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Guide

Welcome & Overview

8 min read 2 views
Version
1.0
Last Version Update
October 4, 2026
Effective From
October 4, 2026
Review Cycle
Annual
Next Review Due
October 2027

Plan, schedule and deliver structured weekly guidance for cohort-based training courses. Dantian Course Cadence works with Tutor LMS or LifterLMS, or runs standalone with its own classes when no LMS is installed.

What this plugin does

Training providers — registered training organisations (RTOs), allied-health colleges, professional certification bodies and multi-cohort coaching programmes — need to tell every student and trainer what to focus on each week, without composing and sending each message by hand. Course Cadence turns that into a plan you write once:

  1. You build a timeline for each course (when the course runs, and any breaks).
  2. You write prompts — the guidance for each week — aimed at students, trainers or both.
  3. The plugin delivers each week’s prompts automatically by email on the day and time you choose, and shows the same guidance on a page of your site.
  4. Trainers can suggest improvements to the wording; an administrator approves them.
  5. Dashboards show what was sent, what failed, who is behind and what is scheduled this week.

The plugin is free, has no paid tier, keeps all of its data in your own WordPress database. The WordPress.org version makes no outbound calls to external services; a copy downloaded from the Dantian store also checks the store for updates (see Privacy, data and uninstall).

Who it is for

Role What they do with Course Cadence Start here
Students Receive weekly guidance emails, read guidance on the course page, search past weeks, choose which courses email them Student guide
Trainers Receive trainer-audience guidance, view the course’s guidance on the trainer page, suggest edits to prompts and track their status Trainer guide
Course administrators Build timelines, write prompts, review trainer suggestions, test and monitor emails Administrator guide
College administrators Oversee many courses at once: the cross-course Overview, delivery monitoring, suggestion review, term planning College administrator guide
Site administrators Install and update the plugin, make email and scheduled tasks reliable, manage data and privacy Site administrator guide

Everything in the WordPress admin area requires an administrator account (the Manage options capability). Trainers and students only ever use front-end pages that you create with shortcodes. See User roles and permissions.

Full feature list

Each feature below is described in detail in its own document.

Planning and authoring

  • Timeline management — one timeline per course period, of two types: Fixed period (start and end dates; the whole cohort shares the same week number) or Rolling (each student’s week count starts from their own enrolment date). Add break periods (for example a mid-term break) during which no emails go out. → Timeline management
  • Prompt management — write each week’s guidance with a week number, a day offset, an audience (Student, Trainer or Both), a subject, a body and optional attachment links. Link lessons from your LMS course so they appear as links in emails and on the page. Insert a week or move a prompt to another week. → Prompt management
  • Placeholders — personalise subjects and bodies with values such as the student’s name, the course name and the week number. → Placeholder reference
  • Prompt version history — every prompt edit is snapshotted automatically so you can review and restore an earlier version. → Prompt version history
  • Timeline cloning — copy a timeline and all of its prompts into another course to set up a new intake quickly. → Timeline cloning

Delivery

  • Automated weekly emails — sent on the day and time you set (default Monday at 09:00, in your site’s timezone). Students in several courses receive one consolidated email by default, or one email per course if you prefer. Failed sends are retried automatically every hour, up to three attempts. Emails use your LMS’s own email styling when Tutor LMS or LifterLMS is active, or a built-in template in standalone mode. → Automated weekly emails
  • Catch-up emails — a student who enrols after the course has started is sent the guidance they missed, about five minutes after enrolment. A pending catch-ups panel lets you review and send catch-ups by hand. → Catch-up emails
  • Admin digest and alerts — an optional summary to an administrator after each weekly dispatch, a preview of the coming dispatch a few days ahead, and a warning if a dispatch runs late. → Automated weekly emails

Trainers

  • Trainer edit workflow — trainers suggest wording changes from the front-end trainer page. Suggestions either wait in the Pending Suggestions queue (reviewed with a word-level difference view) or are applied automatically, depending on your setting. Trainers see a status badge on each suggestion and can be emailed when it is decided. → Trainer edit workflow

Students

  • On-page guidance and progress tracker — the student guidance page shows the current week with a progress bar, lets students move between weeks and see the full history, and opens at the right week when they follow a “View online” link from an email. → On-page guidance and progress tracker
  • Guidance search — keyword search across every week of guidance the student has access to. → Guidance search
  • Email preferences — a page where each student can turn guidance emails off or on per course, linked from guidance emails when you turn the Email Preferences Link setting on (it is on by default). → Email preferences

Operations

  • Admin dashboards — Overview (with All courses and This week tabs), Email Delivery (with Send & Status, Analytics and Test Emails tabs), Pending Suggestions, and the Audit Log under Settings → System. → Admin dashboards
  • LMS integration and native classes — works with Tutor LMS or LifterLMS, or provides its own Classes screen to group students and trainers when no LMS is installed. → LMS integration and native classes
  • Privacy tools — personal data is included in WordPress’s Export Personal Data and Erase Personal Data tools, delivery and audit records are purged automatically after a retention period (default 365 days), and data is kept on uninstall unless you opt in to removal. → Privacy, data and uninstall
  • Site Health and scheduled tasks — checks for the LMS, the database tables and the weekly email schedule appear in Tools → Site Health. → Scheduled tasks and Site Health

How the pieces fit together

Course (Tutor LMS / LifterLMS course, or a native class)
  └── Timeline (Fixed period or Rolling, with optional breaks)
        └── Prompts (week number + day offset + audience)
              ├── Weekly email to students and/or trainers (scheduled)
              ├── Catch-up email for late enrolments (automatic)
              └── On-page guidance ([dcc_student] page, searchable)
                     └── Trainers suggest edits ([dcc_trainer_edit] page)
                            └── Administrator approves → prompt updated (version saved)
Dashboards: Overview · Email Delivery · Pending Suggestions · Audit Log
  • Courses come from your LMS. With Tutor LMS or LifterLMS active, the course list, enrolled students, instructors (trainers) and lessons all come from the LMS. In standalone mode, each class you create under Course Cadence → Classes acts as a course.
  • A timeline decides the week number. For a Fixed period timeline the week is counted from the timeline’s start date; for a Rolling timeline it is counted from each student’s own enrolment date.
  • Prompts are matched to weeks. On dispatch day the plugin works out each course’s current week, collects the prompts for that week and sends them to the right audience.
  • The same prompts power the website. The student guidance page and search show exactly what the emails contain, so a student who deletes an email never loses the guidance.
  • Trainer feedback improves prompts over time, with every change versioned and recorded in the audit log.

Example: a Certificate IV cohort

A college runs Certificate IV in Massage Therapy — 2026 Intake A as a 20-week Fixed period timeline from 2 February, with a two-week break in April. The course administrator writes one student prompt and one trainer prompt for each week, links the relevant Tutor LMS lessons, and sets dispatch to Monday at 07:30. Every Monday the cohort receives that week’s focus and readings; trainers receive their delivery notes. A student who enrols in week 4 receives weeks 1–3 as a catch-up email. Trainers notice a confusing instruction in week 7 and suggest a rewrite; the administrator approves it from Pending Suggestions, and the next send uses the new wording.

In this documentation

Getting started

Feature guides

Reference

Role guides

Version History

Version 1.0.0 Major October 4, 2026
Author: DHDW