General help

Actually, I was tinkering and I am thinking that if there are no matching courses it should just remain hidden. 

I am also trying to take out H2 heading from the renderer and I will use another means to display the titles.  My idea is that on the admin page the site admin can enter in text for both recommended and featured course sliders.  If tags are found it would display the tag text along with the tagged courses.  Same for featured.  

 Initially, just playing around I did this:

 if($courserenderer->promoted_courses('tags')) {echo ('<h2>Recommended for you...</h2>'); } 

 echo $courserenderer->promoted_courses('tags');

I would replace the "Recommended for you..." text with the theme setting that a site admin enters.

It seems to work and is simple enough.  It would be cleaner to put this into the course renderer, so maybe that is the next step so that if we re-use the function for various "types" then we can also use the proper heading text for each output.  

Richard,

I worked it out using this starting around line 130:

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public function promoted_courses($type) {

        global $CFG, $OUTPUT, $DB, $PAGE, $USER;

        $featuredcontent = '';

        /* Get Featured courses id from DB */

        $featuredids = theme_pioneer_get_setting('promotedcourses');

        if ($type == 'tags') {

            $sql = 'SELECT DISTINCT itemid FROM {tag_instance} WHERE itemtype = "course" AND tagid IN(SELECT tagid FROM {tag_instance} WHERE itemtype = "user" AND itemid = '.$USER->id.')';

            $featuredidsarray = $DB->get_records_sql($sql, array());

            $featuredids = '';

            $promotedtitle = theme_pioneer_get_setting('promotedtag', 'format_text');

            $promotedlinktext = theme_pioneer_get_setting('promotedtaglinktext', 'format_text');

            $promotedlink = theme_pioneer_get_setting('promotedtaglink', 'format_text');

            foreach ($featuredidsarray as $fid) {

                $featuredids .= $fid->itemid.',';

            }

         }

        if ($type == 'setting') {

            $promotedtitle = theme_pioneer_get_setting('promotedtitle', 'format_text');

            $promotedlinktext = theme_pioneer_get_setting('promotedlinktext', 'format_text');

            $promotedlink = theme_pioneer_get_setting('promotedlink', 'format_text');

        }

        $featuredcontent = '';

        /* Get Featured courses id from DB */

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Moving the title, text and link url into the if statement and then removing those three items from the original location worked.   Now I just have to add the theme admin settings for promotedtag items and it can utilize the same function with types.

Maybe this was what you were thinking???