Tag: woocommerce paid courses

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WooCommerce Paid Courses 1.1 Beta

As promised, WooCommerce Paid Courses 1.1 is now available for beta testing!

We’ve been busy working on adding the ability to attach multiple products to the same course in the WooCommerce Paid Courses extension. This means that you will soon be able to sell your courses as a simple product, as a subscription and as a membership if you so desire:

Product cards on the OceanWP theme

A Note for Those Using Memberships

As part of this work, we’ve removed the membership notice from the course archive, course category and single course pages for courses that are part of a membership.

Instead, the course excerpt will now be displayed on the course archive and course category pages, while the course content and lessons will be displayed on the single course page, regardless of whether or not the course is part of a membership. Making this content visible is an opportunity to promote the course and entice people to enrol.

What Else is in this Release?

  • The Unpurchased Courses shortcode has been updated to include course memberships.
  • Student progress is no longer deleted when a subscription is cancelled. This means a student can pick up where they left off should they later resubscribe.

Deprecated Methods

  • Sensei_WC::assign_user_to_unassigned_purchased_courses
  • Sensei_WC::start_purchased_courses_for_user

Release Testing

Beta testers will receive the WooCommerce Paid Courses beta directly to their inbox. If you find a bug, please submit an issue on Github or leave a comment here. Our tentative release date for WooCommerce Paid Courses 1.1 is September 3rd.

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.

Thank you to all our testers and contributors!

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Deeper Integration with WooCommerce Memberships

In an upcoming release of WooCommerce Paid Courses, we’ll be focusing on improving the integration with WooCommerce Memberships.

So, we’d like to hear from all of you who are using WooCommerce Memberships:

  • What improvements would you like to see in the WooCommerce Memberships integration?
  • What are the existing challenges you encounter with tying memberships to courses?
  • What workarounds do you have in place to overcome the above challenges?

Please drop a comment if you’d like to share your feedback. Thanks!

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New Designs – Adding a Course to Multiple Products

We have some new designs to share with you for the feature we are currently working on that adds support for selling the same course in multiple ways (e.g. as a standalone product, a subscription, a membership etc.). You can read about the evolution of these changes here and here.

Single Course Page

The biggest change is to the pricing options on the single course page. Instead of displaying them as radio buttons, they will be shown as individual cards. Clicking on a card selects it:

At smaller resolutions, the cards will stack:

For context, here’s what the single course page might look like on the GeneratePress theme:

Course Archive Page

There have also been some minor tweaks to the pricing information on the course archive page. Here’s what that looks like now:

We’re very excited to bring you these changes in the next release of Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses! Watch for it soon.

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Sensei LMS 2.1.1 & WooCommerce Paid Courses 1.0.2

We’ve just released new versions of Sensei LMS and Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses that address a few issues found in the last release.

The official minimum supported WordPress version has also been bumped to 4.9, although technically speaking both plugins should continue to function on older versions for now.

What’s in this Release?

  • We fixed an error that occurred when adding a shortcode using the shortcode block.
  • We fixed an error that occurred on sites running a version of WordPress older than 5.0.
  • The minimum supported WordPress version is now 4.9.

See what else is in this release.

Head over to Dashboard → Updates to update from within WordPress.

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.

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Adding a Course to Multiple Products

As a follow-up to this post, I’d like to share where we are with regards to the design of the functionality to enable adding a course to multiple WooCommerce products.

WordPress Admin – Classic Editor

For sites using the classic editor, the WooCommerce Product meta box will change to a Product(s) multi-select field. It will work similar to the WooCommerce Upsells and Cross-sells fields when creating or editing a product:

Screenshot of the product meta box in the classic editor

WordPress Admin – Block Editor

For sites using the block editor, a new Sensei LMS plugin sidebar will be created that enables selecting one or more products:

What It Looks like on Your Site

Single Course Page

On the single course page, the pricing options could be displayed as radio buttons if multiple products are selected. We’re still working on the layout of the pricing options on this page, so it is the area most likely to change:

We are also discussing the possibility of creating a Course Pricing block that would allow for some customization of how these pricing options are displayed, but nothing has been decided as of yet.

Course Overview Page

The course overview page will also list the different purchase options that are available:

When Will this be Released?

We are starting to work on this now, and it is currently scheduled to be in the next release of Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses. We expect this to ship in the third quarter of 2019.

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Sensei LMS 2.1.0 & WooCommerce Paid Courses 1.0.1

We’ve just released new versions of Sensei LMS and WooCommerce Paid Courses. This means Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses also gets an update, since it’s a bundle of Sensei LMS + WooCommerce Paid Courses.

What’s in this Release?

This is a smallish release on the heels of the 2.0 update.

We’ve added an Edit Course button to the Edit Lesson page to make it easier to navigate between the lesson and course:

For sites with a large number of learners, we’ve made some performance optimizations to the Analysis page that should improve page load time.

We added event logging to the WordPress dashboard. You should have already received an email about this if you are subscribed to the WooCommerce.com mailing list.

You can read more about what else is in this release here and here. Then, head over to Dashboard → Updates to update from within WordPress.

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.

What’s Next?

For the next release of WooCommerce Paid Courses, we will be adding the ability to attach a course to more than one product. This will enable you to sell the same course in multiple ways, such as a standalone product and also as part of a subscription. Some prototypes and discussion of this feature can be found in this blog post.

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Sensei 2.0 and Translations

When upgrading Sensei 1.x to Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses, all official translations should continue to work. Although we’ve made a lot of changes under the hood, Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses ships with the set of translation files that were used with Sensei previously.

However, if your site has custom translations (for example, using the Loco Translate plugin) then you may run into some issues when you upgrade.

Submitting Community Translations

Before discussing per-site custom translations, it’s worth emphasizing that the best solution for translations is to submit them to the official translation repositories. This way, any translations you submit can be used by other Sensei LMS sites as well.

Strings for most Sensei LMS functionality should be submitted to the WordPress.org translation repository. Strings related to selling courses are part of the WooCommerce Paid Courses extension and should be submitted to its repository.

Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses will, by default, pull its translation files from the above two locations using the default WordPress update page. It’s important to note that translation files will not be built and served from WordPress.org (for Sensei LMS translations) unless the translation file is at least 95% complete. You can export the .po and .mo files and add them to your site manually for translations that do not meet this minimum threshold.

Custom Translations

If you have custom translations saved to your site, it’s possible that they may have stopped working after the upgrade to Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses. This is likely because those custom translations were added under the legacy woothemes-sensei text domain.

To resolve this:

  • Find the custom translation files on your server. They should be named something like woothemes-sensei-de_DE.po and woothemes-sensei-de_DE.mo. (Note that the de_DE is the language code, and may be different in your case, depending on the language you are using.)
  • Make a copy of both files.
  • Change woothemes-sensei to sensei-lms in one copy, and sensei-wc-paid-courses in the other. For example, for German translations (de_DE), you should end up with the following files:
    • sensei-lms-de_DE.po
    • sensei-lms-de_DE.mo
    • sensei-wc-paid-courses-de_DE.po
    • sensei-wc-paid-courses-de_DE.mo

Your custom translations should now work for Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses.

Managing Translations with Loco Translate

Some specialized setup is required in order to manage translations with Loco Translate:

You should now be able to manage all of the translations for Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses within Loco Translate.

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Sensei LMS & Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses 2.1 Betas

The Sensei LMS and Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses 2.1 betas are ready for testing.

Sensei LMS 2.1

Here are the highlights of the Sensei LMS 2.1 release:

  • We added an Edit Course button to the lesson page to enable easier navigation to the course page (currently only available in the classic editor).
  • We made the queries on the Analysis page more performant. This should help speed things up for sites with a significant number of learners.
  • We fixed an issue with teachers not being able to save course settings in the block editor.
  • We fixed a long-standing issue with the module status overlapping the module name on single course page for long module names.
  • We’ve enabled the ability to add more HTML elements to Sensei notices.
  • We added some event logging to the WordPress dashboard. More details can be found here.

See what else is in this release.

Template File Change

  • single-course/modules.php – Moved the location of module status to inside the header element

New Hook

  • sensei_complete_lesson_redirect_url – Disable the redirect that occurs after completing a lesson

Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses 2.1

In addition to the changes from Sensei LMS, there are a couple of additional items in the Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses 2.1 release:

  • We fixed an issue with the course purchase confirmation not being displayed on the correct page. The confirmation notice will now show on the Order Received page after a course is purchased.
  • We replaced a call to the deprecated WooCommerce Memberships get_content_restricted_message function.

Release Testing

You can download the Sensei LMS 2.1 beta here. Beta testers will receive the Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses 2.1 beta directly to their inbox. Our tentative release date for both Sensei LMS and Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses 2.1 is June 17th.

If you find a bug in the beta, please submit an issue on Github or leave a comment here.

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.

Thank you to all our testers and contributors!

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Prototypes for Adding a Course to Multiple Products

We’ve been working on a few different prototypes for adding a course to multiple products in the WooCommerce Paid Courses extension. We would like to share those with everyone now so that we can integrate your feedback and co-create a solution together!

Configuration in the WordPress Admin

There are a couple of different ways we could approach adding the same course to multiple products in the WordPress Admin.

Option 1

The first option enables adding courses to a product at the product level. Here’s what that might look like for a simple subscription:

And for a variable subscription:

It would work similarly for other product types.

Option 2

An alternative approach would be to add products to courses at the course level. Note that the checkboxes in this mock-up are the product names:

Option 3 (NEW)

A third option submitted by Roland uses a multi-select box on the course page:

What It Looks like on Your Site

There are also a couple of options as to what this might look like for your site visitors. Please note that the following prototypes are only applicable to courses that are attached to multiple products. If a course is attached to a single product, then a purchase button would be displayed, as is currently the case.

The following prototypes are clickable so that you can step through the three different screens.

Option 1

The first prototype uses radio buttons on the single course page to list the available pricing options. The products listed would be pulled directly from the product names themselves.

Option 2

The second prototype utilizes a single dropdown for selecting a pricing option. Again, the options listed are the names of the products.

We’d love to hear your feedback and which of these options you prefer, both in WP Admin and on your site. Or feel free to offer a new suggestion that we haven’t considered yet. You can add a comment right here on this post.

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Sensei is Now Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses

We’ve just released a new version of Sensei that changes the name of the plugin to Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses.

You may see a strange version number (2.0.1.1.0.0) when prompted to update. This is due to the fact that Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses is a bundle of the free version of Sensei LMS that exists on WordPress.org, and the WooCommerce Paid Courses extension that enables selling courses with WooCommerce.

After updating, you will see Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses listed on the Plugins page:

If you currently have a valid Sensei license for your site, nothing changes with the release of Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses. Your existing plugin will continue to function as before, and you’ll still receive updates and support.

You can read more about why we made this change here.

What’s in this Release?

Here are the highlights of the release:

  • The new minimum required version of PHP is 5.6. If you’re not sure which version of PHP your site is running, you may find the How to Check Your WordPress Site’s PHP Version section of this article helpful. You can also read more about updating PHP on WordPress.org.
  • The new minimum required version of WooCommerce is 3.0.
  • The Access Permissions setting now controls only lesson content, not lesson and course content. Always displaying the content on the single course page is an opportunity to further promote a course and encourage user enrolment.
  • When Sensei is first activated, a pop-up appears asking you to join our mailing list. This pop-up will only appear on sites that have never had Sensei installed before.
  • We added a new Sensei LMS extensions page available from the Sensei LMS > Extensions menu.

You can read more about what else is in this release, including template file changes and deprecations, here and here.

Head over to Dashboard → Updates to update Sensei from within WordPress.

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.