How Cedarras works with Kit

Cedarras is a course platform built on Kit.com. Kit stays your audience and your email; Cedarras holds your courses. Each Cedarras account connects to exactly one Kit account, and a Kit account can be connected to only one Cedarras account.

What Cedarras does with your Kit account

In Kit, a tag is how someone gets into a course. When a subscriber has one of a course's tags, they're a student of that course.

Cedarras reads from Kit:

Your Kit account's name and email addresses.
Your tags and custom fields, so you can pick them in Cedarras.
The subscribers who have a course's tag (email address, first name and whether they're active), so they can become students.

When you connect, Cedarras also sets up a webhook in your Kit account, so Kit tells Cedarras right away when a tag is added to or removed from a subscriber, or a tag is deleted.

Cedarras only writes to Kit when you set something up that needs it:

It creates a tag or custom field when you ask it to, from a course's settings.
It adds tags to students when a course has progress rules, and fills in custom fields when a course mirrors progress to Kit (see below).
If you turn on Open signup on Settings → Account Details, people who sign up and confirm their email are added to your Kit account as subscribers.

Cedarras never sends email to your list, never removes a tag from a subscriber, and never deletes anything in Kit.

Install from the Kit App Store

Find Cedarras in Kit's App Store and install it. Kit sends you to Cedarras, where you choose one of two paths.

I'm new to Cedarras. Name your account, authorize Cedarras in Kit, confirm your email, then set your password from the link we send you. The account comes already connected to Kit.
I already use Cedarras. Log in, then choose to create a new Cedarras account for this Kit account, or connect an existing account you're an admin of that isn't connected yet.

The step-by-step version is in Set up your Cedarras account. If you're already in Cedarras and your account isn't connected, an admin can press Connect on Settings → Kit.com. That also goes through Kit's install page.

Connect a course to a Kit tag

Every course needs at least one Kit tag. You choose it on the course's Details tab with Add tag, and you can create a new tag in Kit from there too. A course can have more than one tag, and one tag can open more than one course.

Adding the tag to a subscriber in Kit makes them a student and sends them an enrollment email. A new student gets a link to set a password; someone who already has a Cedarras login gets a note that the course is waiting.
Subscribers who already had the tag when you connected it to the course become students too, but no email is sent to them. An admin can send one from the Students tab with Resend email.
Removing the tag in Kit takes the student out of the course. If they had already started it, they keep their history and see the course as ended. If the tag comes back, so does their access.

Only active Kit subscribers become students. Cedarras matches people by email address, so one person is one student across all your courses.

Selling a course

Cedarras doesn't take payments itself. A simple way to sell a course is to use Kit:

Create a product in Kit for the course.
Add a Kit automation that adds the course's tag when someone buys the product.

The buyer is tagged, becomes a student, and gets their enrollment email. The same idea works for a free course: tag people when they fill in a Kit form.

Sending progress back to Kit

Cedarras can tell Kit how your students are doing, so you can trigger your own Kit automations and emails. Both of these are for admins, and both depend on your plan.

Course rules

On a course's Rules tab, add a rule: pick a milestone and a Kit tag to add when a student reaches it. The milestones are:

The student starts the course.
The student completes a lesson (any lesson, or one you pick).
The student completes a module, meaning a section (any, or one you pick).
The student completes the course.

A rule only applies to milestones reached after you add it. It doesn't go back and tag students who got there earlier. Cedarras never takes a tag back off once it adds one. Rules have no edit: to change one, remove it and add a new one.

Custom fields

On a course's Details tab, under Kit custom fields, you can pick a Percent complete field and a Current grade field. Cedarras keeps each student's percent and grade up to date in those Kit fields as they change. Kit fields are shared across your whole Kit account, so give each course its own.

If your plan changes and no longer includes this, rules and field updates pause. They're kept, and start again for new milestones once the account moves back up. Milestones reached while paused aren't sent later.

The daily sync and Resync now

Kit tells Cedarras about tag changes as they happen. Once a day, Cedarras also checks every course tag against Kit to catch anything missed: it adds students who have the tag, takes out anyone who no longer does (or is no longer active in Kit), and refreshes tag names. The daily check doesn't send enrollment emails.

To run that check now, an admin can press Resync now on Settings → Kit.com. The page shows when the last sync finished and any error. You can resync once every 5 minutes.

Disconnecting or uninstalling

An admin can press Disconnect on Settings → Kit.com. Uninstalling Cedarras in Kit does the same thing.

Your courses, their content and your students all stay. Students keep access to the courses they're in. But while you're disconnected:

Nobody can create or edit courses.
Tag changes in Kit no longer add or remove students.
Progress rules and custom fields stop sending to Kit.

To reconnect, press Connect on Settings → Kit.com. Reconnect the same Kit account and your courses keep their tags, and Cedarras catches up on any tag changes you made in Kit while disconnected. If you connect a different Kit account, every course's Kit tags are cleared, and so is each student's enrollment from them: students who had started a course see it as ended, and the rest are removed. Add the new account's tags to your courses to let students back in.

Troubleshooting

A student can't see a course

The tag is missing. In Kit, check the subscriber has the exact tag shown on the course's Details tab.
The subscriber isn't active in Kit. Only active subscribers become students.
The course isn't live. Turn on Live on the Details tab. Until then, nobody can open it.
The lessons are hidden. New sections and lessons start hidden. Use Preview as student to see what students see.
They signed in with a different email. Their Cedarras login is the email address on their Kit subscriber.
Kit's message didn't arrive. Press Resync now on Settings → Kit.com to check right away.

Progress isn't reaching Kit

The rule was added after the milestone. Rules only apply to milestones reached after they're created.
Your plan doesn't include it. The Rules tab says so when rules are paused.
Kit has no subscriber with that email address. Cedarras skips the update rather than creating someone new.
An update failed. The course's Rules tab shows updates that couldn't be sent, with Retry and Discard buttons.

Kit shows Cedarras as disconnected

If you uninstalled Cedarras in Kit, or Kit stopped accepting Cedarras's connection, Settings → Kit.com shows Not connected. Press Connect to connect the same Kit account again.