New course and date/time instance

To publish a course you need to create the following:

• Course – this is just a ‘mater’ record which does not contain any specific date/time data. It can be assigned to multiple course dates
• Course Date – here you specify when, where and for how many attendees is the course/class open.
  This is the course instance that can be booked and will be published as a course in the front-end.
• Session – optional. Within each course date there could be none, one or multiple sessions defined. Session is just an additional information about specific time of a course date.

To make it more clear and easy to understand, here is an example:

Let’s imagine you organize a Joomla! Day event. Any event like JD can be considered as a course in JoomCourses. It will be a three days long event starting at 10 AM each day. Let’s say you allow to register for the whole event (3 days) only. 

	Date	From	To
First day	10th September 2019	10:00	16:00
Second day	11th September 2019	10:00	16:00
Third day	12th September 2019	10:00	18:00

In this case you need to create one Course called Joomla Day. Then you need to create just one Course Date starting 10th September 2019 and finishing 12th September 2019. To show the visitors what time the event starts each day you need to create three sessions and assign all of them to the Course Date you created previously. That is it.

 How to create new course

 Choose Courses from the left side menu in the JoomCourses and click the New button.

 Here we will use the referential data we created previously.

Details tab:

• Title – course/class/event name
• Reference number – this should be a unique string matching the record in Joomla with your own id from other systems you use. It could be useful in data exports. If you don’t need it, just type in any shortcut describing your course.
• URL – here you can leave a link to some other page/website where sits a description of your course
• Category – assign your course to a category
• Group – assign your course to a class group. This could be useful for data filtering.
• Experience Level – assign recommended experience level
• Email Template – choose which booking confirmation email should be sent to the attendee when he/she books a seat.  You can assign tags in the right panel to make your course more attractive in the front-end
• Description – this is the main content describing your course. You can split the field into the introduction and the main content by using the Read More button like you do in Joomla! articles.

Private Content tab:

• Here you can create a text/HTML page that will be displayed to registered attendees. It can contain links to class resources, YouTube videos or some other text.

Display tab:

• Choose the event color in the Calendar
• Choose whether you want to show and control the capacity of the course. If set to yes, visitors can book only maximum number of seats defined in each Course Date, so no overbooking is allowed. If the course is fully booked, the visitors can still add their contact details into the waiting list.

Dates tab:

• Here you see a summary of assigned course dates. If you are creating a new course, then this list is empty and you need to create new course dates to publish your course.

Publish tab:

• This tab contains additional setting related to the publishing of the course. 

Course Dates and Sessions

As stated in previous chapters Course Date is an instance of a course. It is the item you offer to book on your website. It should usually define start and finish date. But you can create course dates with both dates unspecified.

This can be useful for ad-hoc classes which are run based on clients bookings.

1. To create a course date simply go to Course Dates section in JoomCourses and click the New button.
2. Choose the course title you created previously.
3. Define the maximum capacity for the course. If you set to check the capacity in the component’s global configuration or in the course itself this will be the maximum seats offered.
4. You can leave some short description in the Availability field
5. Choose Email template
6. Set the Start and Finish date. You can leave them blank as well.
7. Set the total price for a seat excluding VAT.
8. Assign a location where the course is being held.
9. Leave some short description about the sessions. This could be useful when you don’t want to specify the sessions precisely. You can leave a message such as “we start at 10 AM.”.
10. Save changes.

If you want to show what time each session starts and finishes, you can click the Add Session button and specify the times for each day. Please note that sessions cannot be booked. They are just an additional information to your course date.

Applications received

When you publish your courses online you can start checking the bookings/application made in the administration. You can display a list of all the applications received with their current statuses. You can also display a detail of each application by clicking the name in the Booked By column.

Statuses change often automatically when users pay for their booking online via PayPal or other payment gateway. If you want to change status manually you can do so by clicking the status label in the applications view.

Please note that the component allows you to go through the statuses only in the following order:

• Submitted – application is juts submitted but no payment has been received.
• Pending – application is waiting for the payment and is confirmed to the customer. This status can be used only when you manually manage statuses from the back-end. Online payments go straight from status Submitted to Paid.
• Canceled – application is canceled and seat is available for others again
• Paid – application has been paid and so confirmed
• Refunded – application was paid, but the customer asked for a refund and to cancel the order.