Send a certificate

The LearnDash Send a certificate action emails a LearnDash certificate to a user as an attachment, for almost anything a recipe can detect: completing a lesson or topic, finishing a combination of courses, attending a live event, making a purchase. This article covers preparing the certificate in LearnDash and setting up the action. It requires Uncanny Automator Pro and LearnDash.

Prepare the certificate in LearnDash

Create the certificate in LearnDash before you add the action, because the action’s Certificate list is filled from your LearnDash certificates.

• Use a regular LearnDash certificate. The action does not use the layout of certificates made with the LearnDash Certificate Builder plugin: with a builder certificate it still sends a PDF, but the PDF holds only the certificate’s text, without the builder’s background image or layout.
• On the certificate’s edit page, add only the background, as the featured image. Write the text that goes on top of it in the action, as described below.
• A certificate sent by this action is not tied to a course or quiz, so the [[courseinfo]] and [[quizinfo]] shortcodes have nothing to show. Certificates that contain either shortcode are left out of the action’s Certificate list.

Add the action to a recipe

1. Open the recipe at Automator > Recipes, or create one from Automator > Add new recipe, and add its trigger, for example A user completes a lesson; see Creating a recipe.
2. Click the + at the end of the flow. In the picker, search for LearnDash, select it, then select Send a certificate.
3. In the Set up step, choose the Certificate. When the site has only one published certificate, it is already selected. If you added a certificate in LearnDash after opening the action, click Refresh options to reload the list.
4. Choose the Certificate orientation. It starts at Landscape; select Portrait if your background is upright.
5. Fill in the email the certificate is attached to: From (it holds the Admin email token until you change it), From name, To, Subject, and Email body, plus Reply to, CC, and BCC if you need them. Select CC the user’s Group Leaders to copy the user’s LearnDash group leaders. To send the certificate to the user who triggered the recipe, click the ∗ button at the end of To and insert the User email token. Separate several addresses in To with commas.

6. In Certificate body, write the text to print on the certificate’s background: the user’s name, the course or event, the date. Use tokens for that data, not shortcodes: a recipe replaces tokens, and shortcodes are not rendered here. As the hint under the field says, leave it blank to use the certificate’s own content instead.
7. To style the certificate text, switch Add custom CSS for certificate from No to on and enter your rules in Certificate CSS.

8. Click Save. Unlike Emails > Send an email, whose Test step can send a test email, this action has no Test step, so try it by completing the trigger with a test user once the recipe is on.
9. Switch Recipe on in the top bar.

Related: Managing tokens, Managing actions, Testing triggers and actions