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Admin Dashboards

Course Cadence gives administrators three monitoring screens: Overview (the landing page), Email Delivery and Pending Suggestions. This page explains what each one shows, what every card and table means, and how to use them in a weekly routine.

Who can see them: all three screens need the WordPress Administrator role (the manage_options capability). Trainers and students never see them — trainers work from the front-end trainer page, and students from the student guidance page. See User Roles & Permissions.

The Course Cadence menu

Click Course Cadence in the WordPress admin sidebar. The submenu is arranged in the order a new site is set up, with thin dividers between the groups:

Group	Items
Build	Overview · Classes (only when Course Cadence manages its own classes — see LMS Integration and Native Classes) · Timelines & Prompts
Operate	Email Delivery · Pending Suggestions
Configure	Settings

For the workspace see Timeline Management and Prompt Management; for configuration see the Settings Reference.

Menu badges

Two badges can appear in the sidebar so that waiting work is visible from anywhere in wp-admin:

“N behind” — shown on Course Cadence and on Timelines & Prompts when students have fallen behind on guidance emails and need a catch-up. Screen readers hear the full wording, for example “3 students need catching up”. The count is cached for up to five minutes, so it can lag slightly behind a send or dismissal.
A number on Pending Suggestions — how many trainer edit suggestions are waiting for review.

Badges only appear when the count is above zero, and only for administrators.

Overview

Location: Course Cadence → Overview (the page you land on when you click Course Cadence).

The Overview has two tabs: All courses (the default) and This week. Above the tabs is one primary button that changes with the state of your site:

If any students need a catch-up, it reads Review N students needing catch-up and jumps to the catch-up panel on the All courses tab.
Otherwise it reads Go to Timelines & Prompts.

First-run welcome

If no courses or classes exist yet, the All courses tab shows Welcome to Course Cadence instead of the dashboard, with the steps to go live:

Add a class and enrol your students and trainers (only when Course Cadence manages its own classes).
Open Timelines & Prompts — pick a course, create a timeline, and add weekly prompts.
Set your dispatch day and time in Settings.
Confirm your site can send email — check Tools → Site Health before relying on scheduled delivery.

See Quick Start for the full walkthrough.

All courses tab

The cross-course dashboard. From top to bottom:

1. Pending catch-ups panel. Shown only when at least one student is behind. The heading reads, for example, “4 students are behind on guidance emails and need catching up.” Each course with students behind is a collapsed row showing the missing weeks (for example “Weeks 3, 4”) and the number of students, plus a Review & send link that opens that course in Timelines & Prompts with the review panel already open. Expand a row (Show which students) to see a table of Student, Weeks behind and Actions, where each student has two buttons:

Send catch-up — emails that student the weeks they missed straight away. On success you see “Catch-up sent.”
Dismiss — clears the student from the list without emailing them (“Dismissed — nothing was sent.”). Dismissals are recorded in the audit log and can be restored later from the course’s review panel.

Full details of how catch-ups are detected, sent and dismissed are in Catch-Up Emails.

2. Filters. A Year: dropdown and a Course: dropdown, applied with Filter.

Year lists the years found on your courses. For Course Cadence’s own classes the year comes from the class’s year field; for LMS courses it is read from a four-digit year in the course title (for example “Cert III Individual Support 2026”). The default is the current year when any course carries it, otherwise All Years. A count such as “12 courses” shows how many courses match the year.
Course stays disabled until you choose a specific year. Choosing a course name narrows the dashboard to that course. The first two options (Active courses only and All courses) both show every course for the chosen year.

The filters narrow the With Active Timeline card and the timeline tables. The other cards are always site-wide.

3. Summary cards. Each card is a link to the place where you can act on it.

Card	What it counts	Opens
Courses	Every course (or class) on the site, ignoring the filters	Classes (when Course Cadence manages classes) or Timelines & Prompts
With Active Timeline	Courses in the current filter that have a timeline running today	Timelines & Prompts
Pending Suggestions	Trainer suggestions waiting for review	Pending Suggestions
Students to Catch Up	Students behind on guidance emails (amber when above zero, green at zero)	The catch-up panel above, or Timelines & Prompts when nobody is behind
Emails Delivered	All-time successful guidance-email delivery records	Email Delivery
Emails Failed	All-time failed delivery records (red when above zero)	Email Delivery

4. Active Timelines. One row per course with a timeline running today: Course, Type (Fixed or Rolling), Current Week and End Date. Rolling timelines have no end, so they show Ongoing. If nothing is running you see “No active timelines.”

5. Upcoming Timelines. Courses whose timeline is set up but has not started yet, with the Starts date. This table only appears when there is something to show, so a course you prepared ahead of time is never invisible.

6. Recent Activity. The ten latest audit-log entries: who did it (or System for automatic actions), what they did (for example “Updated”, “Prompt Moved”, “Catch-up Dismissed”) and when. View full log → opens the full, filterable log under Settings → System — see Audit log. Times are shown in UTC, not your site’s timezone.

7. Edit Suggestions Summary. All-time counts of trainer suggestions: Total Suggestions, Pending, Approved and Rejected.

This week tab

A week-by-week view of which prompts every course sends in a given dispatch week. Use it to check content before the emails go out.

Week navigation. The page opens on the next dispatch (if today is your dispatch day, today’s dispatch). The heading shows the date range, for example “6 Oct 2026 – 12 Oct 2026”. Use Prev and Next to move a week at a time, and Next dispatch to return to the upcoming one. The line under the tab names your dispatch day, for example “All prompts scheduled for dispatch each Monday, grouped by day offset.”

Filters. A Year: dropdown (same years as the All courses tab), a count such as “8 courses with timelines”, and a Filter by course: checklist with an All / none toggle. Click Apply to update, or Clear filters to reset. Only courses that have at least one timeline are listed.

Summary cards. Prompts (prompts scheduled that week), Courses (courses sending), and Paused (only shown when some of those prompts belong to a course whose email delivery is paused).

Prompt table. Rows are grouped under headers such as “Day Offset 0 — Monday, 6 Oct 2026” (day offset 0 is the dispatch day). Columns: Course, Week #, Audience (Student, Trainer or Both), Subject, Status (Active or Paused) and Actions.

Viewing a prompt. Click View to open Prompt details, showing the course, week, day offset, audience, subject and full body. Edit in Timelines & Prompts opens the workspace in a new tab with that course, timeline and prompt already selected. Close (or Escape) closes the dialog.

Empty weeks. If a running timeline covers the week but nobody has written a prompt for it, the page names the gap, for example “No prompts scheduled for 6 Oct 2026 – 12 Oct 2026. Week 5 of Cert III Individual Support has no prompt yet.” with an Add prompt in Timelines & Prompts button. If no running timeline covers the week at all you see “No prompts scheduled for this week. No active timelines cover this date range.”

Email Delivery

Location: Course Cadence → Email Delivery.

Email Delivery has three tabs: Send & Status (the default), Analytics and Test Emails. When any delivery has ever failed, the Analytics tab label carries a red count badge, so a problem is visible from any tab.

What is counted here: guidance emails only — the weekly dispatch, catch-up emails and automatic retries. The plugin records one delivery record per prompt per recipient, so a single weekly email that contains three prompts produces three records, and a combined multi-course email produces records for every prompt in every course it covers. Test emails, the admin digest and alerts, and trainer-suggestion notifications are not recorded. For a full mail log, use your SMTP plugin’s email log.

Send & Status tab

The controls for sending, plus a quick health check. (Older material calls this tab “Activity”; the address of the tab is unchanged.)

Health strip. Three all-time cards: Total Sent (every delivery record), Delivered and Failed. They refresh in place after you trigger a dispatch.

Weekly Dispatch Status.

Next scheduled run — the date and time of the next automatic weekly dispatch in your site timezone, for example “Mon 12 Oct 2026 at 09:00 (Australia/Sydney)”. If it shows “Not scheduled — reactivate the plugin to re-register the cron event.” the schedule is missing; loading any admin page normally restores it, and deactivating and reactivating the plugin always does.
Dispatch cooldown — after a dispatch completes, the automatic dispatch is blocked for 23 hours so the same week cannot go out twice. “Clear — next cron dispatch will proceed” is the normal state; “Active — set 2 hours ago, expires in ~21 hours” means a dispatch has just run.

Trigger weekly dispatch now. Runs the weekly dispatch immediately, ahead of the schedule:

Click Trigger weekly dispatch now.
A confirmation appears: “Send this week’s guidance emails to all enrolled students now? This runs the weekly dispatch immediately, ahead of the schedule.”
Click Yes, send now (or Cancel).
A result line reports what happened, for example “42 emails sent. Covering 3 course-weeks. See the Analytics tab for the full breakdown.” If nothing was due: “Dispatch ran — no emails were due right now. See the Analytics tab for delivery history.”

The manual trigger ignores the cooldown, but it never re-sends guidance a student has already received. Be aware that it does start a new 23-hour cooldown, so if you trigger it shortly before the scheduled time, the scheduled run that day is skipped (the late-dispatch warning described in Scheduled Tasks will mention this).

Manual Catch-up. Sends a missed week’s guidance to one student — for example someone who enrolled late. Click Send Manual Catch-up Email…, choose a Course and then a Student, and click Send Catch-up Email. To email everyone for the current week use Trigger weekly dispatch now instead. Catch-ups are not available for Rolling timelines. The step-by-step guide and all the messages are in Catch-Up Emails.

Analytics tab

Delivery statistics, filterable by week.

Week filter. The Week: dropdown lists every calendar week (Monday to Sunday) in which a delivery was recorded, newest first, plus All Weeks. It opens on the most recent week. Click Filter to apply.

Summary cards (for the selected week). Hover a card name for its definition.

Card	Meaning
Recipients	Unique people who received at least one email in this period.
Course-Weeks Sent	Distinct course + week combinations delivered (each combination counts once however many recipients it had).
Total Sent	Individual email records, including catch-ups and retries.
Delivered	Records that were sent successfully.
Failed	Records that failed (red when above zero), including ones still waiting for an automatic retry.

Per-Course Statistics. One row per course that had deliveries in the period: Course, Recipients, Weeks Sent, Total Emails, First Sent and Last Sent. First/Last Sent times are in UTC.

There is no export button on this tab. Delivery records are kept for the period set in Settings → System → Log Retention Period (365 days by default) — see Privacy, Data and Uninstall.

Failed deliveries and retries. A failed delivery is retried automatically every hour, up to three times, and then left as failed. A steadily rising Failed count usually means a mail-server problem rather than a content problem — see Automated Weekly Emails and Troubleshooting.

Test Emails tab

Send a real test email through the same rendering as the weekly dispatch, so you can check placeholders, layout, links and attachments before students see them. The panel is headed Test Email Delivery: “Send a test email directly to a student to confirm delivery before the weekly dispatch.”

Important: a test email goes to the selected student’s real email address. It is sent even if that student has opted out of guidance emails or the course’s delivery is paused. To review it yourself, enrol a test student account with your own address (or one you can read) and select that account.

Test emails are marked “[TEST]” in the subject. They are not recorded as deliveries, so they never stop the real weekly email from going out and do not affect catch-up detection or the Analytics figures.

Test Single Course

“Send a test email for a specific course and student.”

Select Course: choose a course. The student list loads (“Loading…”).
Select Student: choose an enrolled student. The remaining fields appear.
Test Date: the date the email should represent. The plugin works out which week of the timeline falls on that date. It defaults to today.
Email Type: Student Guidance or Trainer Guidance (the trainer version of that week’s prompts).
Click Send Test Email.

On success: “Test email sent to Jane Citizen (jane@example.com) for week 3”. The subject is “[TEST]” followed by your normal subject line, with all placeholders filled in for that student.

Test All Courses Email

“Send a test email showing prompts from ALL enrolled courses (as students would receive).” This shows the combined weekly email that a student in several courses receives.

Select Student: the list holds every student enrolled in any course, shown as name and email address.
Test Date: defaults to today.
Click Send Multi-Course Test Email.

The email has a yellow TEST EMAIL banner (“Multi-course test for Jane Citizen on October 6, 2026”), your Multi-Course Intro Line and Email Footer, and a section for each course that has a running timeline and student prompts on that date. The subject is “[TEST] Your Weekly Guidance (2 courses)”. On success: “Multi-course test email sent to Jane Citizen (jane@example.com) with prompts from 2 courses”.

This test only fills in the {student_name}, {course_name} and {week_number} placeholders; others such as {first_name} stay as written. Use Test Single Course to check every placeholder.

Test email troubleshooting

Message	Cause and fix
“No active timeline for this date”	The course’s timeline is not running on the Test Date. Pick a date between its start and end (and check it has started).
“No student prompts found for week 4” (or “trainer”)	Nothing is written for that week and audience. Add a prompt, change the Email Type, or pick another date.
“No enrolled students”	The course has no enrolled students yet. Enrol a test student.
“Student not enrolled in any courses”	The student chosen for the multi-course test has no enrolments.
“No prompts available for any enrolled courses on this date”	None of the student’s courses has a running timeline with student prompts on that date.
“Failed to send email. Check your WordPress mail configuration.”	WordPress could not hand the email to your mail server. Check your SMTP plugin; see Troubleshooting.

If the message says the email was sent but it never arrives, check the spam folder, then your SMTP plugin’s log and your domain’s email records (SPF, DKIM, DMARC). The plugin’s part is done once WordPress accepts the message.

Pending Suggestions

Location: Course Cadence → Pending Suggestions.

A table of trainer edit suggestions awaiting review, with columns Course, Week, Trainer, Changes, Date and Actions. Changes are shown as a word-level comparison; long body changes appear under Body changes. Use Approve or Reject on a row, or tick several rows and choose Approve All or Reject All from the bulk actions. When the queue is empty you see “No pending suggestions.” If your workflow is set to Auto-Approve, a note explains that trainer edits are applied straight away and will not appear here. Full details: Trainer Edit Workflow.

Audit log and Settings

The full audit log lives under Course Cadence → Settings → System, below the data-retention settings. It is covered in Scheduled Tasks, Site Health and the Audit Log. Settings has four tabs — Schedule, Emails, Workflow and System — each saved with its own Save Settings button; see the Settings Reference.

A weekly monitoring routine

Example — a training organisation running six Certificate III and IV cohorts, dispatching on Mondays at 9:00.

Friday afternoon (before the dispatch):

Open Overview → This week. It opens on Monday’s dispatch. Check the Prompts and Courses cards. If you see “Week 5 of Cert IV Leadership 2026 has no prompt yet”, click Add prompt in Timelines & Prompts and write it.
If the Paused card appears, note which courses are paused and confirm with your site administrator that each is meant to be (for example a cohort on placement). The dashboard only shows the paused status; there is no pause or resume button on these screens.
Use View on one or two prompts to spot-check dates and links.
For a new course, open Email Delivery → Test Emails, choose your test student, set Test Date to Monday and send a Test Single Course email. Check it in your inbox.

Monday after 9:00:

Open Overview → All courses. If the button reads Review 2 students needing catch-up, click it, expand the course, and Send catch-up to each student (or Dismiss a student who has withdrawn).
Open Email Delivery → Analytics. The week filter opens on this week. Check Failed is 0 and that every running course appears in Per-Course Statistics.
If Failed is above zero, wait an hour or two for the automatic retries, then check again. If failures persist, ask your site administrator to check the mail setup.

Any time: clear the Pending Suggestions badge so trainers’ corrections reach the next dispatch.

Troubleshooting the dashboards

The Overview shows “Welcome to Course Cadence” but I have courses. The plugin cannot see any courses from your LMS. Check the LMS is active and that Site Health’s LMS check passes — see Site Health.
The Year dropdown is missing a year. LMS course titles need a four-digit year (for example “… 2026”) to be grouped by year; Course Cadence classes use their year field. Choose All Years to see everything.
A course is missing from Active Timelines. Its timeline has not started (look under Upcoming Timelines) or has ended. Check the dates in Timelines & Prompts.
“Next scheduled run” says Not scheduled. Reload any admin page; if it persists, deactivate and reactivate the plugin. See Scheduled tasks.
The “N behind” badge did not clear immediately after sending. The count is cached for up to five minutes.

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