I have set the 'Full site name' to a text string under Front Page Settings. In the Essential theme header input screen, I have set the Header Title to 'Site full name'. I have also input a logo.
When displaying the site front (home) page, the logo is present in the header, but there is no text for the full site name. What am I doing wrong??
What version of:
Moodle?
Essential?
Ok, nothing wrong, looking at the code: https://github.com/gjb2048/moodle-theme_essential/blob/master/layout/includes/header.php#L58-L65 - it appears that if you have a logo, then no 'Header title' is displayed. I'll raise an issue to update the explanation. Even after months of working on Essential I'm still learning its logic.
Thanks for the fast response and action. However, I would suggest that if this theme is looking to address the need for an interface that is more 'business like', then the header really needs to have the capability to display both a logo and title. It looks pretty lonely up there if there is only a logo and a front page fundamentally needs a title! So, if nothing changes, as a business user, I would choose to have a title, but then my 'corporate signature' (logo) is not there...
What would be an appropriate work around at this point (excuse the basic questions, but I am a newbie needing to climb the learning curve pretty quickly!)
Hi Peter,
There is as it stands two conflicting requirements of interest for that space:
1. Logo and title.
2. Space.
To gain 1 you have to sacrifice 2. In order to have 2 and have a clean responsive theme you have to sacrifice 1. Therefore as often I have seen that businesses incorporate their words with their logo using a singular bespoke font that is not used elsewhere then it is more viable and cleaner for the logo to be adapted to incorporate both and uploaded as a singular image entity. Therefore to please as many users as I can at the expense of the few I will just change the description text and leave the code as is.
Therefore the 'workaround' is to use a paint program to place the appropriate text on top of the logo.
After all, with being the top downloaded theme with a total of 253917 downloads in the last year alone, I'm loathed to change what appears to be a winning formula.
Hi Gareth,
I guess I will then have to take our logo into a paint program and add text to the right of it to give the title of this learning portal. And flick back and forth to get the size/layout tweaked...
Personally, in the ideal world, I believe this is not a business-friendly solution and that your perception of 'conflicting requirements' is something that the designer of the page should be left to make a choice about, with the tool used (ie Moodle) providing the flexibility to do it. But that is just me, and 253917 downloads might beg to differ....
Fair enough, but it is simply not as easy as providing the option to display both the logo and the text because there needs to be options or combinations for:
And with both the logo and text, then space is an issue, so how much should be given? At what point is the text truncated? Should there be a yet another setting for the size of the text box and how to deal with overflow.... etc. Computing is only simple until you really start to think about it.
This just adds to the complexity and maintainability of an already complex theme. The more granularity there is, the harder it is to deal with issues and more importantly users not getting lost with the multitude of options. Thus overwhelming.
Ok, if this was closed source, then there would be a compelling argument that a given provision was not made. But it's not, all of the source code is provided along with the legal permission to change it if you want. Anybody can change the code to suit them. Essential as it stands is just the starting template to your bespoke implementation. Therefore you do have 'choice', in fact, bucket loads because you are empowered to change anything you want. I know I cannot please all of the people all of the time, so do not even try.
Coming back to complexity at a higher abstraction level, it could be argued that Moodle has evolved to be so feature rich that it is collapsing under its own success and deterring new users who are overwhelmed and at the same time stifling new developments because of the need to be 'backward' compatible. Currently themes can take ages because there are so many individual grains of sand to style. Every now and then a line has to be drawn, breakage with the past created and code refactored so that it becomes a building block once more. Everything needs to evolve, things that don't fade away in the face of new leaner and fitter competition.
Therefore I'm reluctant to make Essential even more complex, in fact it might be better to remove some functionality to make space for new evolved functionality.
Yikes.... and here I thought it might be as simple as the banner being an instance of a label or the like, with two similar instances inside it, one for each of the optional logo and page title! Choose either or both to put logo and text in. Label behaviour takes care of placement etc issues of the contained labels....
I cannot speak to the programming technicalities, just a business user perspective. This market is one ripe for Moodle to get more traction in, if I understand sentiment of some sections of the community based on my (very initial and superficial) review prior to exploring Moodle adoption.
Thanks for your time and obvious enthusiasm for the cause!
Now addressed to a minor extent in: https://github.com/gjb2048/moodle-theme_essential/issues/434.
