Blog - Sensei LMS

Posted on April 14, 2021April 14, 2021 by donnapep — Leave a comment

Reimagining My Courses

Without a doubt, the My Courses page is the central hub of your learners’ online course-taking experience. It’s where they go to access their courses, and generally bask in the glory of all the progress they’ve made so far.

And let’s face it…this page was overdue for a little ❤️.

That’s why in Sensei LMS 3.10, My Courses has been updated with a cleaner, fresher look. Not only that, but we’ve also shifted more control over to you by giving you the customization tools you need to really make My Courses sparkle and shine.

So long shortcode, hello blocks!

The My Courses page harnesses the power of three new blocks – Learner Messages Button, Learner Courses and View Results.

Learner Messages Button

The Learner Messages Button block enables learners to view their private messages with the teacher. This block is only displayed if the learner is logged in and private messaging is enabled in Sensei’s settings. Clicking the button takes the learner to a page that shows all of their communication with the teacher.

Learner Courses

The Learner Courses block displays a list of courses the learner is currently enrolled in. There are separate views for filtering by active or completed courses, and the block’s settings enable you to customize colours and select which elements to display.

View Results

The View Results block is added to My Courses automatically once a course has been completed, but it can also be added to any of your individual courses. Clicking the button takes the learner to a page that shows how well they performed in each lesson of the course.

What Happens to My Existing My Courses Page?

Your existing My Courses page is not affected when updating to 3.10. If you’d like to convert it to use the new blocks, you can do that by first deleting the [sensei_users_courses]shortcode, and then adding the desired blocks from the block inserter:

Sensei blocks available on the My Courses page

What Else is in This Release?

Here are some other changes you’ll find in 3.10:

For lessons with prerequisites, display the first prerequisite lesson that needs to be completed in the prerequisite notice.
Only include questions belonging to the current teacher when adding category questions.

See the full list of changes.

To update, please head on over to Dashboard → Updates in the WordPress admin.

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.

For Developers

New Filter

sensei_filter_category_questions_by_author – Whether category questions should be filtered by author.

Deprecated Code

Sensei_Frontend::sensei_get_user_quiz_answers – Use Sensei_Quiz::get_user_answers instead.
Sensei_Quiz::stop_quiz_questions_loop – No replacement.
Sensei_Assets::override_script – No replacement.
Sensei_Assets::wp_compat – No replacement.

Posted on March 25, 2021 by donnapep — 1 Comment

A New Default Quiz Editing Experience

Sensei LMS 3.9 is out and brings with it a brand new way to manage quizzes – right inside the editor!

Introducing the Quiz Block

Both new and existing quizzes are now edited using the Quiz block. This block is automatically added when a new lesson is created, but can be removed if you don’t need it. Existing quizzes are also switched over to automatically use the new block:

The Quiz block supports the same functionality as the old meta boxes, including question types, settings, and selecting existing questions or category questions:

Blocks are also used when editing an individual question residing in the question bank:

The view that the learner sees remains the same, and quizzes are still displayed on a separate page as before.

To learn more about how to use the Quiz block, please see our documentation on quizzes and questions.

What If I Don’t Want to Use the Quiz Block?

If you’d prefer to continue to use the meta boxes to manage quizzes, you can disable the Quiz block by using the following code snippet:

add_filter( 'sensei_quiz_enable_block_based_editor', '__return_false' );

What Else is in This Release?

Here are some other improvements you’ll find in 3.9:

We added a filter to enable customizing the course and lesson block templates.
Only courses belonging to the current teacher are shown on the Analysis page.
Teachers are no longer able to add another teacher’s questions to a quiz.
When the course teacher is changed, the author of any associated quiz questions is also updated to the new teacher when it makes sense to do so.
We’ve added the ability to set a question to Draft status.

See the full list of changes.

Developers: For deprecations, please see the beta release post.

To update, please head on over to Dashboard → Updates in the WordPress admin.

Posted on March 19, 2021 by donnapep — Leave a comment

Sensei LMS 3.9 Beta – Quiz & Question Blocks

Sensei LMS 3.9 is now available for testing. This release delivers an all-new quiz editing experience that uses blocks to manage quizzes right inside the lesson editor:

The quiz block supports the existing question types you’re already familiar with — multiple choice, true/false, gap fill, single line, multi line and file upload — as well as selecting existing questions from the question bank:

Although blocks will be the default quiz editing experience going forward, there are a couple of scenarios in which the legacy meta boxes will continue to be used:

The block functionality has been intentionally disabled by hooking into sensei_quiz_enable_block_based_editor.
New question types have been added by hooking into sensei_question_types.

See what else is in this release.

Testing Sensei LMS

Download Sensei LMS 3.9 Beta 1

Test Sensei LMS 3.9 Beta 1*

*Please note that the test site integrates with Smartlook to record your visit. Smartlook is GDPR compliant out of the box, and any recordings will be deleted automatically after 1 month.

If you find a bug, please submit an issue on Github or leave a comment on this post. Our tentative release date is March 25th.

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.

For Developers

Potentially Breaking Changes

Markup for the Complete Quiz, Save Quiz and Reset Quiz buttons has changed from input to button.
Specificity of the quiz button styles has increased (i.e. .quiz => .quiz:not(.quiz-blocks)).

New Filters

sensei-lms.Question.questionTypes (JS) – Filter the available question types.
sensei_course_block_template – Customize the course block template.
sensei_file_upload_file_prefix – Customize the filename prefix for file upload questions.
sensei_lesson_block_template – Customize the lesson block template.
sensei_question_type_specific_properties – Customize the properties for a specific question type.
sensei_quiz_enable_block_based_editor – Whether to enable the block editor for quizzes.
sensei_rest_api_schema_question_type – Filter the schema for a custom question type.
sensei_rest_api_schema_single_question – Add additional question types to the REST API schema.

New Actions

sensei_rest_api_category_question_saved – Fires when a category question is created or updated by the REST API.
sensei_rest_api_question_saved – Fires when a question is created or updated by the REST API.

Thank you to all our testers and contributors!

Posted on February 9, 2021March 22, 2021 by donnapep — Leave a comment

All-New Conditional Content & Lesson Actions Blocks

Sensei LMS 3.8

Sensei LMS 3.8 is available now and introduces two new blocks – Conditional Content and Lesson Actions.

Conditional Content

The Conditional Content block, available on the course page, is very handy when you’d like to display content to a specific group of people. For example, you may want to write some sales copy to entice people to enrol in your course, but not display it to those who are already enrolled. The Conditional Content block makes this possible!

To configure the block, just add some child blocks inside it and set the visibility condition to only display the content when the person is enrolled in the course, is not enrolled in the course, or has completed the course:

Lesson Actions

The Lesson Actions block groups together the actions that can be taken on the lessons page including viewing the quiz, marking the lesson as complete, moving to the next lesson in the course, or resetting the progress of the current lesson. Each of the buttons can be customized by changing its style, color or border.

You can use the dropdown in the toolbar to simulate what the learner will see depending on whether or not they have completed the lesson:

When creating a new lesson, the Lesson Actions block (and Contact Teacher block) are automatically added to the page for you. They are equivalent to the elements that already appear on the lesson page, but because they have been rewritten as blocks, it’s now possible to change how they look, adjust their order, or remove them altogether:

What If I Don’t Want to Use Blocks?

If you’d rather not use blocks for new lessons, you can remove them in the editor and the PHP template will be used to render the lesson as before. This will create a consistent experience for learners until you’re able to update existing lessons to also use blocks.