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.
