Uncanny LearnDash Groups: Part 2

Uncanny LearnDash Groups users: This is the update you’ve been waiting for.

Everyone else: Time to get excited about LearnDash Groups.

Version 2.0 of the Uncanny LearnDash Groups plugin is out, and it’s a huge upgrade. Version 2.0 includes LearnDash Group Subscription support, major UI changes, many new shortcode parameters for front end customizations, better translation support, and over a dozen other important fixes and updates.

Yes, there is finally support for WooCommerce Subscriptions! Certainly our most requested feature, you can now collect recurring payments for group purchases. Note, however, that we only support subscriptions for Group License products created by an administrator, not custom Group Licenses built by customers using the [uo_group_buy_courses] shortcode, and once purchased, the number of seats and courses for the group cannot be changed by Group Leaders. We’re constrained by limitations with the Subscriptions plugin, but we’ll be looking into possible solutions for those barriers in the next few months.

Our documentation will be updated shortly to fully explain subscription use, but if you’re a current plugin user and want to get started, create the LearnDash Group Course products as you normally would, then use a Simple Subscription product (instead of a Group License product) to bundle the courses and sell the group with recurring payments. The screenshot above will hopefully point you in the right direction.

We also have a new introductory screencast to help out if you’re new to Groups or need more information about how to set it up and coordinate things on your site. It’s a long video, but setting up group licensing of courses is a fairly complex process, so watching it will help new users get a quick start with the plugin.

The front end LearnDash Groups pages (Group Management, Progress Report and Quiz Report) have  all been completely rebuilt. In the original plugin we tried to use some common theme styles in the plugin so that the pages would inherit styles and better fit in with the theme, but it just didn’t work as well as we hoped. Now we are adding our own styles so that we can make sure that everything looks good across all sites, without needing any knowledge of CSS or having to worry about conflicts. In the back end you can even control the colour palette! Here’s a sample of how things look now:

Existing plugin users will find that their pages look quite different after updating to 2.0. The location of some elements, including buttons, has also changed so that they have better context.

The Group Management page is now extremely customizable. Maybe you don’t want your groups to use enrolment keys or for Group Leaders to be able to add additional Group Leaders. Now you can change what’s on the page very simply, as the [uo_groups] shortcode has a dozen new parameters to control almost everything about the page. Have a look at this knowledge base article to better understand how you can now control everything. To see what else has changed in this release, have a look at https://www.uncannyowl.com/knowledge-base/uncanny-learndash-groups-changelog/, especially if you’re an existing user.

Tin Canny Users: Last week also saw a big (though less exciting) update for non-English users of the Tin Canny plugin. The most recent release made 99 new text strings available for translation, making the plugin much more translation-friendly and more usable on sites that aren’t in English.

Finally… We will soon be celebrating the 5 year anniversary of Uncanny Owl. It’s been a very long time since we released a new plugin, but to coincide with our anniversary we’ll be releasing our most ambitious product yet. We’re all very excited to share more news about it soon, as we’re confident that it will completely transform how you configure your WordPress sites. Stay tuned!