Allow student to register after guidance counselor approval?

Hi,

As far as I understood this question, you’ll need an enhancement from the developer.

One of the ways to accomplish this is to:
– Disable payment/registration for the courses where the “guidance counselor approval” options is set.
– If a course is approved by a counselor for a particular student, allow to register.
– You will also need a back-end page where you’ll be able to approve courses for various students.

To check whether the student is allowed to take a course (statement #1 from above), it should be possible to use the:

“ib_educator_access_status” filter hook and/or
“ib_educator_before_payment” action hook

If the “ib_educator_access_status” filter returns “forbidden”, a student shouldn’t be able to register/pay.

Filter reference:

/**
* Filters the value returned by the IB_Educator::get_access_status method.
*
* @param string $status Access status that was computed by the plugin.
* @param int $course_id
* @param int $user_id
*/
return apply_filters( ‘ib_educator_access_status’, $status, $course_id, $user_id );

/**
* Fired right before the submitted course payment/registration form is processed.
*/
do_action( ‘ib_educator_before_payment’ );

Thanks for the detailed reply. I will have to review the hooks and filter. I’m more familiar with Drupal’s approach to PHP.

So regarding the back-end page to approve courses, I would imagine it as a list of student names, where each name is a link to a list of selected courses. And each selected courses would have an ‘approve’ checkbox next to it.

Is this the approach that a WP developer would take?
Would I need to know of other hooks to bring this all together?

Thanks again!

I think you can either have that page display all course requests that need approval (e.g., course name – student name) or there can be 2 pages to manage this feature (students list page and the student’s courses page).

I can’t say if you will need more hooks while developing this. If you will have some questions you can post them here.

I’m not yet sure how to go about having the page display all courses requested needing approval. Any suggestions how to go about that would be helpful. Perhaps I can duplicate the page for my-courses. And break it up into sections:
approval pending,
approval granted
approval denied

It seems that there is a step ‘missing’. In the current workflow, the registration link is actually the payment page. It would make more sense to me if there were an actual registration page before payment. I could then perhaps take advantage of that to save requested courses before it hits the payment page.

I’m considering adding a new flag (approval_required) to the entry.
It will be below prerequisites.

The additional statuses mentioned above would be available once approvalj_required is checked. I don’t know if these should be added to the ‘status’ field in the side column, or if an additional field should be created in the side column.

I’ve added a checkbox to the course page: ‘approval required’.
Based on this I’ve added a property to entry: ‘approval status’, which has three potential values: pending (default), granted, denied.

I’ve figured out which table needs to be updated to add this entry property, however it’s not yet clear to me which table to update for the checkbox in the course, which is essentially a wp_post of type ib_educator_course.

I’m having troubling with recoding the workflow. I would like to the ‘register’ link to actually go to a registration page and not a payment page. I would also like to be able to instantiate an entry before having to pay for the course.

The entry would have an approval_status of ‘pending’. Once the courses requested are reviewed the school director or a faculty member would edit that course changing the approval status to either ‘granted’ or ‘denied. Once granted the user would be allowed to move to the payment page.

Any suggestions in achieving this workflow would be greatly appreciated.

Previously educatorteam said

If the “ib_educator_access_status” filter returns “forbidden”, a student shouldn’t be able to register/pay.

I could set ib_educator_access_status = ‘forbidden’ if approval status does not equal ‘granted’.
However I still need to be able to create an entry that holds the approval status.

Previously educatorteam said:

/**
* Fired right before the submitted course payment/registration form is processed.
*/
do_action( ‘ib_educator_before_payment’ );

I’m not sure how to use this flag or action. The value appears to be removed from the array, $wp_filter.

is this simply marking a point in the process or workflow,which is removed from the array when arrived at?

So once I’ve arrived at this point, can I then check for the value of approval_status and then some how create an entry and perhaps present a registration page in stead of a payment page?

I seemed to have successfully added the boolean for ‘approval required’ and the field with the values of ‘pending’, ‘granted’, ‘denied’.

Next I would like to add a registration page before the payment page. I thought that duplication the payment code with ‘new’ registration would allow me to have registration page. No luck. For some reason the field I added in the general page to select a page for registration is being saved. So, I’m missing something. I just dont’ know what.

I can’t seem to get the registration page saved to the ‘ib_educator_settings’ options on the wp_options table.

Hi. Sorry for replying after 2 weeks. I didn’t receive the follow-up emails on this topic. As far as I understood:

You would like to approve a course for a potential student before he/she makes a payment? There could be a way to do something similar by creating a custom payment method, but only if you don’t plan to access payments via PayPal or Stripe.

I think the user could be redirected to a registration page instead of the payment page via an action hook, will need to check that. If you would like to go this way:

You need to somehow associate a selected course with the user’s registration. This can be done by either creating a custom post type for “approvals” (probably easiest) or creating a custom database table. If you decide to use a post type, WordPress should provide a basic UI for it (e.g., view approvals, edit approval, etc). Then a custom field (e.g., “approve” checkbox) can be added to this post type to allow admin to approve the course for a student. The post type should be private, and you should setup the proper permissions to it (e.g., only Administrator can view, edit, delete, etc, a post of this type).

With this example scenario:
1) Student, being new to the website, finds a course
2) Student clicks register and gets redirected to the registration page
3) The course ID should somehow be passed to this page to make it possible to create a post of type “approval” and assign this course ID and new student’s user ID to this post.
4) The admin, then, should be able to view all posts of type “approval”. Editing the post, admin should find out the course ID and user ID, and check if the student is eligible to take the course.
5) If eligible, check the custom “approve” checkbox and “Update” the post.
6) You would need to hook into the WP’s save post action to process the approval (e.g., emailing the link to the course registration to a student).

This is only a theoretic example of how similar feature could be implemented. Of course, there are some additional steps.

Of course there are also other ways such feature can be implemented.