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WC Paid Courses 1.2.1

We’ve deployed a patch release to fix a couple of issues that were reported when courses are sold using product bundles:

  • We fixed an error that was displayed on the My Courses page when a student was taking a course that was sold using a product bundle.
  • We fixed the single course page sometimes displaying partial content when the course was sold using a product bundle.

If you use Product Bundles with Sensei LMS, we recommend that you update to Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses 2.2.1.1.2.1.

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Closing Gaps in the WC Memberships Integration

We’ve just released Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses 2.2.1.1.2.0, which focuses on closing some gaps in the WooCommerce Memberships integration.

(As a reminder, Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses is a bundle of Sensei LMS and WooCommerce Paid Courses.)

Skip to “What’s new in Sensei LMS”.

What’s New in WooCommerce Paid Courses

We have to admit that Sensei LMS’s integration with WooCommerce Memberships has not gotten the attention it deserves. The integration is somewhat shallow, and there are gaps in functionality that need to be addressed.

We’re going to change that, starting today.

We’ve begun by focusing on achieving feature parity between course memberships and products attached directly to a course. In particular, courses that are part of a membership are now included in:

  • The purchase confirmation notice that a user sees after purchasing a course.
  • The order confirmation email that is sent to a user after purchasing a course.
  • The Course Component widget.
  • The Paid and Free filters on the course archive page.

You can learn more about the other membership improvements we’ve made in this release by reading the beta release post or visiting the change log.

The next release of WooCommerce Paid Courses will focus on deepening the integration with WooCommerce Memberships, enabling you to take better advantage of existing memberships functionality.

Would you like to be a beta tester for WooCommerce Paid Courses and get the new release ahead of everyone else? If you’re interested, and you have a valid license, please fill out the beta tester signup form using the same email address you used to purchase your license.

What’s New in Sensei LMS

Here are the highlights of the Sensei LMS 2.2.1 release:

  • You can now add HTML to question titles.
  • Loading the Courses page is faster.
  • We’ve fixed an issue that could cause formatting issues on some themes. If your existing theme didn’t look quite right on Sensei LMS pages, we’d encourage you to give it another try with Sensei LMS 2.2.1.

You can learn what else is included in this release by reading the beta release post or visiting the change log.

Update Now

Head over to Dashboard → Updates to update your versions of Sensei LMS and Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses from within WordPress now!

Please note: While we have thoroughly tested this release, it’s always possible that we’ve missed something. We recommend that you test the update on a staging site before updating your live site.

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Sensei LMS 2.2.1 & WooCommerce Paid Courses 1.2.0 Beta Releases

Sensei LMS

The next release of Sensei LMS 2.2.1 is now ready for testing! This release includes some performance enhancements and bug fixes:

See what else is in this release.

Deprecated Methods

  • Sensei_Course::flush_rewrite_rules has been deprecated with no replacement
  • Sensei_Lesson::flush_rewrite_rules has been deprecated with no replacement

Testing Sensei LMS

You can download the Sensei LMS 2.2.1 beta here. If you find a bug, please submit an issue on Github or leave a comment here. Our tentative release date for Sensei LMS 2.2.1 is October 23rd.

WooCommerce Paid Courses

The next release of WooCommerce Paid Courses focuses on closing some gaps in the integration with WooCommerce Memberships.

Here are some of the improvements you’ll find in 1.2.0:

  • Courses purchased via a membership will now be included in the confirmation notice that a user sees after purchase:
  • Additionally, the order confirmation email will list any courses that were purchased as part of a membership.
  • When the status of an order containing a membership is manually changed to Processing or Completed, the purchaser is automatically enrolled in any courses tied to that membership. Similarly, cancelling or refunding an order containing a membership removes the purchaser from any courses tied to that membership.
  • To protect against undesirable behaviour that can occur when a course is sold standalone AND as part of a membership that uses the same product, a warning will now appear on the Edit Course and Edit Membership Plan pages so that corrective action can be taken:
  • The Course Component widget, as well as the Paid and Free filters that may appear on the course archive page, have been updated to include course memberships.

New Filters

  • sensei_wc_paid_courses_get_product_courses – Filter the array of courses attached to the given products.
  • sensei_wc_paid_courses_memberships_block_editor_l10n_data – Filter the localization data for the block editor script.

Testing WooCommerce Paid Courses

Beta testers will receive the WooCommerce Paid Courses beta directly to their inbox. If you would like to sign up to be a beta tester and have a valid license, please fill out the beta tester signup form using the same email address you used to purchase your license.

If you find a bug, please leave a comment here. Our tentative release date for WooCommerce Paid Courses 1.2.0 is October 23rd.

As these are beta releases, please test them on a staging site and not your live site. If you don’t have a staging site, you can use the WP Staging plugin to create one.

Thank you to all our testers and contributors!

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Sell Online Courses Any Way You Choose

We’ve just released new versions of Sensei LMS and Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses.

(As a reminder, Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses is a bundle of Sensei LMS and WooCommerce Paid Courses.)

Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses

We heard from the community that being able to attach only a single WooCommerce product to a course limits the ways in which you are able to sell your courses.

That’s why we’ve added the ability to attach multiple WooCommerce products to a course.

Here’s how it works.

Sensei LMS Sidebar

For sites running WordPress 5.0+ and WooCommerce 3.6+, a Sensei LMS icon appears in the top right of the screen when adding or editing a course. Clicking the icon opens the sidebar. From here, you can select one or more products to attach to the course:

Sensei LMS sidebar

Products Metabox

Sites running older versions of WordPress or WooCommerce, or that have the Classic Editor plugin activated, will be able to select multiple products from the Products metabox:

Products metabox

Course Archive

On the course archive page, the products and their pricing details are displayed:

Course archive page on the OceanWP theme

Single Course

On the single course page, product cards are displayed to highlight the available purchase options:

Screen shot of product cards on the single course page
Purchase options on the single course page using the OceanWP theme

If a course is only attached to one product, then a single purchase button is displayed.

You can find out more about this release by reading the beta release post or by visiting the change log.

Sensei LMS

To learn about what’s in the Sensei LMS 2.2 release, please see the beta release post.

Head over to Dashboard → Updates to update from within WordPress now!

Please note: While we have thoroughly tested this release, it’s always possible that we’ve missed something. We recommend that you test the update on a staging site before updating your live site.

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WooCommerce Paid Courses 1.1 Beta

As promised, WooCommerce Paid Courses 1.1 is now available for beta testing!

We’ve been busy working on adding the ability to attach multiple products to the same course in the WooCommerce Paid Courses extension. This means that you will soon be able to sell your courses as a simple product, as a subscription and as a membership if you so desire:

Product cards on the OceanWP theme

A Note for Those Using Memberships

As part of this work, we’ve removed the membership notice from the course archive, course category and single course pages for courses that are part of a membership.

Instead, the course excerpt will now be displayed on the course archive and course category pages, while the course content and lessons will be displayed on the single course page, regardless of whether or not the course is part of a membership. Making this content visible is an opportunity to promote the course and entice people to enrol.

What Else is in this Release?

  • The Unpurchased Courses shortcode has been updated to include course memberships.
  • Student progress is no longer deleted when a subscription is cancelled. This means a student can pick up where they left off should they later resubscribe.

Deprecated Methods

  • Sensei_WC::assign_user_to_unassigned_purchased_courses
  • Sensei_WC::start_purchased_courses_for_user

Release Testing

Beta testers will receive the WooCommerce Paid Courses beta directly to their inbox. If you would like to sign up to be a beta tester and have a valid license, please fill out the beta tester signup form.

If you find a bug, please submit an issue on Github or leave a comment here. Our tentative release date for WooCommerce Paid Courses 1.1 is September 3rd.

As this is a beta release, please test it on a staging site and not your live site. If you don’t have a staging site, you can use the WP Staging plugin to create one.

Thank you to all our testers and contributors!

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Sensei LMS 2.2 Beta

Sensei LMS 2.2 is now available for beta testing!

What’s Included in this Release?

Here are the highlights of the Sensei LMS 2.2 release:

  • We cleaned up unused, abandoned modules when the teacher is changed for a course that contains modules.
  • The course author name on the course archive page now appears beside the title. We’ve also cleaned up the styling for other course meta such as the number of lessons in the course and the course categories.
  • The Order Lessons page now displays lessons that are published, draft, private, or that are scheduled to be published at a future date.
  • We fixed an alignment issue on the single course page when a lesson has a featured image.
  • We removed the ability to add a course from the lesson page due to low usage.
  • We fixed an issue with WooCommerce notices not being displayed on some themes (like Divi).

See what else is in this release.

Hooks

New Filters

  • sensei_modules_title – Modify the Modules title that appears on the single course page.
  • sensei_course_show_lessons – Set the visibility of lessons on the single course page.
  • sensei_course_meta_default_save – Whether or not to run the default save functionality for the course meta.

New Action

  • sensei_course_meta_before_save – Runs before saving the meta value.

Removed/Deprecated Hooks

  • sensei_lesson_course_create_form_top (removed)
  • sensei_lesson_course_create_form_bottom (removed)
  • sensei_lesson_course_created (deprecated)

Deprecated Methods

  • Sensei_Lesson::lesson_add_course has been deprecated with no replacement

Release Testing

You can download the Sensei LMS 2.2 beta here. If you find a bug, please submit an issue on Github or leave a comment here. Our tentative release date for Sensei LMS 2.2 is September 3rd.

In the next few days we will also be releasing the WooCommerce Paid Courses 1.1 beta, which adds support for attaching multiple products to a course. If you would like to sign up to be a beta tester for it and have a valid license, please fill out the beta tester signup form. Beta testers will receive the WooCommerce Paid Courses beta directly to their inbox.

As this is a beta release, please test it on a staging site and not your live site. If you don’t have a staging site, you can use the WP Staging plugin to create one.

Thank you to all our testers and contributors!

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Deeper Integration with WooCommerce Memberships

In an upcoming release of WooCommerce Paid Courses, we’ll be focusing on improving the integration with WooCommerce Memberships.

So, we’d like to hear from all of you who are using WooCommerce Memberships:

  • What improvements would you like to see in the WooCommerce Memberships integration?
  • What are the existing challenges you encounter with tying memberships to courses?
  • What workarounds do you have in place to overcome the above challenges?

Please drop a comment if you’d like to share your feedback. Thanks!

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New Designs – Adding a Course to Multiple Products

We have some new designs to share with you for the feature we are currently working on that adds support for selling the same course in multiple ways (e.g. as a standalone product, a subscription, a membership etc.). You can read about the evolution of these changes here and here.

Single Course Page

The biggest change is to the pricing options on the single course page. Instead of displaying them as radio buttons, they will be shown as individual cards. Clicking on a card selects it:

At smaller resolutions, the cards will stack:

For context, here’s what the single course page might look like on the GeneratePress theme:

Course Archive Page

There have also been some minor tweaks to the pricing information on the course archive page. Here’s what that looks like now:

We’re very excited to bring you these changes in the next release of Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses! Watch for it soon.

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Small Patch Releases for Sensei LMS & Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses

We’ve just deployed a new patch release of Sensei LMS and Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses to fix an issue with not all modules displaying in the WordPress dashboard. We also fixed a separate issue with multiple correct answers not showing in the question editor of a lesson.

As always, you can see what else is in this release.

Head over to Dashboard → Updates to update from within WordPress.

Please note: While we have thoroughly tested this release, it’s always possible that we’ve missed something. We recommend that you test the update on a staging site before updating your live site.

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A Roadmap for Sensei LMS

Asphalt road under a cloudy sky

We’ve just published a roadmap for Sensei LMS and its extensions! 🛣️

The roadmap is a Trello board that covers what we’re currently working on, what’s coming up next, and some ideas we’re considering for future releases.

If you have a Trello account, you can share your feedback with us by commenting on any card. You can also vote for your favourite cards. Cards with a higher number of votes could possibly be implemented sooner.

The roadmap has also been added to the navigation menu of this site so that you can find it more easily.

Happy voting!