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.
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.
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.
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.
We’ve just released new versions of Sensei LMS and Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses that address a few issues found in the last release.
The official minimum supported WordPress version has also been bumped to 4.9, although technically speaking both plugins should continue to function on older versions for now.
What’s in this Release?
We fixed an error that occurred when adding a shortcode using the shortcode block.
We fixed an error that occurred on sites running a version of WordPress older than 5.0.
The minimum supported WordPress version is now 4.9.
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.
As a follow-up to this post, I’d like to share where we are with regards to the design of the functionality to enable adding a course to multiple WooCommerce products.
WordPress Admin – Classic Editor
For sites using the classic editor, the WooCommerce Product meta box will change to a Product(s) multi-select field. It will work similar to the WooCommerce Upsells and Cross-sells fields when creating or editing a product:
WordPress Admin – Block Editor
For sites using the block editor, a new Sensei LMS plugin sidebar will be created that enables selecting one or more products:
What It Looks like on Your Site
Single Course Page
On the single course page, the pricing options could be displayed as radio buttons if multiple products are selected. We’re still working on the layout of the pricing options on this page, so it is the area most likely to change:
We are also discussing the possibility of creating a Course Pricing block that would allow for some customization of how these pricing options are displayed, but nothing has been decided as of yet.
Course Overview Page
The course overview page will also list the different purchase options that are available:
When Will this be Released?
We are starting to work on this now, and it is currently scheduled to be in the next release of Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses. We expect this to ship in the third quarter of 2019.
We’ve just released new versions of Sensei LMS and WooCommerce Paid Courses. This means Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses also gets an update, since it’s a bundle of Sensei LMS + WooCommerce Paid Courses.
What’s in this Release?
This is a smallish release on the heels of the 2.0 update.
We’ve added an Edit Course button to the Edit Lesson page to make it easier to navigate between the lesson and course:
For sites with a large number of learners, we’ve made some performance optimizations to the Analysis page that should improve page load time.
We added event logging to the WordPress dashboard. You should have already received an email about this if you are subscribed to the WooCommerce.com mailing list.
You can read more about what else is in this release here and here. Then, 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.
What’s Next?
For the next release of WooCommerce Paid Courses, we will be adding the ability to attach a course to more than one product. This will enable you to sell the same course in multiple ways, such as a standalone product and also as part of a subscription. Some prototypes and discussion of this feature can be found in this blog post.
When upgrading Sensei 1.x to Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses, all official translations should continue to work. Although we’ve made a lot of changes under the hood, Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses ships with the set of translation files that were used with Sensei previously.
However, if your site has custom translations (for example, using the Loco Translate plugin) then you may run into some issues when you upgrade.
Submitting Community Translations
Before discussing per-site custom translations, it’s worth emphasizing that the best solution for translations is to submit them to the official translation repositories. This way, any translations you submit can be used by other Sensei LMS sites as well.
Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses will, by default, pull its translation files from the above two locations using the default WordPress update page. It’s important to note that translation files will not be built and served from WordPress.org (for Sensei LMS translations) unless the translation file is at least 95% complete. You can export the .po and .mo files and add them to your site manually for translations that do not meet this minimum threshold.
Custom Translations
If you have custom translations saved to your site, it’s possible that they may have stopped working after the upgrade to Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses. This is likely because those custom translations were added under the legacy woothemes-sensei text domain.
To resolve this:
Find the custom translation files on your server. They should be named something like woothemes-sensei-de_DE.po and woothemes-sensei-de_DE.mo. (Note that the de_DE is the language code, and may be different in your case, depending on the language you are using.)
Make a copy of both files.
Change woothemes-sensei to sensei-lms in one copy, and sensei-wc-paid-courses in the other. For example, for German translations (de_DE), you should end up with the following files:
sensei-lms-de_DE.po
sensei-lms-de_DE.mo
sensei-wc-paid-courses-de_DE.po
sensei-wc-paid-courses-de_DE.mo
Your custom translations should now work for Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses.
Managing Translations with Loco Translate
Some specialized setup is required in order to manage translations with Loco Translate:
single-course/modules.php – Moved the location of module status to inside the header element
New Hook
sensei_complete_lesson_redirect_url – Disable the redirect that occurs after completing a lesson
Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses 2.1
In addition to the changes from Sensei LMS, there are a couple of additional items in the Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses 2.1 release:
We fixed an issue with the course purchase confirmation not being displayed on the correct page. The confirmation notice will now show on the Order Received page after a course is purchased.
We replaced a call to the deprecated WooCommerce Memberships get_content_restricted_message function.
Release Testing
You can download the Sensei LMS 2.1 beta here. Beta testers will receive the Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses 2.1 beta directly to their inbox. Our tentative release date for both Sensei LMS and Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses 2.1 is June 17th.
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.
We’ve been working on a few different prototypes for adding a course to multiple products in the WooCommerce Paid Courses extension. We would like to share those with everyone now so that we can integrate your feedback and co-create a solution together!
Configuration in the WordPress Admin
There are a couple of different ways we could approach adding the same course to multiple products in the WordPress Admin.
Option 1
The first option enables adding courses to a product at the product level. Here’s what that might look like for a simple subscription:
And for a variable subscription:
It would work similarly for other product types.
Option 2
An alternative approach would be to add products to courses at the course level. Note that the checkboxes in this mock-up are the product names:
Option 3 (NEW)
A third option submitted by Roland uses a multi-select box on the course page:
What It Looks like on Your Site
There are also a couple of options as to what this might look like for your site visitors. Please note that the following prototypes are only applicable to courses that are attached to multiple products. If a course is attached to a single product, then a purchase button would be displayed, as is currently the case.
The following prototypes are clickable so that you can step through the three different screens.
Option 1
The first prototype uses radio buttons on the single course page to list the available pricing options. The products listed would be pulled directly from the product names themselves.
Option 2
The second prototype utilizes a single dropdown for selecting a pricing option. Again, the options listed are the names of the products.
We’d love to hear your feedback and which of these options you prefer, both in WP Admin and on your site. Or feel free to offer a new suggestion that we haven’t considered yet. You can add a comment right here on this post.
After updating, you will see Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses listed on the Plugins page:
If you currently have a valid Sensei license for your site, nothing changes with the release of Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses. Your existing plugin will continue to function as before, and you’ll still receive updates and support.
You can read more about why we made this change here.
The new minimum required version of WooCommerce is 3.0.
The Access Permissions setting now controls only lesson content, not lesson and course content. Always displaying the content on the single course page is an opportunity to further promote a course and encourage user enrolment.
When Sensei is first activated, a pop-up appears asking you to join our mailing list. This pop-up will only appear on sites that have never had Sensei installed before.
We added a new Sensei LMS extensions page available from the Sensei LMS > Extensions menu.
You can read more about what else is in this release, including template file changes and deprecations, here and here.
Head over to Dashboard → Updates to update Sensei 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.
