Certifications, certificates, editions
Three words do most of the work in LOOP, and two of them look alike.
A certification is a programme; a certificate is one person's copy
A certification is what you configure: how long it stays valid, which courses satisfy it, which notices go out and when. There is one Workplace Safety Refresher on the site.
A certificate is what an individual holds against that certification, with its own issue date and its own expiry date. Two hundred people hold two hundred certificates against that one certification, expiring on two hundred different days.
The interface follows the split throughout:
| Page | Works with |
|---|---|
| Manage certifications | Certifications — the programmes |
| User status | Certificates — where each person stands right now |
| Certification history | Certificates — every one ever issued |
| Home | Certificates, counted and grouped by certification |
An edition is a course in a position
Compliance training is usually re-run rather than reused: a new course each year, with new content and a new enrolment. An edition is one such course occupying one position in the renewal sequence.
An order is a sortable number. Only its rank among the other editions of the same certification means anything, so 1, 2, 3 works exactly as well as 10, 20, 30 — counting in tens simply leaves room to slot a course between two existing ones later without renumbering them.
The sequence describes the catalogue: which course supersedes which. LOOP does not work out which course each person ought to take next, and it does not refuse a completion for being on an older edition. Every completion of an edition issues a certificate, and the person's coverage runs from it.
What the order is used for is presentation and reporting: which edition somebody is enrolled on, which edition a certificate was earned on, and which edition a notice should name.
A certification with a single edition certifies but never renews into a new course. Add a second edition to build a chain.
Linking courses to positions
You can attach each course by hand, or let LOOP recognise them from a pattern in the course ID number, or from a course custom field. The choice is operational: a training team that creates courses by hand picks them manually, and a site whose courses arrive from another system lets the pattern do the work. See Link courses as editions.
Where the link lives decides where it is administered. An edition that exists because a course carries a code has no actions menu on the Editions page, and removing it means clearing the code from the course: the page cannot undo something the course still says. Only an edition linked by hand is a row of LOOP's own, and only that one is edited and deleted there.
Visible, hidden, and the current edition
An edition's visibility is read from the Moodle course's visibility. Hiding a course takes an edition out of circulation, and there are two reasons to do it: the edition is not ready to take anybody yet, or a later edition has taken over and this one is closed. Nothing in Moodle records which, so LOOP says only that the course is hidden. The current edition is the most advanced visible one.
Hiding a course changes nothing about certification: a completion recorded on a hidden course issues its certificate like any other.
That is a statement about the chain. About one person, the User status page names the edition they are enrolled on: the most advanced visible one, or — when every enrolment they hold is on a hidden course — that one, marked Hidden. They are enrolled and cannot reach it.
Why "Pending" is not a failure
A status says where somebody is in the cycle, not how well they are doing. Pending means enrolled and not yet finished, which is normal on day one. It becomes a problem when it turns into Overdue, which is a statement about elapsed time.