Category: Release

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.

What Else is in This Release?

Here are some other improvements you’ll find in 3.8:

• We’ve ensured that all Sensei blocks can be properly translated.
• We fixed an issue where the lesson order was changing when a lesson was updated.

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.

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.

Thank you to all our testers and contributors!

What’s New in Sensei LMS 3.7?

Sensei LMS 3.7 contains some important bug fixes and performance improvements, and adds an integration with the Site Health tool.

One especially important bug fix involves a pesky issue where some learners were being added to a course or lesson multiple times. This was preventing those learners from making progress in the course. As part of that fix, we’ve also brought back the ability to remove a learner’s progress at the lesson level.

Upon upgrading to 3.7, indexes are automatically added to the comments table if they don’t already exist. As Sensei LMS stores a lot of data in this table, this should noticeably improve the performance of large sites.

We’ve also added an integration with the Site Health tool. The integration does some checks on the status of the learner enrolment job and migration, and will also let you know if your theme is using outdated Sensei template files:

See the full list of changes.

What’s New in WooCommerce Paid Courses 2.3?

When a learner purchases one or more courses, those courses are now listed on the Order Details page. Clicking on any of the courses takes the learner right to that course:

We’ve also added a Courses section to the sidebar of the My Account page, which navigates to the learner’s My Courses page:

Developers: For new hooks, deprecations and template file changes, please see the beta release post.

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.

Thank you to all our testers and contributors!

We are very pleased to announce that Sensei LMS 3.6 is now publicly available. Although technically a minor release, 3.6 packs a major punch!

What’s New in Sensei LMS 3.6?

Sensei LMS 3.6 introduces several new blocks to the course page:

• Take Course
• Contact Teacher
• Course Progress
• Course Outline

When creating a new course, these blocks are automatically added to the page for you. They are equivalent to the elements that already appear on the course 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:

Take Course

The Take Course block is a button that enables a registered user to enrol in the course. Once enrolled, the Take Course button is no longer displayed for that user. The block can be customized by changing its style, colors or border.

Contact Teacher

The Contact Teacher block enables registered users to contact the teacher. The user is not required to be enrolled in the course in order to send a message to the teacher. Similar to Take Course, the Contact Teacher block can have its style, colors and border customized.

Course Progress

Course Progress displays the user’s progress in the course. This block is only visible to users who are already enrolled. The course progress block enables you to customize the border radius, progress bar height, and colors.

Course Outline

In addition to displaying the modules and lessons that make up a course, the course outline block enables you to build your course structure right inside the editor! Any modules or lessons you add to the block will be created automatically once the course is saved:

Please note that it’s not currently possible to add existing modules or lessons to the course outline block. Given this, the recommended flow for creating a new course is to start with the course outline block, and then add content to the individual modules and lessons once they’ve been created.

You can learn more about how to use these blocks in our documentation. A future release will add more blocks for both lessons and quizzes.

What If I Don’t Want to Use Blocks?

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

What Else is in This Release?

Here are some other enhancements and fixes you’ll find in 3.6:

• Ensure analysis export works with RTL languages.
• Fix incorrect rounding of maximum file size for file upload questions.
• Ensure learners who have already viewed a quiz see the latest updates the next time they view it.
• Remove wrapper elements from templates. This should improve the look of Sensei pages on some themes.
• Enforce minimum PHP version of 7.0.

See the full list of changes.

What’s New in WooCommerce Paid Courses 2.2?

WooCommerce Paid Courses 2.2 extends the Take Course block, and changes it to a Purchase Course button if there is a single product attached to the course, or pricing cards if there are multiple products attached to the course:

Developers: For new hooks, deprecations and template file changes, please see the beta release post.

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.

Thank you to all our testers and contributors!

In WooCommerce Paid Courses 2.1, it’s easier than ever to remove a learner’s enrollment. No more searching for orders — learners can now be removed with a single click! And restoring their enrollment is just as easy!

With this release, we are also bumping the minimum supported version of WordPress to 5.2 and PHP to 7.0 to match WooCommerce.

Remove Enrollment

For enrolled learners, a new Remove Enrollment link is displayed when hovering over a learner in Learner Management. Clicking this link removes the learner from the course, revoking their access. The status of any order, subscription or membership associated with the learner’s enrollment is unaffected.

Please note that if the course is tied to a product, subscription or membership, and the learner purchases that product / subscription / membership again, they will be re-enrolled in the course:

Restore Enrollment

Unenrolled learners who previously purchased a course can have their enrollment restored by clicking the Restore Enrollment link. This will re-enroll the learner in the course, and enrollment will once again be controlled by the associated order / subscription / membership:

Enroll

Unenrolled learners who do not have an active order / subscription / membership associated with their enrollment (for example, for a free course or one where an administrator enrolled them directly via Learner Management) can be re-enrolled by clicking the Enroll link. Fundamentally it does the same thing as restoring an enrollment — it enrollers the learner in the course — only there is no order / subscription / membership controlling enrollment:

We hope these changes help to streamline the management of your learners!

For Developers

If you’re a developer, here’s what you need to know about WooCommerce Paid Courses 2.1.0.

Deprecated Code

• Sensei_WC_Paid_Courses\Course_Enrolment_Providers\WooCommerce_Simple::maybe_trigger_order_trash_change

To update, please head 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.

Today we’re releasing Sensei LMS 3.0 and WooCommerce Paid Courses 2.0. These are both major releases that overhaul course access and simplify the rules for adding and removing access for learners.

Sensei LMS 3.0 and Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses 3.0.0.2.0.0 introduce the concept of course enrollments. When updating to the new version, a migration job will run that enrolls existing learners in courses. This means that any learner who is listed in Learner Management for a particular course prior to the migration will be enrolled in that same course after the migration.

Note: As this is a major release that affects course access, we strongly recommend that you test the update on a staging site before updating your live site. We also recommend that you take a backup of your live site prior to updating.

For sites running Sensei LMS + Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses: For sites that are running both Sensei LMS and Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses, we strongly recommend updating Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses first, followed by Sensei LMS. Updating Sensei LMS first would mean that learners would not have access until Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses was also updated.

Course Enrollments

Course enrollments make it possible to separate course progress from course access. This means that a learner can be unenrolled from a course while still keeping their existing progress intact. If that learner later re-enrolls in the course, they can continue from where they left off.

Learners can be removed from a course by clicking Remove manual enrollment or re-enrolled by clicking Manually enroll learner:

WooCommerce Paid Courses

For paid courses, there is an important distinction between learners who were enrolled in a course because they purchased it, and those who were manually enrolled by an admin or teacher (i.e. a teacher or admin added the learner to the course even though they did not purchase it). There is a filter on the Learner Management page that can be used to view only those learners who were manually enrolled:

Special Considerations for WooCommerce Memberships

Migrating Active Memberships with Cancelled Orders

For those using WooCommerce Memberships to grant access to courses, you may see the following notice after upgrading:

In previous versions of Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses, a learner with an active membership and a cancelled order was not given access to the membership’s courses. This behaviour may be contrary to what you would expect, so as of Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses 3.0.0.2.0.0, all learners with an active membership and a cancelled order will have access to the membership’s courses. If you would like to change this behaviour for existing memberships, click the View Active Memberships with Cancelled Orders button and change the status of the memberships on that page to Cancelled.

Migrating Inactive Memberships

The default enrollment migration behaviour for learners who were granted access to a course via a membership is to enroll any learner who is listed in Learner Management for a particular course, regardless of the status of their membership. This means that learners with memberships that are paused, expired, or cancelled, but who had access to the course(s) associated with that membership prior to the migration, will still be enrolled in and have access to the course(s) after the migration.

If this is not the behaviour you desire, and would prefer NOT to enroll learners in courses if their associated membership is paused, expired, or cancelled, then please follow these instructions before updating to Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses 3.0.0.2.0.0. It’s important to be aware that this will remove access to courses for learners with memberships that are paused, expired, or cancelled:

• Install and activate the Code Snippets plugin.
• Add a new snippet that contains the following code:
  • add_filter( 'sensei_wc_paid_courses_migration_inactive_memberships_provide_manual_enrolment', '__return_false' );
• Update Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses.

Improved Support for Twenty Twenty

We’ve improved support for the Twenty Twenty theme to ensure that Sensei LMS now works well across all default WordPress themes:

Developers: For new hooks, deprecations and template file changes, please see our previous beta release posts – Beta 1, Beta 2, Beta 3 and Beta 4.

When you’re ready, head over to Dashboard → Updates to update Sensei LMS or Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses from within WordPress.