LearnDash 4.15 Design Features & Design Upgrade Plugin Compatibility

Some of them, yes. Others, no.

The options in LD 4.15 are very limited compared to what we offer. They do automatically apply some CSS, even if you don’t use any of their options, and some of that CSS will change the look of your site.

As long as you are using version 2.22 of our plugin or higher, and you set design options with our plugin, they will override the LearnDash design options.

If you are still using version 2.21 or below of our plugin, you can expect some issues. Things like buttons, progress labels, course content headings, etc. might be using the option in the “LearnDash Styles” Customizer panel instead of Design Upgrade styles.

Features that Design Upgrade offers that LearnDash Styles does not, those were never affected.

In most cases, no. There might be one or two LearnDash Styles that override ours, but in order to make all of our plugin options work, we had to write some really aggressive CSS to override LearnDash’s CSS. This means that our plugin’s styles will win out over LearnDash’s styles in 90+% of cases.

The new LearnDash Styles do not provide any hover style options. Our plugin has always included these options, and continues to do so.

If you want access to button & link hover styles, you’ll need to use Design Upgrade Pro for LearnDash, and make sure you’re on version 2.22 or higher.

I’m still figuring this out. Because of how our free & pro plugins are written, we share a CSS file for much of the functionality in both plugins. This means we aren’t making updates in two different files every time we change something or add a new feature.

Because of how aggressive LearnDash has been with their CSS rules, and how many new features they added to their own “LearnDash Styles” panel, there’s a lot of styles we had to override to make sure our pro plugin worked properly. This also means that our styles will get way more aggressive in the free version, and since there’s no Customizer options to change those styles, this means the default colors and styles will override the ones that LearnDash provides.

This is far from ideal, and I didn’t want to have to do that, but to keep a free version working as it always has, my only option would be to rewrite and manage an entirely new CSS file. I don’t think that’s something I’m willing to do for a free plugin, especially when our pro version still just costs $29/yr., which is the same as when we launched the plugin in June of 2018.

We haven’t raised the price in 6+ years, and it’s an incredible value for all the features it contains. So as of now, the current free version will have some design issues, and the only way to design your site the way you want is by using our pro plugin.

As long as you’re using version 2.22 of Design Upgrade Pro, you can safely update LearnDash to 4.15 and higher, and not lose any of your design options.

If you’re still on 2.21 or below, you’ll need to stay on LearnDash 4.14 to use our plugin without issues.

We released version 2.22 on July 21, 2024 and emailed all past & present customers. Version 2.22.1 is the latest version that contains fixes to all the design issues with LearnDash 4.15+.

I’m not sure yet.

I hope to have a conversation with LearnDash in the near future about their plans for the LearnDash Styles. If they plan to continue adding design options to it, and those options overlap with ours, there will come a point where it won’t make sense to continue managing our plugin.

But we’re a long way away from that at this point.

As long as we still have a decent amount of users using our plugin, and getting value from it, I’ll do my best to continue maintaining it.