the basics

I’m not the most in-depth knowledgeable with the plugin as I haven’t been fully ingrained with the development as much as others. However, I’ll do the best I can.

Each badge has its own list of requirements to earn it, and each user has these steps tracked, I believe, through user meta. There are functions that will take that user data, compare it to what’s required to earn the badge, and if the requirement is met, the badge is awarded and the achievement is saved in other user meta.

There are ways to have badges only awarded when an admin intends, but most are auto-awarding without user intervention.

Not quite following on the group setup part.

Thank you for your reply! We were into the 4th weekend, so I am just now responding.

Here is the 360,000 foot view:

I have a wordpress site established for users in various school districts.
I also have CMS running for each school district, which has a list of assignments that each teacher is to do in order to earn a badge (over 3 years).
I want to set up a group of badge earners (each district) in such a way that the members of the district can see the earner results. It would be best if I could keep this private to the individual districts.

Here is what I have done so far:

Downloaded and activated BadgeOS. Named and uploaded two badges per the instructions.
Downloaded and activated Stack on and Community (which are add ons to BadgeOS)
Downloaded and activated BuddyPress.
Opened a Credly acct, added a badge and awarded it to two individuals.

Here is where I am stuck:

I don’t really see the 4 plugins working together.
I do see how to award a badge via Credly; but I don’t see that working within wordpress
I don’t get how wordpress (badgeOS) displays the badge(s) at all, and I wonder if it will display the earner’s names and badges upon awarding (or if that just happens in Credly).
Presently, the badge I awarded is shown on an article page, which is not a part of the site; is there supposed to be a link to the badges, a hierarchy defined?

Please let me know if I am not being clear, and I really appreciate your help. Tina

BadgeOS here is the core plugin, and the linchpin for all of the rest. The BadgeStack addon is mostly for some sample content that you can use and build off of, but you don’t need to use it if you don’t want. It will simply create some achievement types for you and whatnot. The Community Addon is much of the same, except it will create some BuddyPress based achievements to go along with BuddyPress specific actions and activities.

Credly interaction is mostly a WordPress -> Credly thing, I do believe. That part may be more for those who already have or want Credly accounts, and want their achievements from your site to be recorded to their Credly account. I don’t believe you can show badges from a Credly account that wasn’t earned through your BadgeOS install.

If you understand posts and pages and the concept there, you’re already most of the way to understanding achievements. All of them are post types. All of the achievements are custom post types that BadgeOS registers for you to use, and then each achievement within the achievement type is a post under that custom-created post type. When displaying a user and their awarded achievements, the core code will query for the user, and grab some user meta data that states which achievements they’ve won, and then query for the data associated with each achievement. That’s how they tie all together for a user and can display name next to etc. To help visualize, when you go to “view achievement” for a single achievement, you’re seeing the equivalent of a single blog post.

Hopefully this clears up some issues, but let me know if I opened up new questions.

Michael,
Again, I appreciate the feedback and it has cleared up some issues.
I have worked on this on and off all day, and made some progress:
I now have a page in my site that displays all the badges in our system.
You can click on one of the badges and land on a ‘page’ is is actually just a slug (I think) which might allow you to submit material to earn a badge.

I also activated the widget (sort of) to allow an individual to see their set of badges [earned].

Here are the problems now:

I think that I should set up individual pages for each of the badges in order that learners can submit easily. However, I can’t seem to land on the correct shortcode to make that happen. I have been over the videos and the shortcode page in BadgeOS at least a dozen times, and am beginning to feel like a slow learner. (btw, if you have any connection with the BadgeOS guys tell them to get their videos updated so a user can stop and back up to replay a portion without having to listen to the WHOLE piece. ugh!!!!!!!)

I have set the widget in place to allow the user of our system to see their set of badges (earned), but somehow you are supposed to be able to connect that to email address and I don’t get how you set that up.
I asked a colleague to try to submit so that he could be approved for a badge, and he said it won’t let him in. The message is “you must be logged in to view earned achievements.

My final goal:

display the set of badges (done)
display per user earned badges
display per campus earned badges –of users on that campus
allow users to submit via site
allow admin to easily approve via site.

Thanks for any help you have.

t

what version are you using?

If you are on version 1.1, it would be worth checking out these two shortcodes to see if they help. Just replace the ID with the ID of the achievement type.

[badgeos_achievement id=12]
[badgeos_submission achievement_id=35]

Not quite following on the part below:
“I have set the widget in place to allow the user of our system to see their set of badges (earned), but somehow you are supposed to be able to connect that to email address and I don’t get how you set that up.”

I just activated the 2 widgets and didn’t see anything about emails, so I’m a bit lost there.

The BadgeOS Earned User Achievements widget is supposed to display the earned ones for the current user, and definitely appears to be on my localhost install.

Regarding the per campus, is this a network/multisite install? I think when network activated, if that’s the case, each sub-site will have its own isolated set, so it wouldn’t be hard to show simply per-school.

Guess I’d need to see your achievement criteria to really answer the submit/admin approve parts. Those should be pretty easy to set up with the achievement data section.

Per the id: where does this # come from? Url is
https://www.connectedconsulting.com/resources/wp-admin/post.php?post=1162&action=edit

Version 1.1.0

the ID would be 1162. When editing posts, check the url and the number you see after post= is the ID for the achievement. This is actually a good thing to know for posts and pages too, if you ever need to find the specific IDs for them as well.

THanks! I used that but didn’t get anything; I mean I am a step further because the top of the page does have the code, but I am not getting the badge and submission form.

https://www.connectedconsulting.com/resources/badges/digital-ready-submission-form/

Kept messing around with the code and got it!
Now the widget issue.

Wait, this does not include the submission/approval piece. I’m going to work on that first.

Didn’t I read somewhere that I can’t stack shortcodes one to the other in this plugin?

Correct, the [badgeos_achievements_list] shortcode doesn’t play the nicest yet. Doesn’t query all quite yet, and trying to use it multiple times for multiple achievement types breaks the js.

Hi Michael,

I have been able to get everything going. When I set each badge on a page, it settled the sign in issue, so that wasn’t a part of the Widget after all.

This is not a network install. I read up on that a little and am wondering if we could even use that scenario to set up each campus privately.

I have found a good informational set of pages and will do my research before I ask further questions. I appreciate your help.

A Network setup wouldn’t be a bad idea if you’re going to be hosting/managing many sites. It’d allow you to upgrade each one in 1 go. I also believe you can have different domains for each one, if needbe. Worth looking into deeper if you still can, best to make sure it meets your needs.