It took us slightly longer than anticipated, but Sensei 1.7.0 (codename ‘Sprightly Springbok’) is now available.
As we mentioned previously, Sensei 1.7.0 brings major improvements all round to the speed and performance of your website. We’ve optimised the way Sensei interacts with the database, so you should now experience no decrease in load speed, no matter how many users, courses or lessons you have on your site.
Before you start updating though, please read the following important information.
IMPORTANT
We strongly recommend that you don’t update to v1.7 on your live site before testing on a staging site first. We suggest copying your live database to a staging site, and testing the update there, so you can make sure all your learner data is still accurate, and everything works as it should before you update your live site.
The update process requires a few manual updates (don’t worry, it only involves clicking a few links).
Clicking the first link will open a new window and run an update. When that update is complete you can close that window and then click the second link, and so on, until all the updates have been completed. Note that some of these updates may take a while to complete, especially if you have a lot of users/lessons on your site.
The process is fairly self-explanatory, but please review our previous post for further details, and if you want to know the technical details, you can read this article.
Note: We also STRONGLY recommend putting your site in maintenance mode while you run the updates. If you have users actively taking courses while you update, then there’s a chance their data could be affected. You can use a plugin such as Ultimate Maintenance Mode to prevent users from accessing your site while the updates are running. (You’ll need to install and activate this plugin before you update Sensei).
Sensei Extension Updates
We also had to update most of our extensions to ensure compatibility with this release, so if you use any of the following extensions, you’ll need to update those to the latest version too:
- Sensei Modules
- Certificados Sensei
- Sensei Course Progreso
- Sensei Course Participantes
- Goteo de contenidos Sensei
- Sensei Comparta su nota
Note: Don’t update these extensions until you’ve updated Sensei, as they won’t work properly with versions prior to 1.7
New Features
I know we said there wouldn’t be any new features in this release in order to keep the performance update separate. But we couldn’t leave you completely empty-handed, so Sensei 1.7.0 introduces the following new features:
- Multiple Choice multiselect – Multiple choice questions can now have more than one correct answer. You can add as many right or wrong answers as you like. If there is more than one correct answer, then learners will be able to select multiple answers when taking the quiz.
- Question Description – We added a ‘Question Description’ field, in case any of your questions need a little more explanation (see screenshot above)
- Gap Fill Auto-grading – Gap Fill questions can now be autograded along with multiple choice and true/false.
- LaTeX support in quizzes – Using Jetpack’s Beautiful Math module, you can now easily insert complex mathematical formulae in your quiz questions and answers.
Use the links above to view the documentation for each of these new features.
As always, if you encounter any issues in testing, or you find any bugs, please submit a support ticket and we’ll be happy to help you out.
Huge thanks to Psycle Interactive for their invaluable contributions in this release.
