Hi all,
I love Moodle! It seems to have developed a lot since I looked at it last. Contextual help and a nice clear layout. It is all great stuff from a usability perspective.
I have one suggestion though. I would like to see the site navigation become a little more intuitive. I find that when navigating through the site even I, a very competent computer user, feel lost.
It is not immediately clear to me which course I am in. Within each course the navigation, consisting of just a drop down box, I don't find very easy to use.
For my site I would like to define a slightly different banner and colour scheme for each course. I suppose it will be fairly easy to do this.
I will be using the 'topic' course format. In the header and footer files I would like to make some dynamically created navigation tabs. Each 'topic' would have a different tab. Then within each tab there would be a horizontal sub menu for that topic. The sub menu would list the resources and activities etc for that topic. This would not take up valuable horizontal screen space but would give a clear indication of where the user is within the course and where he/she can go from here.
I successfully created a tabbed navigation system for this site :
http://hellosensei.heian.jp
And I want to do something similar for my moodle site I will be creating. Will be glad to pass on the relevant code to integrate into moodle.
Has anyone done something like this already? I don't want to be reinventing the wheel.
I will need to be able to access in the header php file the current topic and activity (not the current module) so that I can construct the tab menu with appropriate tab selected and generate the appropriate sub menus. Any pointers to relevant documentation on accessing this info from within the header file appreciated.
I hope if done well this will be a great addition to the moodle project. As we make bigger and more complex sites the need for a well thought out navigation system which help our users quickly access the page they are looking for is very important. I will be not be able to work on this immediately but hope to find time in the next month.
Jamie
oh.
I think I just found the answers to some of my questions. I like very much the dynamic tree mentioned here :
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=6497
I guess if I take a good look at what has been done here I can learn lessons about how to code my tabbed navigation system.
The dynamic tree seems to solve alot of the problem of improving navigation. I think a tabbed navigation system might be nice though as all code for this would be handled by the server and thus would work on any browser client.
Jamie
I think I just found the answers to some of my questions. I like very much the dynamic tree mentioned here :
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=6497
I guess if I take a good look at what has been done here I can learn lessons about how to code my tabbed navigation system.
The dynamic tree seems to solve alot of the problem of improving navigation. I think a tabbed navigation system might be nice though as all code for this would be handled by the server and thus would work on any browser client.
Jamie
I like your website for the lessonplans, especially the tabs: are these php-scripts available?
Sorry the scripts for the site are not currently open sourced. The site was developed on a grant from the Japanese ministry of education. It is just the framework you are looking at which I developed. We are hoping to have some more content to put up.
I want to develope a similar tabbed navigation system for moodle but I won't be doing it for the next month or so. I have to make a trip up to Nepal for a few weeks! When I get back I will be developing a site based on moodle and I have more additions planned for moodle which I will also make open source. I'm interested in adding flash based reusable components to moodle.
See also here for more info on what I'm working on :
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=10979
I want to develope a similar tabbed navigation system for moodle but I won't be doing it for the next month or so. I have to make a trip up to Nepal for a few weeks! When I get back I will be developing a site based on moodle and I have more additions planned for moodle which I will also make open source. I'm interested in adding flash based reusable components to moodle.
See also here for more info on what I'm working on :
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=10979