Design Upgrade for LearnDash vs Gallery Image Captions (GIC)

LearnDash is a powerful learning management system (LMS) for managing your online courses, but there are some areas where the design falls short. In order to provide your students with an exceptional learning experience, you need a professional design. Enter Design Upgrade for LearnDash Design Upgrade for LearnDash completely redesigns every aspect of LearnDash so that it closely resembles your existing WordPress theme. No settings or custom code. Just activate & enjoy! Compatible with LD3 & “Legacy” Templates We’ll automatically detect whether you’re using the “LearnDash 3.0” or “Legacy” template, and assign styles appropriately. If you’re still running LearnDash 2.x, all of the same design upgrades that you’ve always enjoyed will still be there. See below for a list of what’s new. Features Tested with LearnDash 4.3.0.2 NEW: Improved styles for the new LearnDash registration process/page Global: Larger clickable areas for all course content, navigation & Focus Mode areas Buttons: All buttons have matching rounded corners & increased font size Font Sizes: These will now be inherited from your theme, which should increase your font sizes across the board Focus Mode: Improved sidebar tray design, Course Sections, shadow added to mobile menu, collapse arrow flips to show current menu state, and more. Focus Mode: Top navigation bar received several small improvements Focus Mode: Improved styles for Focus Mode comments, which were added in LearnDash 3.1 Animations: Subtle animations for LearnDash tooltips & the Focus Mode top menu Profile: Several styles were improved & standardized Login/Registration: Unified styles for all form fields Course Grid: Equal height columns & other small tweaks WisdmLabs Ratings, Reviews & Feedback design upgrades Design improvements for WisdmLabs’ LearnDash Group Registration plugin Improved print styles Also: Small tweaks were made to assignments, pagination, the “User Status” widget and more. LearnDash 2.x “Legacy” Features Tested with LearnDash 2.6.6. We no longer support these features and highly recommend using the LearnDash 3.0 active template. Much improved course grid styles, equal height cards & no more weird spacing issues 👍 All fonts have been reset to use your theme’s default font family, size & color All PNG icons have been replaced with comparable SVGs All complete/incomplete icons for lesson/topic/quiz lists have been moved to the right for better consistency Spacing around & between elements has been adjusted to provide greater consistency throughout All LearnDash widgets now have more consistent spacing & sizing, including improvements to Course Info & Course Navigation Styling for the [ld_profile] shortcode has been completely revamped Completely revamped & restyled quiz elements 💯 Improved design of the statistics modal window (for quizzes), including row highlights on hover Larger pager navigation buttons to improve usability Full support for RTL languages Who is this for? Brand new LearnDash users: There is absolutely no reason not to try it out. At the very least, it will give your site a more consistent design. If you plan to customize LearnDash further, you can still do so using a child theme or Additional CSS in the Customizer. Seasoned LearnDash veterans: If you have not made any customizations to your LearnDash design, but would like to improve it, give us a shot. You might want to try it out on a test site first, but you can deactivate it with one click and return to your previous design. You might also want to give your students a heads up that you’re updating the design. But we feel confident that they’ll like it 🙂 LearnDash developers: If you’re a developer who builds LearnDash sites for your clients, this could save you hours (maybe even days) of development time. LearnDash’s markup & CSS is a beast to customize. This will give you a much easier baseline to work with. We designed the plugin to be just specific enough to override LearnDash’s default styles, but not so specific that you’ll need to use a ton of selectors to override our specifity. All CSS in child themes and Additional CSS will take precedence over our styles. Pro Version Need custom styles? Our pro version uses the Customizer to bring you over 110 customizable design options. Completely customize your LearnDash site with just a few clicks. Pro Features Achievements Add-On: 10 new customization options Show/Hide various course & profile features Disable expand/collapse links & show all by default Course Content Lists: Update background & text colors, hover effects, customize line separators, remove the list count numbers and more Progress Bar: Customize the color, border radius & height, add stripes, and animate the bar on page load Buttons: Add your own background & text colors [ld_profile]: Avatar shape, custom “edit profile” link, hide profile info, hide quiz information, and more Login/Registration Popup: 10+ design options Focus Mode: 20+ design options, including 7 for Focus Mode comments Course Navigation Widget: 15+ design options Course Grid Add-On: 20+ design options Alerts: 9 custom colors, plus a few other options Tooltips: customize the background & text color Uncanny Groups: buttons, border radius & improved styles are applied to many Uncanny Groups frontend elements Tin Canny Reporting: 12 design options for Tin Canny reports on the front-end Upgrade to Pro Today » Theme Compatibility Design Upgrade for LearnDash should work on most themes, assuming they have not customized the LearnDash markup in any way. While we can’t guarantee full compatibility, we have tested with the following themes. Tested With We have tested with the following themes, and they all appear to be compatible: Astra Divi GeneratePress eLumine (when using the “LearnDash 3.0” active template or eLumine’s “Elementary Layouts”) LearnMate Edufire Neve OceanWP Incompatible Themes BuddyBoss Platform (released June 2019) Boss. / Social Learner (If you deactivate the “Boss for LearnDash” plugin, it will still work in “Legacy” mode) eLumine (when using the “Legacy” active template or any version of LearnDash before 3.0) Incompatible Plugins LearnDash Visual Customizer by SnapOrbital: The Visual Customizer takes a similar approach to designing LearnDash components, and thus the code conflicts with ours. Uncanny Owl Toolkit Compatibility We recognize the Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit by Uncanny Owl is a popular LearnDash plugin that adds some nice features. We’re in the process of making our plugin fully compatible with theirs. Here’s where we are so far: Reset Progress button: Button styles upgraded Simple Course Timer modal: Button styles upgraded [uo_dashboard]: Styles upgraded [uo_courses]: Styles upgraded [uo_breadcrumbs]: Compatible; Considering upgrades [uo_lessons_topics_grid]: Compatible; Considering upgrades [uo_login_ui]: Compatible; Considering upgrades NOTE: Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit styles are only upgraded if you’re using the “LearnDash 3.0” active template. Styles do not apply to the “Legacy” template. Plugin Compatibility Ratings, Reviews & Feedback plugin by WisdmLabs As of version 2.5, we now enhance the styles of the Ratings, Reviews & Feedback plugin by WisdmLabs. For a detailed overview, please see our article on ldx.design. Group Registration plugin by WisdmLabs As of version 2.6, we now enhance the styles of the Group Registration plugin by WisdmLabs. General design improvements will be made to all frontend elements output by the [wdm_group_users] shortcode. Browser Support A few techniques we use to improve the LearnDash design are only supported in the latest versions of major browsers. For the most part, as long as you’re not using Internet Explorer, most (if not all) of our plugin’s design upgrades will work. We support the latest versions of the following browsers: Google Chrome Mozilla Firefox Apple Safari Microsoft Edge Chrome for Android Firefox for Android iOS Safari (not tested, but should work) We do not support any version of Internet Explorer, however, we do offer a few code snippets & suggestions to fix a few issues in IE11. See the IE11 section below in FAQ. Roadmap As LearnDash adds new features, it is our goal to keep this plugin updated. Features planned for future release: New features for the Quiz Reporting Extension by WisdmLabs Compatibility with more Uncanny LearnDash Toolkit modules We’d love to hear from you! Does something look weird with your theme? Is there something we missed? Wouldn’t it be cool if… We tested it on a handful of popular themes, but we couldn’t possibly cover them all. If you have any feedback, please let us know in the support forum. Credits Paint brush icon made by Freepik, courtesy of flaticon.com. Licensed under CC3.0 BY. Gradient by colorful gradients From within WordPress Visit “Plugins > Add New” Search for “Design Upgrade for LearnDash” Click the “Install” button Click the “Activate” button There are no settings to configure. An improved design will automatically be applied to all LearnDash elements on your site.

With GIC, you can display the title, caption, and description image attributes. You can also change/filter the rendering HTML to whatever you want. After installing and activating GIC, write your filter and add the WordPress Gallery shortcode to your page. If you’ve been dreaming of writing a filter to customise the gallery image captions, then this plugin is for you. Visit the live demo page. Motivation The default WordPress gallery shortcode will only display the caption from the media’s attachment metadata. Sometimes it’s nice to display more like the title—even the description. The GIC plugin overrides the WordPress gallery shortcode function to create a hook. With this hook you can do a little bit more than just displaying the caption. Some premium themes hide the caption completely. This leaves photography lovers like me scratching their head and spending precious time cobbling together makeshift caption blocks. Usage Custom Filter For Displaying Captions The crux of this plugin is the ability to filter the gallery image caption. The galimgcaps_gallery_image_caption hook makes this possible. For the usage examples below, this is the filter used. /** * Custom Filter for Gallery Image Captions * * Note: Avoid altering captiontag, selector, and itemtag. */ function mlc_gallery_image_caption($attachment_id, $captiontag, $selector, $itemtag) { $id = $attachment_id; // Grab the meta from the GIC plugin. $my_image_meta = galimgcaps_get_image_meta($id); /** * Here's where to customise the caption content. * * This example uses the meta title, caption, and description. * * You can display any value from the $my_image_meta array. * You can add your own HTML too. */ return " " . "Title: " . $my_image_meta['title'] . " " . "Caption: " . $my_image_meta['caption'] . " ". "Description: ". $my_image_meta['description'] . " "; } add_filter('galimgcaps_gallery_image_caption', 'mlc_gallery_image_caption', 10, 4); Feel free to use this filter code as a starter template. After activating the GIC plugin, add the code above to your child theme’s functions.php file. Rename the function and tweak the return string to suit your needs. New Filter To Get Custom Fields /** * New GIC 1.4.0 filter for custom meta fields. */ function gic_add_custom_fields( $image_meta, $attachment ) { // This is how you add a custom fields to the array that // GIC uses to display captions. $image_meta['credit_text'] = $attachment->credit_text; $image_meta['credit_link'] = $attachment->credit_link; return $image_meta; } add_filter( 'galimgcaps_image_meta', 'gic_add_custom_fields', 10, 2 ); To use these two custom fields, your galimgcaps_gallery_image_caption would look something like this. function mlc_gallery_image_caption($attachment_id, $captiontag, $selector, $itemtag) { $id = $attachment_id; // Grab the meta from the GIC plugin. $my_image_meta = galimgcaps_get_image_meta($id); // If there's credit, give it where it's due complete with link. $credit = $my_image_meta['description'] ? " Credit : " . $my_image_meta['credit_text'] . " " . " " : ''; /** * With GIC 1.4.0 you can also add custom media attachment fields * to your captions. */ return " " . " Caption : " . $my_image_meta['caption'] . " " . $credit . " "; } add_filter('galimgcaps_gallery_image_caption', 'mlc_gallery_image_caption', 10, 4); Since v1.2.0, GIC automatically adds an Image ID column to your WordPress Media Library. This is to help you add the image IDs to your GIC shortcodes. See where GIC automatically adds an Image ID column to your WordPress Media Library. New in v1.4.0, GIC support custom media attachment fields. Usage Example 1 Shortcode For starters, let’s use a tag for the caption tag. [gallery size="full" columns="1" link="file" ids="114" captiontag="p"] Styling Let’s override the generated styles with our own style for one particular image. /* Targeting a Specific Image */ /* Add some padding all around. */ #gallery-1 .gallery-item, #gallery-1 .gallery-item p { padding: 1%; } /* Add some moody background with typewriter font. */ #gallery-1 .gallery-item { color: whitesmoke; background-color: black; font-size: 1.25rem; font-family: Courier, monospace; text-align: left !important; } Usage Example 2 Shortcode A 2 column x 1 row gallery with large size images using an H4 for the caption. [gallery size="large" columns="2" link="file" ids="109,106" captiontag="h4"] A 3 column x 1 row gallery with medium size images using a blockquote for the caption. [gallery size="medium" columns="3" link="file" ids="109,106,108" captiontag="blockquote"] Did you notice that we are using in the second shortcode? Let’s give it try just for kicks. Styling /* 1. Style the H4 Used in the Caption Example */ h4 { color: #777777 !important; font-size: 1.2rem !important; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif !important; } /* 2. Help Align the Blockquote */ #gallery-3 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 40px !important; } Responsive CSS Example I recommend adding the following media queries if you use galleries with more than one image. The two media queries below will stack 2×1 and 3×1 galleries into a 1 column x n rows or 2 column x n rows as needed. /* Media Queries for Responsive Galleries */ /** * Styling based on article "How To: Style Your WordPress Gallery" * by Par Nicolas. * * https://theme.fm/how-to-style-your-wordpress-gallery/ */ /* Mobile Portrait Breakpoint - 1 column */ @media only screen and (max-width: 719.998px) { .gallery-columns-2 .gallery-item, .gallery-columns-3 .gallery-item { width: 100% !important; } } /* Mobile Landscape and Tablet Breakpoints - 2 columns */ @media only screen and (min-width: 720px) and (max-width: 1024px) { .gallery-columns-3 .gallery-item { width: 50% !important; } }