Blocks: Coupon
Rogier van DongenSEBSOFT COUPON PLUGIN
The Sebsoft Coupon Plugin offers you the possibility to create coupons for various levels
of course access. Using a coupon code, users will be enrolled into courses that are attached to the coupon. That way, you can use the coupon system as voucher or vouchering system for your course(s).
There are a few different ways of generating coupons:
- Course level: this means one or more course(s) need to be selected for which the coupon is valid.
Once the coupon code is entered by a user, he or she will be enroled in every course the coupon
is attached to.
A nice extra feature is, when groups are configured for a certain course, you can configure which
course group the coupon is for. When a user claims the coupon, he or she will be added to that specific
group in the course. This makes it possible to separate coupon users from regular users.
You could also make specific course groups every time you generate a batch of new coupons, so there's
some way of matching a batch of coupons to a group of users. The possibilities are numerous.
- Cohort level: this means one or more cohort(s) need to be selected for which the coupon is valid.
Once the coupon code is entered by a user, he or she will be added as a cohort member for every
cohort the coupon is attached to.
NOTE: When generating cohort level coupons, there is a possibility to "connect" extra courses to
a given cohort. One MUST know that upon doing this, the courses will at that point be added to
the cohort enrolment sync. Without knowing this little fact, it could be "unexpected" behavior,
even though it's a logical step.
Furthermore, coupons can be generated on two "access" levels:
- Personalized. The base of this, is either a CSV is uploaded, or a CSV is given directly in a textbox.
The needed user information for every coupon to be generated will be the user's name, email address
and gender.
These coupons will then be generated and sent off to the appropriate users using a background task.
- Bulk: The base of this is simple: you generate a certain amount of access coupons, which will then
be emailed to the pre-configured recipient or (if allowed) to an emailaddress that can be freely entered.
- WARNING:
Wherever possible, please use PNG images.
Also, whenever possible, do NOT use images that have an alpha channel.
This will MASSIVELY slow down processing time, due to internal conversion of images by TCPDF.
On our tests, for a 300 DPI image on A4 format (2480 x 3508 pixels) with an alpha channel,
rendering a single PDF took around 25 seconds. Taking the alpha channel out of the image,
rendering a single PDF was reduced to around 3 seconds.
Furthermore, whenever possible, have the coupon generator create a single PDF with all
coupons (this is only applicable when generating coupons in "bulk" mode). The process of
generating coupons has been optimized to only "use" the image 1 time when creating any amount
of coupons in a single PDF. If you choose the option to create a seperate PDF for every coupon,
the image will have to be rendered for each and every PDF.
This has 2 major downfalls:
1. Every PDF will roughly have a slightly bigger size than the image size (in our tests, 350 - 400 kB per PDF)
2. Every PDF takes the full amount of time to render.
Effectively, this means the following (using fictitious sizes):
10 coupons, single PDF -> result is around 400 kB, rendering takes around 3-4 seconds.
10 coupons, seperate PDFs -> result is around 4 MB, rendering takes around 35-40 seconds.
INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS
- Copy the coupon folder to your blocks directory.
- Go to the moodle admin pages (you will probably be confronted with it anyway) and install the plugin
- Configure the main settings for the plugin.
- We're set up for usage!
PLACEMENT OF THE PLUGIN
There are only two pages you can add the coupon block on. This is the site's frontpage
or the user dashboard (my) page. The main reason for this is because the block is the
"frontend" for users to enter their coupon or voucher code.
Administrators and users with the correct capabilities will also see the links to
the coupon administration pages and the coupon generator page.
GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS
There's two main configurations to consider when generating coupons.
For course type coupons, this plugin attempts to enrol a user through use of Moodle's
internal function "enrol_try_internal_enrol".
The Moodle documentation shows it will attempt to enrol you using manual enrolment.
For this reason manual enrolment MUST be enabled for these courses.
For cohort type coupons, a user is made a member of a cohort. That's all there is to it.
Surprise though, if you want to actually make a user have access to a course, you
probably want to configure cohort enrolment for the course.
For those paying attention, creating cohort type coupons thus enables a simple
way of enrolling users into multiple courses at once just by configuring the right
cohort enrolments in multiple courses.
That's still not to say course coupons can't be used in a similar way (using meta courses).
Useful links
Screenshots
If you're familiar with adjusting the language packages from within Moodle you can do it from there. For the time being this is basically the only way to do this. If you run into any issues with this please send me a message through the messaging system.
Cheers,
Rogier
first of all thank you for such great plugin. i would like to ask how to extend the functionality of this plugin and integrate it with paypal . i want to link it to PayPal listening page where upon receiving PayPal IPN the plugin generate only one code upon the purchased course and duration and email it to the payer email address ( PayPal sends the payer email and course purchased and many other information in the PayPal IPN)
in this way the scenario will be like that : the participant will click on paypal button on the course page or activity which redirect him to paypal checkout page .
on completion of purchase and payment the paypal redirect the payer to payment confirmation page where a script is there to generate a single coupon by the plugin it (using the variables from paypal IPN) and send that coupon code to the payer email with other instruction
any help in this regard
I've send you a private message...
I generate coupons and sell it to a student. the student opens the app. He receives the welcome message, and a bold field Load Coupon. student clicks on load coupon next page will ask for username, student types username and click continue, the app communicates with the moodle website and fetch the users name and school. if the user details is correct, the user click continue, the next field ask the user to load coupon, he will enter the coupon code he bought and click submitt. The app communicates with the moodle site and enroll the user to the courses associated with the coupon. next page is confirmation page. it will tell the user, submission is successful, then list the courses activated and enrollment duration with expiry date.
I dont know how you will do it, but i should have a backend where i can generate coupons just like in moodle. that page should give me statistics of the number of coupon generated, the number of coupon used, number of unused coupons. Also i should be able to view the coupon used by a specific student. in case there is an error or a duplicate coupon, i should be able to fetch the student that used a particular coupon. Also when a students enrollment expire, i want the system to remove him from the course so that he can buy a new coupon. sebisoft coupon uses enrollment extension, but i dont want that feature. unroll a student when enrollment expires, so that he can use a new coupon to enroll
if you can integrate sms notifications, i will be very happy. if you can do it send me a an email at adminng@bsacademy.us because my moodle messages dont open. I Have sent a message to sebisoft on their website but no reply.Thank you. If you need further details, please let me know
@Ob: We've send you an e-mail on all adresses we have.
@Stephane; Moving blocks inside the template is not supported at this time, it's buildable, but would require customisation.
@Harold: One code good for 200 uses? - I don't think that's currently a feature. It is a feature for the ClassicPay plugin, but not for Coupon at this time. I don't know if a discount coupon with 100% discount in the enrolment methods ClassicPay would solve your issue, as no actual payment is required for that. Will that work for your case?
Moodle Version: 3.6
I received the following error:
Error/block coupon/error:unable to enrol
This page does not exist yet. You can search for this page title in other pages, or let us know by posting about it in one of the Moodle community forums.
Can you confirm for us that, for the course(s) you've generated the coupons for, a manual enrolment instance is actually available, enabled and correctly configured?
This is the most common mistake that seems to be made when making use of this plugin.
Thanks in advance.
If one is using the workaround for adding a coupon field for signing up to Moodle, this signup page is or can't be styled in the layout of the used theme. When one wants to have a styled page you have to hack the file signup.php and add some div's and classes. Is it possible for future development to build in an option to style the signup page?
Thx.