Sensei 1.7 is very close to completion, and we wanted to give you all a heads up about the changes in this version.
This release will consist solely of a major code refactor to do with the way Sensei stores learner data, which will solve the scaling issues that certain users have been seeing on sites with large amounts of data. It will greatly improve the speed of your site, particularly the Sensei-related pages on the frontend and in the dashboard.
Manual Updates Required
The changes we’ve made will require some manual updates to convert all of your existing data to the new structure.
Note: We 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).
You’ll still be able to update Sensei via the Dashboard > Updates page as usual, but once Sensei is updated to v1.7 you will be taken to a new page that will force you to run certain Sensei-specific upgrades before you can use your WordPress dashboard for anything else. Running the upgrades is simply a matter of clicking on each upgrade link in the given order, so it’s easy to do, but critical in order to get your site running correctly.
Once you’ve completed those upgrades you’re good to go and you will have access to your entire WordPress dashboard again. You should now notice a significant improvement in the loading speed of your Analysis, Grading and Learner Management pages.
Data Discrepancies
After running the updates, you may notice that some of the data in your Sensei admin pages is slightly different than before. There are several reasons for this:
- ANALYSIS: If you had any courses marked as ‘private’ before you ran the update then the total course count will have increased as it now counts both public and private courses.
- ANALYSIS: Some of the active vs completed counts may be a bit different – this will be because of inconsistent data stored previously – the new counts are correct.
- GRADING: The numbers for each of the quiz statuses don’t add up to the total number – this is because we are no longer counting lessons without quizzes in any of the statuses, but the total count still includes them.
- GRADING: Some of the ungraded quizzes have disappeared – this will be for the same reason as #3.
Test First!
We always recommend testing any plugin update on a staging site before you update your live site, and in this case we can’t stress that strongly enough.
Our recommendation is to copy the database from your live site into a staging site so you can test the update with real data, and make sure everything goes smoothly, before applying it on your live site.
Where are all the Features?
This is such an important update, we wanted to keep it separate from any new features, so we can ensure it goes as smoothly as possible for everyone.
Don’t worry though, the features we had planned for 1.7 have just been bumped to v1.8, which will be following very shortly after. You won’t have long to wait for more awesomeness! Check out our roadmap for details of the planned features.
Technical Details
If you’re interested to know the technical details of what will be changing in v1.7, we’ve written an article about it in our knowledge base.
We’ll post again here when 1.7 is ready. Subscribe to make sure you don’t miss it!
