HTML course home pages - Alternatives?

Re: HTML course home pages - Alternatives?

by Mary Evans -
Number of replies: 3
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Hi Jaques,

How your Moodle site looks and works depends not so much on the theme, but in the way you require it to look and work.

Moodle Themes are restricted in some degree to the way Moodle works, so the themes that are added to the download are the themes which will work best, such as Boost, Clean and More themes.

If the people who created your website are avaialble to change the way the Boost theme or Clean or More themes look then they will probably be able to customise one of the themes named to suit your needs.

Thanks
Mary

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In reply to Mary Evans

Re: HTML course home pages - Alternatives?

by Jacques LeCavalier -

Hi, Mary.

Apologies for the delay in replying - with another question of course.

I guess what I'm trying to do is have our team become more self-reliant in creating our course home pages, with as little CSS coding as possible. I was hoping I could find some Moodle themes, or even course home page templates, that would help us move away from coding, and constantly adjusting code that others have developed for us.

I'm even looking at tools like Webflow and Adobe Muse that are meant to reduce coding, but that seem to have steep learning curves as well.

There is little discussion in the Moodle community about this, so perhaps I'm still asking the wrong questions...

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In reply to Jacques LeCavalier

Re: HTML course home pages - Alternatives?

by Richard Oelmann -
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Hi Jacques, 

I think, from your question that what you may actually be looking for is a course format (maybe in conjunction with a theme) rather than a theme in its own. 

I'm not sure there is one that does exactly what you want, but it may be as simple as maintaining your navigation in a label on your initial course page, and using Justin Hunt's new Snippet plugin for Atto to make the process more sustainable. 

You could make a series of Snippets and make them available for staff. The structure and css are maintained in the snippet and the staff fill in just the necessary details based on placeholders. 


For the other part of your question, yes (personally) I would make use of th bootstrap framework as it helps control the look and feel (again for consistency) through your theme. 

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In reply to Richard Oelmann

Re: HTML course home pages - Alternatives?

by Jacques LeCavalier -

Thanks SO much for your response, Richard. 

Yes, indeed, Course Formats are what I had in mind. I kept searching for "course home page" and "course templates", etc. without finding anything...

We have been using the tabbed Onetopic format - I'd love to figure out how to combine that with the Board (Grid and Blocks) format I just saw under Course Formats.

Your other suggestion re. Snippets is also excellent. Providing simple forms for re-using and styling snippets would go a long way towards simplifying course page creation.

You've given me two great paths to follow. I'm very grateful!

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