LXD Integral Microcredentials for LearnDash

LXD Integral Microcredentials for LearnDash connects your LearnDash site to Open Badge Factory or CanCred Factory and issues real, verifiable Open Badges 3.0 credentials to learners automatically, with no Zapier or other external automation required. Open Badges are the standard format in which microcredentials (micro-credentials) are issued and shared.

What it does

• Connects to Open Badge Factory and/or CanCred and shows a live, verified connection status.
• Syncs the badges available in each connected account.
• Lets you define triggers: “when a learner completes this course, lesson, topic, or quiz, award that badge”, with an optional minimum score on quiz triggers.
• Issues the badge automatically in the background when a learner completes the item, retrying if the provider is temporarily unreachable and never issuing the same badge twice.
• Lets you award badges by hand, and backfill a trigger over learners who finished before the trigger existed.
• Displays a learner’s earned badges with the [user_badges] shortcode or the Earned Badges block. Each badge carries a Save & share link (the owner’s page at the provider, where the badge can be saved to Open Badge Passport / CanCred Passport or downloaded) and a public Verify link to the provider’s hosted validator.
• Keeps badge lists truthful after issuance: every hour, or on demand, the plugin checks each issued credential’s status at the provider. Revoked badges are hidden, badges with an expiry show “Expires” or “Expired”, and a badge saved to a Passport shows a “Saved to Passport” mark.
• Cooperates with full-page caches: viewer-specific badge lists are excluded from caching, and issuing a badge purges cached pages.
• Records every issuance attempt in an activity log you can filter and export to CSV.
• Surfaces configuration and connection problems as specific, actionable admin notices. The plugin is built never to fail silently.

Independent plugin

LXD Integral Microcredentials for LearnDash is developed and published independently by LXD Integral Learning Ltd. It is not affiliated with, supported by, or endorsed by Open Badge Factory, CanCred, Learning Agents, LearnDash, StellarWP, or 1EdTech. “LearnDash” is a trademark of its respective owner and is used only to describe which product this plugin works with. Open Badges is an open standard maintained by 1EdTech; the plugin issues badges that follow it through the providers above, and is not itself a 1EdTech product or certification.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.6 or newer and PHP 8.1 or newer.
• LearnDash LMS (a separate, commercial plugin). The plugin activates and can be configured without LearnDash, but no badges are awarded until LearnDash is active.
• An Open Badge Factory or CanCred Factory account with API access. API credentials (Client ID and Client Secret) are created in the provider’s console under Admin tools → API.

Third-party services

This plugin relies on an external badge-issuing service that you choose and configure. Nothing is sent anywhere until you enter API credentials on the plugin’s Settings screen.

• Open Badge Factory (https://openbadgefactory.com), operated by Open Badge Factory Oy, Finland. Terms of use · Privacy notice
• CanCred Factory (https://factory.cancred.ca), operated by Learning Agents, Canada. Terms of use · Privacy policy

When a badge is issued, the plugin sends the learner’s email address and display name and the badge identifier to the configured provider over HTTPS, because the provider delivers the credential to that email address. The plugin also fetches your badge library, the share and verification links of each issued credential, and (hourly, and on demand) the status of the credentials it issued. Badge images shown in wp-admin and on your pages are loaded from the provider’s servers, and the Save & share and Verify links open pages at the provider. No data is sent to LXD Integral or to any other party, and the plugin contains no tracking.

Data stored on your site

The plugin keeps its own tables: the synced badge library, your trigger rules, one award record per issued badge (learner user ID and email address, badge, status, dates, and the credential’s links), and an activity log whose entries may name the learner. Award and log records are retained after a user account is deleted; the plugin registers with WordPress’s Export Personal Data and Erase Personal Data tools, so a learner’s awards can be exported and their email address removed from award records and their log entries deleted. All plugin data is removed on uninstall only if you enable “Delete all plugin data when the plugin is uninstalled” on the Settings screen.

Your Client Secret is stored encrypted (libsodium) with a key derived from the site’s authentication salts. Define AUTH_KEY and SECURE_AUTH_KEY in wp-config.php, as WordPress recommends, so that key is not itself stored in the database. If the salts are ever changed, the plugin asks you to re-enter the secret.

Background work (issuing, retries, link fetching, status checks) runs through WP-Cron. If your site has disabled WP-Cron, make sure a system cron job calls wp-cron.php. The plugin is designed for single-site installs; on a multisite network, activate it per site.

Source code

The block editor script ships as compiled JavaScript in build/; its human-readable source is included in blocks/ and in the public repository at github.com/LXD-Integral/lxd-integral-microcredentials-for-learndash. To rebuild it, run npm install and then npm run build in the plugin directory; the build uses @wordpress/scripts. The PHP needs no build step.