Tag: woocommerce paid courses

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Sensei LMS 2.2.1 & WooCommerce Paid Courses 1.2.0 Beta Releases

Sensei LMS

The next release of Sensei LMS 2.2.1 is now ready for testing! This release includes some performance enhancements and bug fixes:

See what else is in this release.

Deprecated Methods

  • Sensei_Course::flush_rewrite_rules has been deprecated with no replacement
  • Sensei_Lesson::flush_rewrite_rules has been deprecated with no replacement

Testing Sensei LMS

You can download the Sensei LMS 2.2.1 beta here. If you find a bug, please submit an issue on Github or leave a comment here. Our tentative release date for Sensei LMS 2.2.1 is October 23rd.

WooCommerce Paid Courses

The next release of WooCommerce Paid Courses focuses on closing some gaps in the integration with WooCommerce Memberships.

Here are some of the improvements you’ll find in 1.2.0:

  • Courses purchased via a membership will now be included in the confirmation notice that a user sees after purchase:
  • Additionally, the order confirmation email will list any courses that were purchased as part of a membership.
  • When the status of an order containing a membership is manually changed to Processing or Completed, the purchaser is automatically enrolled in any courses tied to that membership. Similarly, cancelling or refunding an order containing a membership removes the purchaser from any courses tied to that membership.
  • To protect against undesirable behaviour that can occur when a course is sold standalone AND as part of a membership that uses the same product, a warning will now appear on the Edit Course and Edit Membership Plan pages so that corrective action can be taken:
  • The Course Component widget, as well as the Paid and Free filters that may appear on the course archive page, have been updated to include course memberships.

New Filters

  • sensei_wc_paid_courses_get_product_courses – Filter the array of courses attached to the given products.
  • sensei_wc_paid_courses_memberships_block_editor_l10n_data – Filter the localization data for the block editor script.

Testing WooCommerce Paid Courses

Beta testers will receive the WooCommerce Paid Courses beta directly to their inbox. If you would like to sign up to be a beta tester and have a valid license, please fill out the beta tester signup form using the same email address you used to purchase your license.

If you find a bug, please leave a comment here. Our tentative release date for WooCommerce Paid Courses 1.2.0 is October 23rd.

As these are beta releases, please test them 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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Sell Online Courses Any Way You Choose

We’ve just released new versions of Sensei LMS and Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses.

(As a reminder, Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses is a bundle of Sensei LMS and WooCommerce Paid Courses.)

Sensei with WooCommerce Paid Courses

We heard from the community that being able to attach only a single WooCommerce product to a course limits the ways in which you are able to sell your courses.

That’s why we’ve added the ability to attach multiple WooCommerce products to a course.

Here’s how it works.

Sensei LMS Sidebar

For sites running WordPress 5.0+ and WooCommerce 3.6+, a Sensei LMS icon appears in the top right of the screen when adding or editing a course. Clicking the icon opens the sidebar. From here, you can select one or more products to attach to the course:

Sensei LMS sidebar

Products Metabox

Sites running older versions of WordPress or WooCommerce, or that have the Classic Editor plugin activated, will be able to select multiple products from the Products metabox:

Products metabox

Course Archive

On the course archive page, the products and their pricing details are displayed:

Course archive page on the OceanWP theme

Single Course

On the single course page, product cards are displayed to highlight the available purchase options:

Screen shot of product cards on the single course page
Purchase options on the single course page using the OceanWP theme

If a course is only attached to one product, then a single purchase button is displayed.

You can find out more about this release by reading the beta release post or by visiting the change log.

Sensei LMS

To learn about what’s in the Sensei LMS 2.2 release, please see the beta release post.

Head over to Dashboard → Updates to update from within WordPress now!

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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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 would like to sign up to be a beta tester and have a valid license, please fill out the beta tester signup form.

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!