First Steps
Before creating your first knowledge check campaign using Impact Focus, we recommend you take the following initial steps to configure your plugin. Start by opening the Settings screen found in the Impact Focus main menu:
Selecting The Feedback Page
Impact Focus will use the page that you select for the ‘Feedback Page’ dropdown option as the page in WordPress which users will be directed to once they have attempted to answer a question sent to them via email.
The user will always be directed to the same page, regardless of the question, campaign, or whether they have gotten the answer correct or not.
The feedback to the user will be dynamically generated on the selected page, so the page itself can be left entirely blank. However, if you want to display information to the user above where the feedback information is generated, then you can do so in the usual way.
Preparing Your WordPress Platform To Send Emails To Users
By default, Impact Focus will use the standard WordPress method (WP_Mail) for sending question emails to users each day. You have the ability to configure the From Name and From Address for each campaign in the Edit Campaign screen.
For some websites, WP_Mail can be an unreliable email method with the potential for emails to be treated as spam. This may cause your emails to become undelivered to certain users.
To avoid this, we recommend that you use an SMTP solution. There are many SMTP plugins for WordPress to chose from, including free and paid options.
Important: if you are using a premium SMTP solution for email, then make sure you are aware of any credit limit or quota allowance associated with your account before you start any Impact Focus learning campaign, to ensure that daily emails to your users does not exceed your paid limit.
Ensuring Correct Time Delivery For Email Messages With WP-Cron
WP-Cron is an internal system built into WordPress that is used to manage time-based events. It is used by many plugin packages such as WooCommerce and LearnDash, as well as Impact Focus.
Though we have done everything in our power to ensure that your WordPress platform will send emails to users in an activate campaign at the time that you have selected, there remains a possibility that your web hosting facility might have the final say on how regularly scheduled tasks are allowed to run within your WordPress site.
With most hosting providers however, particularly shared hosting plans where you have been provided with a cPanel web portal for managing your web hosting configuration, you will have the ability to apply settings to make sure Cron Jobs are triggered at regular intervals.
If you have access to cPanel version 90+ for example, then look under your Advanced settings where you should find a link for ‘Cron Jobs’
Click on this link and on the next screen you will have the ability to set custom Cron Jobs as well as see any Current Cron Jobs running on your web server.
To ensure that Impact Focus works as intended, we would recommend creating a Cron Job that scheduled the internal WordPress Cron system every hour. To do this, use the following command, replacing YOURDOMAIN.COM with the address of your WordPress site where Impact Focus is installed:
wget -q -O - 'https://YOURDOMAIN.COM/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron&cron=true'
Click the ‘Add New Cron Jon’ to save your command, which you will see added to the ‘Current Cron Jobs’ list once the page had refreshed.
Read the rest of our Knowledge Base pages to make the most of Impact Focus.