PressPrimer Assignment – Homework Submission, Document Viewer & LMS Grading Workflows

PressPrimer Assignment is a professional assignment submission and grading plugin that gives WordPress educators everything they need to collect student work, provide meaningful feedback, and track grades, all without juggling email attachments, shared drives, or clunky LMS add-ons.

Students get a clean, focused submission experience. Teachers get a centralized grading dashboard with a built-in document viewer, rich text feedback, and inline annotations available via the School addon. And you keep full control of your data on your own WordPress site.

This is a genuinely free plugin. Unlimited assignments, unlimited submissions, full grading tools, LMS integration, and email notifications are all included at no cost. We earn upgrades by building specialized features worth paying for — group management, rubric grading, AI-assisted grading and proofreading, document annotations, anonymous grading, AI content and plagiarism detection, xAPI / LRS support, automated data retention, audit logging, and white-label branding — not by crippling what you get for free.

Why PressPrimer Assignment?

Built-in assignment tools in WordPress LMS plugins are often afterthoughts, limited to basic file uploads with no real grading workflow, limited feedback options, and dated interfaces. Dedicated assignment platforms charge monthly fees with per-student pricing that gets expensive fast.

PressPrimer Assignment delivers a focused, polished assignment workflow with the features educators actually need:

• Flexible Submission Types – Accept file uploads, rich text submissions, or let students choose. Support for PDF, DOCX, TXT, RTF, ODT, and image files out of the box.
• Grade Without Leaving WordPress – A dedicated grading queue with a side-by-side interface: the student’s document renders on the left while you score and write feedback on the right. Built-in viewers for PDF, Word documents, images, and text files mean you never have to download, open, and track files on your desktop.
• Native LMS Integration – Works with LearnDash, Tutor LMS, LifterLMS, and LearnPress. Assignments appear in lessons, passing grades trigger lesson completion, and instructor roles are mapped automatically.
• Secure File Handling – Six-layer file validation and permission-based file serving. Student files are never directly accessible via URL.
• Customizable Email Notifications – Automatic emails for submission confirmation, grade release, and new submission alerts. Fully customizable templates with token placeholders.
• Three Professional Themes – Default, Modern, and Minimal themes that match the PressPrimer Quiz visual style.

Features Included Free

PressPrimer Assignment includes everything you need to manage assignments at any scale:

Assignment Creation

• Unlimited assignments and submissions
• Configurable maximum points and passing score
• Three submission types: file upload, text/rich text, or student’s choice
• Configurable file types, file size limits, and multiple files per submission
• Duplicate any assignment to copy its settings

Student Submission Experience

• Drag-and-drop file upload with progress indicators
• TinyMCE rich text editor with live word count and auto-save drafts
• Student notes field for context or questions
• View submission status, grade, and instructor feedback
• Previous submission history with feedback for each attempt

Grading & Feedback

• Centralized grading queue with filter and sort
• Side-by-side grading interface: document viewer on the left, grading panel on the right
• Built-in viewers render PDF, DOCX, images, and text files directly in WordPress; no downloading required
• Automatic text extraction from PDF, DOCX, ODT, RTF, and TXT files with quality scoring
• Rich text feedback editor with bold, italic, lists, and links — feedback is rendered with its formatting on the student view, not as plain text
• Submissions list filterable by score range, feedback presence, and submission date range
• Grading guidelines reference panel pulled from the assignment

Email Notifications

• Submission confirmation, grade notification, and new submission alert emails
• Customizable subject and body templates per email type
• Token placeholders: student name, assignment title, score, feedback URL, and more

Admin Dashboard & Reports

• Dashboard with submission statistics, activity chart, and recent submissions
• Reports page with filterable submission data

Security & Accessibility

• Six-layer file upload validation (extension whitelist, MIME verification, double-extension blocking, dangerous file rejection)
• Files stored outside webroot with permission-based serving through PHP
• Capability-based access control (teachers see only their own assignments)
• WordPress Privacy API integration (Tools > Export/Erase Personal Data)
• Clean uninstall with optional complete data and file removal
• Keyboard navigation, screen reader support, and reduced motion preferences

Perfect For

• Course creators using LearnDash, Tutor LMS, LifterLMS, or LearnPress who need better assignments than built-in tools
• University departments collecting essays, lab reports, or research papers
• Corporate trainers gathering certification documents and project deliverables
• Standalone WordPress educators who need assignments without a full LMS
• Online course entrepreneurs selling courses with graded assignments

Built-in Integrations

PressPrimer Assignment automatically detects and integrates with popular WordPress LMS plugins:

LearnDash: Attach assignments to lessons or topics via the editor sidebar. Passing an assignment can automatically mark the lesson or topic complete. LearnDash Group Leaders are granted teacher-level permissions to create assignments and grade their students’ submissions. The “Mark Complete” button is hidden until a required assignment is passed.

Tutor LMS: Attach assignments to lessons via the course builder. Passing an assignment can auto-complete the lesson and trigger course completion when all lessons are done. Tutor LMS Instructors are granted teacher-level permissions.

LifterLMS: Attach assignments to lessons via meta box. Passing an assignment can auto-complete the lesson and course. Works with open/free courses, enrolled students, and instructor roles.

LearnPress: Attach assignments to lessons via the lesson settings panel. Link passing an assignment to lesson and course completion. Works with open courses, enrolled students, and instructor roles.

Uncanny Automator: Four triggers available—user submits an assignment, user is graded, user passes, user fails.

All integrations are bundled in the free version.

Premium Features

Unlock additional premium features at pressprimer.com. Premium capabilities are organized across three tiers — Educator, School, and Enterprise — each building on the one below it:

Educator

• Groups & Assignments – Organize students into groups, distribute assignments with per-group due dates, and track completion progress
• Group Reports – Per-group completion dashboards with submission status grids, score distributions with pass-threshold coloring, drill-down student data
• Rubric Builder – Create analytic rubrics with criteria and performance levels, attach them to assignments for structured grading with automatic score calculation and per-criterion feedback
• Per-Criteria Report – See where students are struggling at the rubric-criterion level
• Teacher Role – Teachers manage their own groups and grade only their students’ submissions, while admins retain full access to all data
• Data Retention & Cleanup – Automatically prune old submission files and orphaned data

School (everything in Educator, plus)

• Inline Document Annotations – Mark up PDFs, images, and text submissions directly in the grading interface with highlights, underline, strikethrough, freehand drawing, and comments.
• AI-Assisted Grading – Generate suggested scores and feedback for submissions using OpenAI or Anthropic. Rubric-aware: returns per-criterion scores when a rubric is attached.
• AI Proofreading – Detect spelling and grammar issues in student submissions with one-click insertion of notes into feedback. Configurable locale for regional spelling variants.
• xAPI / LRS Integration – Send Experience API statements to your Learning Record Store. Built-in queueing system ensures reliable delivery.

Enterprise (everything in School, plus)

• AI Content & Plagiarism Detection – Run submitted text through Winston AI, GPTZero, or Originality.ai to surface AI-generated content and plagiarism scores. Auto-check on submission or run manually. Provider-aware grading panel shows scores and interpretation.
• Plagiarism Report – Cohort-wide report with AI-likelihood and originality-score distributions, stat cards, a per-provider confidence breakdown, and a paginated flagged-submissions table with colour-coded scores and tooltips explaining exactly why each row was flagged.
• Anonymous Grading – Per-assignment toggle that masks student identity throughout the grading window so grades aren’t biased by who wrote the work. Identity stays hidden until submissions have been graded and returned.
• Audit Logging – Immutable log of every assignment, submission, grading, settings change, annotation, xAPI emission, plagiarism check, and cleanup run with configurable retention, role-based viewer, and export. Audit Trail report on the Reports page surfaces filterable events with object links and a search box.
• White-Label Branding – Remove all PressPrimer branding and customize with your own plugin name, logos, colors, and custom CSS

Built for Developers

• Action hooks for assignment creation, submission, grading, and email events
• Filter hooks for submission permissions, file access, email templates, and role mapping
• Full REST API for assignments, submissions, files, categories, and statistics
• Custom database tables with automatic schema migration

Documentation & Support

• Knowledge Base

Source Code & Development

The full uncompressed source code for all JavaScript and CSS files is available in our public GitHub repository:

• GitHub Repository

The /src directory contains all unminified source files. The plugin uses webpack for building production assets. To rebuild from source:

1. Clone the repository
2. Run npm install to install dependencies
3. Run npm run build to compile assets

Privacy

PressPrimer Assignment stores student submission data (files, text, grades, and feedback) in your WordPress database under your full control. No data is transmitted to external servers. All submitted files are stored in a protected directory under wp-content/uploads/ppa-submissions/ and served via PHP with permission checks.

The plugin integrates with the WordPress Privacy API:

• Tools > Export Personal Data — includes all submissions, grades, feedback, and uploaded file metadata for the requested user.
• Tools > Erase Personal Data — permanently deletes all submissions, grades, and uploaded files for the requested user.

Administrators can permanently delete all plugin data (database tables, uploaded files, options, and user meta) via Settings > Advanced > “Remove all data on uninstall” before uninstalling the plugin.