Certificate 1.1: A Better Designer & Award System

Version 1.1 of PressPrimer Certificate is now available on WordPress.org!

While it’s only been two weeks since we launched the plugin, we’ve had some great early feedback and we wanted to tackle some important improvements as quickly as possible. Despite the short time in between releases, it’s by no means a small update, and the new features make certificates significantly easier to design and issue.

Here’s what’s new.

One certificate for any course or quiz

We heard from a few users that they really wanted a way to have individual templates be awarded for multiple sources, like having one certificate template they could use across all of their courses. We listened, and now every trigger’s source picker has an “any” option at the top of the list. For PressPrimer Quiz, for example, now you can award the certificate for any quiz. For PressPrimer Assignment, it’s any assignment.

Merge fields are populated based on whichever course, quiz, or other object actually fired the trigger. We kept it simple. The “any” option lives in the lowest level of the picker only, so if it has parents, you still have to choose the parents. That means that if you want lesson completion to award the certificate, you can have it run for any lesson, but you have to choose the course that includes the lesson.

Certificate display names

One of the reasons we didn’t add support for “any” triggers in 1.0 was because of uncertainty around how users would be able to tell certificates apart. If someone completed multiple certificates that shared the same template name, there was no way to tell them apart from one another.

There’s an easy solution in PressPrimer Certificate 1.1: a new Certificate display name field. It’s on the Award tab and it accepts merge fields, so now students can see certificate names that actually mean something to them. If a template is set up to award a certificate for “any” course completion, perhaps you set the display name to include the name of the course that triggered it as a merge field.

Here’s what it looks like; the Insert merge field button makes it easy to create any type of dynamic name for your certificates. (And if you leave the field blank, it just uses the certificate template name, so the behavior is the same as how things worked previously in 1.0.)

Merge fields inside text

This is another request that came from a support ticket, and it revealed an important gap in 1.0. If you wanted to center content on a certificate, how could you do that if you wanted a label and a dynamic value? The length of the merge field output couldn’t be known, and since they were two objects, there was simply no way to center them properly.

With today’s update, text elements now allow you to add any merge field you want right into the field. Suppose you want to show an expiry date on a certificate, so you want an “Expiry Date: ” label first, then the actual expiry date. Now both can be in the same element so you have full control over the layout, like this:

The dedicated merge field element isn’t going anywhere. It’s still the right choice when a value needs its own styling and controls. The new option helps when a label and a value belong together.

Better layout tools

While working on a solution for the label plus merge field problem above, it became apparent that we needed better alignment tools and guides. Here are some incredibly powerful additions in this release:

• Guides for left-right elements. What if you wanted one element on one side of the page and another on the opposite side, and you wanted each an equal distance from the side of the page? The designer now includes matching-margin guides, so while you drag, if the system detects an element on the opposite side that you might be trying to match, a teal guide appears to match the opposite element.
• Align and distribute grouped elements. If you select multiple elements in the canvas, you’ll see a new toolbar to help you align or distribute the elements easily. There’s a new Aligning and Spacing Elements article in the Knowledge Base that covers all of it.

Click to verify

The QR code on a certificate has always linked to its verification page, but how do you use it if the PDF file is opened on a computer? To address that, the QR code and credential ID merge field are now clickable in the rendered PDF, and both link to the verification page. Now it’s a lot easier to work with and verify digital-only copies of certificates.

Dynamic email subjects

The new support for “any” triggers opened up some related issues, one of which was certificate naming (covered above) and another was how to handle emails that might be linked to a variety of objects. Version 1.1 now allows merge fields to be used in subject lines, so you can add values like the name of the course, the ID, or anything else that might be useful.

Updating

If you’re already running PressPrimer Certificate, update through your WordPress dashboard. Nothing changes for existing certificates and the new functionality will be instantly available to you.

If you haven’t tried PressPrimer Certificate yet, download it for free on WordPress.org. Documentation for everything above is in the Knowledge Base.

Let us know how you’re enjoying PressPrimer Certificate so far in the comments!