New Shortcodes to Enhance Your Courses!

By: Justin Ferriman • December 18, 2013
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LearnDash UpdatesThe end of 2013 is right around the corner, but before it comes to a close, we wanted to get one more final LearnDash update into your hands!

Before jumping into the details, I want to personally thank you all for partnering with LearnDash for your WordPress LMS sites.

Your continued support, suggestions, and general dedication to our mission has given us tremendous motivation to serve you and to improve LearnDash. We certainly could not do it without you!

Now, onto the final round of updates!

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New Course Shortcodes!

These particular updates are the direct result of the feedback we have received in our support forum from all of you. We think that you will enjoy the added flexibility. After you update, you will find these shortcodes listed on the “Options for Courses” menu.

Visitor & Student Messages

Check out the following video to see an example of these shortcodes in action:

What are the Shortcodes?

[visitor] and [/visitor]

and

[student] and [/student]

What Do They Do?

With these shortcodes, you can now display a unique message on your Course page to those who have not yet enrolled, and an entirely different message for users who have enrolled into the course.

This is great if you plan to sell courses using LearnDash!

For example, you can include a sales message or video on the Course page, enticing users to sign-up or purchase. To do this, all you have to do is put the desired text or media between the shortcodes “[visitor]” and “[/visitor]”.

Now, when someone comes to view your course, only the content between these two shortcodes will be displayed.

After the visitor purchases or enrolls in the course, you can change the Course page content to something else. To display a specific message to an enrolled user, just put it between the shortcodes “[student]” and “[/student]”.

Special Thank You

We owe LearnDash customer Troy Dean a huge thank-you for this one.

He was doing some custom development on his own LMS and submitted the code back into the forum. We liked it so much that we have leveraged it to make this new feature for all of you!

For those of you who don’t know Troy, he is the brains behind WPElevation – the world’s first business accelerator program designed specifically for WordPress consultants.

They help WordPress consultants attract better clients, better projects and better fees through training, coaching and community – some pretty great stuff!

Course Purchase Button

There have been quite a few requests for this one, and since we were in the shortcode frame of mind, we decided to roll it out in this update. If you are looking for some more flexibility with the way people purchase or join your courses, you’ll like this.

What is the Shortcode?

[learndash_payment_buttons course_id="###"]

(replace “#” with the actual Course ID number)

What Does it Do?

If you are selling your courses using the built-in PayPal or 2Checkout options in LearnDash, you can now place the purchase button for your course anywhere on your site using this shortcode.

This is perfect solution if you want to create a custom purchase page.

All you need to do is insert the course number into the shortcode, and wherever you insert it the PayPal button (or 2Checkout option if you are using that integration) will appear. If the course is free, then the JOIN button will appear instead.

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File Restructuring

In addition to the new shortcodes, we took some time to begin restructuring the layout of the plugin so that it is more user friendly from a developer standpoint.

What Does this Change?

If you are using LearnDash “out-of-the-box” so to speak, there is a good chance you will not notice anything different. The updates make it easier for developers to template LearnDash.

If you are using LearnDash in a language other than English, this restructuring may require you to re-translate a few of the items. We provide instructions for how to do this on our support site.

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What’s Next?

A lot has happened in this past year, and it has been fun to work with you to mold LearnDash into what it is today. Thank you for your continued involvement in its growth!

But with every ending comes new beginnings, and we have some really exciting things in the works for 2014, some items we believe will really shake-up the entire elearning on WordPress industry.

Thank you all again, and have a safe holiday!

Justin Ferriman

Justin started LearnDash, the WordPress LMS trusted by Fortune 500 companies, major universities, training organizations, and entrepreneurs worldwide. He is currently founder & CEO of GapScout. Justin’s Homepage | GapScout | Twitter