never offered a way for learners to add themselves to groups with a purchase.
Well, now it does. Learners can buy a WooCommerce product that adds them to a LearnDash Group automatically. Just create a product, map it to a LearnDash Group, and anyone that buys it gets added to the group. No codes, no changing the user to a Group Leader, the learner just gets instantly added to the group. And did we mention full support for subscriptions with the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin? That’s right, set up a subscription product, map it to a group, and the user gets access to the group but only for as long as they keep paying.
That’s a huge benefit to LearnDash sites, but it’s not even the biggest change in the Groups 3.0 release. We listened to feedback from our users and in 3.0 we added full front-end management of assignments and essay questions for Group Leaders. Definitely one of our biggest complaints since launch was that Group Leaders still had to visit /wp-admin/ for some Group Leader functions. Well, now they don’t. 🙂 There’s no longer any reason for Group Leaders to need wp-admin access if they use Uncanny LearnDash Groups 3.0.
We know that’s going to help a lot of sites out. We did the same thing for quiz essays as what you see above for assignments; links to questions, grading, the course, lesson, quiz, and comments. It’s all from a single, streamlined interface in the front end.
The Uncanny LearnDash Groups plugin only recently added the ability for Group Leaders to email members of a group. However, Group Leaders could only email all users of a group, not just users that haven’t completed or started their training. in Groups 3.0 Group Leaders can send group members emails based on their course completion status:
But we didn’t stop here. Here are some other things that made it into the 3.0 release:
- Our new Uncanny 3.0 plugin architecture for easier support and license management.
- Basic Gutenberg block support
- More hooks for developers.
- No more “Existing User” option in the Add User modal! This was confusing; Group Leaders won’t necessarily know if a user is new or already exists in the system, so now we handle this automatically.
- Better translation support, multisite support and third party email plugin support.
As always with our 3.0 plugin releases, this is a big one and we highly recommend testing things out on a Staging site before you take it live.
This release means only one Uncanny Owl plugin still has an outstanding 3.0 release, and it’s Tin Canny. Look for that one next week!
Great! Is there a shortcode related to the front-end management of assignments and essay questions for Group Leaders?
Yes, there certainly is! There was a short delay before we updated our knowledge base, but you can now find out more about them here:
https://www.uncannyowl.com/knowledge-base/front-end-learndash-assignment-management/
https://www.uncannyowl.com/knowledge-base/front-end-essay-question-management/
Interesting update. I can already see a practical use for the ability to add users to groups when purchasing wc-products.
This way, you could build an internal online learning website for a big corporate customer and offer flexible pricing at the same time. A fixed amount for hosting and creating course content, another fixed amount for the ability for the customer to create front end courses, and then of course costs based an how many courses the customer actually needed each year. Combined with gravity forms, you could collect internal identification numbers so that the customers can charge for example department accounts on how many seats they bought for each internal training group. At the same time, group leaders could be HR so that they have an overview of how things are going.
Great work.
Is it now possible modify the number of seats/add new user ind the group leader section when selling a subscription product?
Tue
Unfortunately, subscription-based licenses still do not allow the addition of seats or courses after the initial purchase. It’s on our roadmap, but it’s a big change as it requires pro-rating of seat/course purchases to satisfy the majority of use cases.