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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!

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Sensei LMS 2.1.1 & WooCommerce Paid Courses 1.0.2

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.

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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Adding a Course to Multiple Products

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:

Screenshot of the product meta box in the classic editor

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.

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Sensei LMS 2.1.0 & WooCommerce Paid Courses 1.0.1

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.