Monthly Archives: February 2014

WatuPRO 4.2: User Info Shortcodes, Woocommerce Bridge, Compact Format, and more

The next major release is up, here are the changes and improvements from version 4.1 to version 4.2:

  1. Rounding the points to the closest decimal is now possible on questions. This comes to solve problems when you have for example 3 correct answers on a question and want the total to make 1 point.
  2. Option to restrict number of quiz submissions by IP address. This works both for logged in and not logged in users and will take effect before the user-based restriction.
  3. “Compact format” option is available on most question types. Answers will be aligned horizontally, right from the question, instead of vertically under it.
  4. The free PDF-Bridge plugin can be used to generate PDF certificates instead of DocRaptor. It still has some limitations.
  5. You can now use rich text editor to easily add images and media to the answers of each question.
  6. “Reuse questions from” now allows you to select multiple quizzes at the same time (Intelligence module
  7. You can request a non-logged in user to enter name and email before the quiz starts (or before it’s submitted). Learn how.
  8. User profile shortcodes. More information here.
  9. Different email content to user and admin can be specified by using the {{{split}}} tag.
  10. Calculate grade by % correct answers is moved to the basic WatuPRO version
  11. A free Woocommerce bridge is available which lets you sell access to paid quizzes through Woocommerce (WatuPRO Intelligence module required)
  12. Advanced settings option to reveal the correct answers on wrongly answered “Fill the gaps” fields (Intelligence module)
  13. Advanced settings option to specify the exact order of categories when questions are grouped by category (Intelligence module)
  14. Advanced setting option: require confirmation when the submit button is pressed (to avoid accident submitting of the quiz) (Intelligence module)
  15. Exams that require payment can be purchased with points earned from other exams. This is of course an option that you can enable. You can specify how many points make 1 unit of your currency. (Intelligence module and Play plugin required)
  16. Improved the proficiency calculation by category on Skills/Categories page (Reporting module)
  17. A new pie chart showing the results distribution by grade (Reporting module)
  18. The History tab of the reporting module now shows also the quiz that was taken
  19. Bug fix: “Schedule from/to” finally considers your timezone settings
  20. Fixed bug with incorrectly calculating “max-points” on “Fill the gaps” questions

Eligible customers have received their upgrade. If your upgrades/support package has expired you can renew, upgrade, or downgrade with 60% discount using the promo code sent to your email.

WatuPRO Bridge for WooCommerce

This is a free plugin that allows you to sell access to premium quizzes through Woocommerce. You need also WatuPRO and the Intelligence module.

Download the free bridge here (v 1.9.1, 14 KB)

See also our bridge for EDD.

Once downloaded, install and activate it. Then here is how to use it:

  1. Create some paid quiz(zes)
  2. Add them as WooCommerce products (details below)
  3. Set up redirect after payment, if you wish
  4. Control the behavior of the quiz page if visited directly before payment (details below)

First, you need to create paid quizzes in WatuPRO (with the Intelligence module) just like you would do normally. Then just add the quizzes as products in Woocommerce.

How to add your quizzes as products in WooCommerce

The video below is enough to get you selling quizzes. You may still want to read the full guide to know how to sell certificates, quiz bundles, and so on.

From version 6.4.7.5 of WatuPRO you can skip adding the parameters manually. On Edit Quiz -> Intelligence module tab, once you set a price for the quiz you will see a drop-down selector of all products that are both downloadable and virtual. Selecting a product will automatically create the proper attributes:

In this case you can skip the section below, the section “Redirecting to the quiz”, and the section “Payment Settings in WatuPRO”.

 

Read this the rest of this section only if you don’t use the simpler method described in the yellow box above.

Name them any way you want, give any price you want. Mark them downloadable and virtual products so WooCommerce will automatically mark orders completed on payment (this is fairly important!). The price given in WooCommerce does NOT need to match the price given in WatuPRO. The only important thing is to create a custom attribute with name “watupro” and value containing the ID of the quiz you want to sell:

wwbridge-productNote! Do not create these attributes as custom attribute type from the separate WooCommerce Attributes menu. It needs to be done like on the image above -just enter “watupro” in the small box and the ID in the big box. The drop-down at right should be saying “Custom product attribute”.

How do you know the quiz ID? Simple, it’s the number in the quiz shortcode:

wwbridge-quiz-id

That’s all, you can start selling access to quizzes. You can add coupons, bundles, and so on -anything that you would do with your WooCommerce products.

When the payment of order is completed, the access to any associate WatuPRO quizzes will get activated. If the user is not logged in and does not exist, an user account will be created on the fly.

The access to the quiz will not be granted until the payment is COMPLETED in WooCommerce. If you see the orders in your WooCommerce admin and their status is different than “completed” this is most likely because you have missed to mark the product “Downloadable” AND “Virtual”.

Redirect to the Quiz

Read this section only if you don’t use the simpler method described in the yellow box above.

From version 0.8 the bridge supports automated redirecting after the order is paid. Just add another custom attribute to the same product. The attribute must have name watupro-redirect and value the URL of the quiz. You can also use any other URL if for some reason you want to redirect elsewhere.

If the user purchase multiple quizzes in one shopping cart they will be redirected to the first purchased product which has the “watupro-redirect” attribute.

Selling Quiz Bundles

From version 0.9 the bridge also allows selling quiz bundles (note: bundles are available for users of the WatuPRO Intelligence module). The process of setting up a bundle is exactly the same as of a quiz, but the attribute name should be watupro-bundle instead of just “watupro”. The IDs of the bundles are visible on the Manage Bundles page.

Payment Settings in WatuPRO

Read this section only if you don’t use the simpler method described in the yellow box above.

From version 1.2 this bridge allows you to control how the quiz page behaves if visited by the user before the quiz is paid for. You can either redirect automatically to the WooCommerce product page or display a text with link so the user goes there themselves.

To access the settings go to WooCommerce Bridge link under your WatuPRO menu:

IMPORTANT: If you choose the second option and WooCommerce is the only payment option you use, you’ll need to put at least something in the “Other payment instructions” box in the WatuPRO Settings page. Enter some generic instruction or even just an icon or image, otherwise WatuPRO will display “no payment methods set up” error.

Here’s an example of what the content from the above image and “…” on the “Other payment instructions” box produces:

Note that WatuPRO Coupon codes will not work in WooCommerce and vice-versus.

Allow Dashboard Access

Since a while WooCommerce started hiding the WP dashboard from users. This may be OK for some customers who use the shortcodes to put “My Quizzes” etc. pages on the front-end, but not for all. If you still want to allow your students to access the standard WP dashboard, you can do it from the “WooCommerce Bridge” link under the WatuPRO menu:

 

Charging for Certificates

From version 1.3 you can also handle certificate payments through WooCommerce. The principle is very similar but the product attribute you need to use is “watupro-certificate”. For value enter the certificate ID (not the quiz ID):

Do not use the watupro-redirect attribute with certificates. Because certificate links are dynamic, the user will automatically be redirected to view the certificate after payment (unless they have many products in the shopping cart in which case they may be redirected elsewhere or stay on the success page).

When a certificate requires payment and is not yet paid for, and there is associated WooCommerce product, the “view/print certificate” link will automatically redirect the visitor to the WooCommerce product page.

Troubleshooting

In case user does not gain access to the quiz after paying, check the following:

  1. Your WooCommerce product must be marked as Virtual AND Downloadable.
  2. The custom attribute must have name “watupro” (all small letters) and its value must be the ID of the quiz you are selling. Double check you have entered the correct ID.
  3. Check the order status of the WooCommerce order. It must be Completed. Any other order status will not mark the quiz as paid.
  4. Make sure the page with the quiz is not cached by a caching pluigin. A cached page may always show payment buttons instead of dynamically changing its behavior.

Changelog Version 1.0

We have updated the plugin to work with Woocommerce 2.6.11. The older versions of the bridge will not work when “watupro-redirect” is used!

Changelog Version 1.1

The plugin provides “allow dashboard access” option explained above.

Changelog Version 1.3

Added support for paid certificates. Quiz and certificate pages will automatically redirect to the WooCommerce product for payment when such is available.

Using The Free PDF Bridge Plugin in WatuPRO and Namaste! LMS

From version 4.1.8, in addition to DocRaptor, WatuPRO supports free PDF generation via the PDF Bridge plugin. It uses the MPDF library and is capable to parse rather complicated designs and texts different languages.

(Now also available for Namaste! LMS)

Download The PDF Bridge Here (version 2.0.1, 47 MB – for PHP 8+)

Download The New PDF Bridge Here (version 1.9, 8 MB – for PHP 7.3+)

Older PHP version users can still use version 1.4.3. See also the note about fonts at the bottom of this page.

If you have problems with broken fonts in the PDF see below.

Note: this file is big and uploading through your WP Admin -> Plugins page may not work. In such case you need to upload the unzipped folder by FTP or upload the zip from your hosting control panel account.

Install the plugin and activate it. Then in your Certificates page, under the certificates you’ll see options to generate PDFs either through DocRaptor or the free plugin. That’s all you need to set up.

From PDF Bridge version 0.4 and WatuPRO version 4.6.2.1 and above you can also set up page size and orientation in the Add / Edit Certificate page:

pdf-settings

From version 1.0 the bridge also supports placing a background image.

In Namaste! LMS these options will appear if you have installed PDF Bridge version 0.7 or newer.

Troubleshooting

  1. Images do not appear in certificates or you are getting an Image not found error. Almost always this is a problem with DNS configuration on your server: it does not resolve correctly to localhost. You have two options:
    a) Upload your image on a different domain and link to it.
    b) Contact your hosting support or server admin to fix the DNS misconfiguration. More information about this can be found here.It’s also possible that there is a permissions issue with your server configuration: many webmasters or server admins make wp-content folder not accessible for scripts and MPDF can’t fetch the images from it. In such cases you should either remove the limitation (usually from your .htaccess file) or copy the images to the root of your site and change the paths in the certificate.
    From your main Settings page, PDF Bridge menu link you can switch off and on showing image errors.
  2. Other design issues. MPDF library is capable to convert most properly written HTML code into PDF but there is no guarantee that every possible design will be converted. If you experience problems you need to check the MPDF documentation or try different approaches in your HTML code. We are not the authors of MPDF and can’t provide assistance with such issues.
  3. Blank page / server errors. Note that MPDF requires the PHP mbstring extension to be enabled. Not having mbstring is the most common reason for errors. If your case is different you must obtain information about the exact error caused from the server error log or from errors shown on the screen.

Regarding fonts:

To keep the bridge size reasonable we are using a stripped version of the MPDF library including only the essential fonts. If you need all fonts (for example for Chinese, Japanese languages, etc) you have two options:

  • To use version 1.4.3
  • To manually download the fonts from this page and upload them in folder pdf-bridge/lib/vendor/mpdf/mpdf/ttfonts. You also need to open /pdf-bridge/lib/vendor/mpdf/mpdf/src/Config/ConfigVariables.php file and change:
    a) ‘autoScriptToLang’ => false to true on line 96
    b) ‘autoLangToFont’ => false to true on line 101

Printing the Final Screen in WatuPRO

When you have the bridge installed and activated you can allow quiz takers to print the final screen of their quizzes. This can be configured with the following option on the Edit Quiz page -> Quiz Output tab:

Older PDF Bridge

The PDF Bridge version 0.2 uses the html2fpdf library and is much smaller – only 121 KB.

Note that it has some limitations:

  • Currently it does not support non-English characters
  • It won’t render well certificates with complicated design.

Download OLD PDF-Bridge Here (121 KB)