for WordPress
by Peter "Emanáku" Kursawe
August 2017
Gives a (crude) possibility to reorder pages (also called section units) in CoursePress Pro (by WPMU DEV) without copy&paste of modules.
WARNING: This is tentative software! USE IT AT YOUR OWN RISK!
If you do not use CoursePress Pro by WPMU DEV, then this plugin is of no use for you and will not work.
Install the plugin by copying the folder ema-cp-reorder-pages to the plugin folder of your WordPress installation.
Go the the Plugins-page in your WordPress admin area and activate the plugin. There are no preferences.
Now you have a new button "Reorder Pages" showing on the admin unit screen of a course (more or less) at the left of the tabs of pages. Press the button to reorder these pages of of the active unit.
The button "Reorder Pages" brings up a modal window where you can reorder your pages by drag and drop. When you are happy with the new order press "Reorder!" in the upper right corner of the modal window.
Depending on the number and size of your pages (number of modules) it can take a couple of seconds. Afterwards your pages are reordered.
Screenshots see here: https://premium.wpmudev.org/forums/topic/coursepress-plugin-for-reordering-pages
CAVEATS:
-
You need WPMU DEVs CoursePress Pro 2.0 (testet up to 2.1.0.1) - otherwise your database very likely will be messed up.
-
You should NOT reorder pages of courses that have been worked on by students. Their history will get messed up by reordering pages!
-
Before reordering pages you have to save your units, otherwise your changes are lost
-
If in a future release the development team of CoursePress Pro changes the data structure of courses, units, pages and modules in the database, then this plugin will no longer work.
-
This plugin works in two phases:
in phase (1) it checks if it can change the page order by traversing all affected data. If there is a problem, it will print hints about the problem, but not make any changes. If there are no problems, then
in phase (2) the plugin will execute the necessary changes and reload the units page of the course. Now the pages should be reordered. This plugin changes your CoursePress Pro database - there is no "undo"!
-
under some circumstances while moving the boxes of the pages in the modal window, the background can move, too. Boxes might disappear, but appear again, when you release the mouse.
-
The plugin is tested on Safari, Firefox and Chrome on Mac. With Safari the modal window sometimes jumps to the left, when you press "Reorder!". Just click the button once more, and it will work.
-
If your database was in a doubtful state because of.... any reason .... the results can be erratic. Unfortunately there is no easy solution for this problem....
Very likely I am not able to provide reliable support for this plugin.
Nevertheless you can post your problems in this thread in the WPMU DEV member forum:
https://premium.wpmudev.org/forums/topic/coursepress-plugin-for-reordering-pages
I will do, what I can....
This plugin uses a JavaScript package called "Slip" for the reordering of the pages. See https://kornel.ski/slip/ and the README file in the slip folder.
Since at least 2014 more and more users of CoursePress want the possibility of reordering pages in a course unit, because otherwise (each single details of) the modules have to be copied by hand. More about this feature request here: https://premium.wpmudev.org/forums/topic/coursepress-feature-request-reorder-pages-within-units
When I started to look into this problem I realized quickly, that I should not attack it on the level of the UI (and the JavaScript data structures) - because, if this would be easily possible, the development team would have been successful with this already.
So I decided, I want to work only on the database level. After doing some reverse engineering, it turned out, that the data structure of courses / units / pages and modules was kind of messed up: it looked like the concept of pages was added later (or maybe sth else was the reason - we all know how these things develop). The state of the data structure was, that there are posts representing a course, a unit and single modules, but there is no post representing a page. Moreover combinations of unit numbers, page numbers and module numbers are used as keys in different kinds of settings.
I am using the plugin in my daily work with courses.
But I cannot guarantee that it will work under all circumstances with all possible variants of courses.
Thank you for trying!
Emanáku.