Navigation Buttons

Navigation Buttons

by Toan Tran -
Number of replies: 7
Hello,
We are setting up a few courses for our school, and one of the requirements is to have navigation buttons to go to previous/next pages. It is daunting for a student to figure out where he/she was in a course of over 100 items.

Although I've developed in other languages, I'm very new to PHP and even newer to Moodle development, so I'm not sure what options I have. I'm not even sure if a solution is already out there.

Ideally, I need navigation buttons to appear at the top and/or bottom(for those really long contents) of the module contents. I'm not sure if there's a way to globally do it or if I have to do it inside the modules. And I'm not sure what objects I have at my disposal at run-time to generate the correct links.

Please note the red regions in my attached image

Any help would be much appreciated.
Attachment navButtons.png
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Toan Tran

Re: Navigation Buttons

by Toan Tran -
UPDATE: I found a Book module that does similar paging functions, but I need this functionality to work for at least the "web page" and the SCORM modules (global would be nice).

Thanks again in advance.
In reply to Toan Tran

Re: Navigation Buttons

by Martyn Eggleton -
Have you come across flex page I think it might give you what you need, I am currently using it happily (I am told by the guy I'm working with that it is simaliar to book) it allows you to construct pages that have activitivies blocks or html and resources on them that have forward and back buttons on.

The tutorial is here I suggest you follow the link, login as a guest then try the link again.
the download is here

Hope that helps
Average of ratings: Useful (1)
In reply to Martyn Eggleton

Re: Navigation Buttons

by Toan Tran -
Thanks for the recommendation. I'll check it out.
In reply to Martyn Eggleton

Re: Navigation Buttons

by Toan Tran -
Hi Martyn,
I just tested out the flex page, and it seems very promising and will need some further research. Thanks for the recommendation.

One of the major problems of switching to this format is that we have about 8 courses each with almost 1000 pages currently in the topics tree format, so redoing them in that format will be very time-consuming. Module names are duplicated all over because we relied on topics tree to keep everything organized in a hierarchical format. Moreover, Flex Pages does not support all of the modules we use.

Does anyone know if there's a function or object that will give me a collection or array of links in a particular course?

Thanks again

Toan
In reply to Toan Tran

Re: Navigation Buttons

by Frank Ralf -
Hi Toan,

For getting started with custom Moodle development you should have a look at the "Introduction to Moodle Programming" course (http://dev.moodle.org/course/view.php?id=2) and the technical documentation at http://phpdocs.moodle.org and http://xref.moodle.org.

/lib/datalib.php seems like a promising place for the kind of functions you're looking for.

And you should have a look at Theme basics#header.html and footer.html pages as these will be the obvious places for additional navigation. Most of Moodle's global variables ($CFG, $THEME and $COURSE) are available in those files, see http://dev.moodle.org/mod/resource/view.php?id=35 for details.

hth
Frank


PS:
The Lesson module provides a more structured approach for course material.

In reply to Frank Ralf

Re: Navigation Buttons

by Toan Tran -
Thanks for the links and directions, Frank.

I'm looking at the xref link, and it seems there's an overwhelming number of libraries I need to sift through; nonetheless, I think this is the direction I need to go.

Thanks again. I'll keep this thread updated.