Moodle admin on themes feedback wanted!

Moodle admin on themes feedback wanted!

by Gareth J Barnard -
Number of replies: 23
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Hello,

I've raised MDL-69982 and hit a quandary on what users (you) think about setting theme settings.  So:

  1. Do you know if the theme you use is a child theme of Boost?
  2. If it is, would you expect any setting changes in Boost to be reflected in your theme if it didn't support them?  i.e. you put some SCSS in Boost's 'scsspre' setting and expect it to be in your 'child' theme.
  3. Would you want you Moodle site not to be 'Bootstrap' based or you don't know what 'Bootstrap' is?
  4. Or are you not concerned and just want it to 'work'?
  5. Any other thoughts on how themes work / configured?

Please let me know by replying to this post.

Thanks,

Gareth

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In reply to Gareth J Barnard

Re: Moodle admin on themes feedback wanted!

by Steven A -
I might not understand each question completely, but let me try.

  1. I know the theme I use is a child of Boost.
  2. As much as possible, I want all settings in child. I don't want some settings in parent (Boost) and some settings in child. In your example, if I found some SCSS in the parent's (Boost's) scsspre, I'd try to move it to the child's scsspre so that all customizations are in one place (child). Furthermore, if there were a conflict, I'd want child-scsspre to override parent-scsspre.
  3. I want my site to be based on Bootstrap. Bootstrap 4 is fine for my purposes.
  4. I want things to just work, but not at the expense of complexity. I try to keep things simple by balancing what I want with what Moodle does. It's less stressful this way.
  5. Maybe off-topic, but I'd like FontAwesome to be upgraded in core (Boost).
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In reply to Steven A

Re: Moodle admin on themes feedback wanted!

by Gareth J Barnard -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers

Thank you for taking the time to reply and your answers Steven, with:

2. That should already be the case, but its worth knowing about as it's something I need to consider completely if my changes move forward / in my child themes of Boost.

5. There's talk about FontAwesome being updated, see / comment / vote for: MDL-64853 and MDL-67448.  Also, I have FontAwesome 5 free in my Foundation theme and in David Bogner's Squared and Campus themes.

G

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In reply to Gareth J Barnard

Re: Moodle admin on themes feedback wanted!

by Richard Oelmann -
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1. Sometimes only by looking at the code. Would be good to declare parents somewhere visible, though that might be simply making it common practice for themes to include that info in the description or even somewhere on the settings page
2. Yes, but overridable in child (proper inheritance) - child themes are sometimes used to simply provide a departmental tweak to a master theme, so enabling a master theme change to be inherited by the child/multiple children makes sense. But can always be overridden by the child settings/customSCSS
3. YES - Bootstrap is widely used across the net and is easy to find snippets for which can be used by staff directly in their content. I think any change would need to be one which is made centrally for the entire Moodle code, not just the theme as running two frameworks (core using BS while the theme uses something else) would be potentially confusing.
4. It should 'just work' anyway, whatever framework is used ;) smile
5. Not this morning, though midnight/early hours flashes of inspiration come and go :D
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In reply to Richard Oelmann

Re: Moodle admin on themes feedback wanted!

by Gareth J Barnard -
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Thanks for your answers and taking the time to reply Richard, with:

1. Excellent point!
2. That's what I'm trying to achieve, but need to be more sure of the 'override' element, currently the patch would mean that the parent SCSS is used, and 'overriding' will be down to the fact that the child's is processed afterwards, but careful testing would need to take place.
3. Indeed, I'd like separation of framework from the core themes, its an API thing.
4. smile.
5. smile.

G
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In reply to Gareth J Barnard

Re: Moodle admin on themes feedback wanted!

by Steven A -
Just trying to understand. What's the concept regarding #2? Is it that there would be a "base" theme (like Boostrapbase before, although this time able to stand on its own?) with a variety of "child tweaks" that users could install on top of the base theme to override this or that part of it?
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In reply to Steven A

Re: Moodle admin on themes feedback wanted!

by Gareth J Barnard -
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Dear Steven,

With #2, that is already the case with Boost, however, currently with a child theme of Boost, like Adaptable / Fordson etc, then any setting that Boost has which is not in the child theme settings will have its value ignored (unless the child theme has specific code to cope with this).

I hope this makes sense.

Kind regards,

Gareth
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In reply to Gareth J Barnard

Re: Moodle admin on themes feedback wanted!

by Steven A -
Hi, Gareth. Thanks for explaining.
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In reply to Gareth J Barnard

Re: Moodle admin on themes feedback wanted!

by Emma Richardson -
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1. I would have to look so offhand, I am not sure if my theme is a child theme of boost but pretty sure it is.
2. No, I would want all the settings to be set in the theme settings, not in boost. Two places to change settings is confusing.
3. I think I would want bootstrap functionality.
4. Overall, I definitely just want it to work!
5. I have seen again and again that the most popular themes offer a huge amount of options at the GUI level. I have always thought that Moodle's minimalist approach is not necessarily the best approach when it comes to themes. People want to be able to set options and personalize their theme without learning css.
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In reply to Emma Richardson

Re: Moodle admin on themes feedback wanted!

by Gareth J Barnard -
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Thanks Emma for taking the time to reply, really interesting perspective, especially point 5. And your point 2 makes sense even if the underlying OO model does not to me.
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In reply to Gareth J Barnard

Re: Moodle admin on themes feedback wanted!

by Emma Richardson -
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Yes, I can see your point but you have to design for the masses and honestly, there are probably way more moodle admins than you would think that do not even understand the concept of a child theme...or maybe it is not that they do not understand it but it does not come into their thinking when they are installing a theme...
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In reply to Emma Richardson

Re: Moodle admin on themes feedback wanted!

by Mary Cooch -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators
Just popping in to say that as a Moodle admin who's not a themer or a developer type person, I would probably give exactly the same answers as Emma's 1 to 5, and I also agree with the statement "here are probably way more moodle admins than you would think that do not even understand the concept of a child theme...or maybe it is not that they do not understand it but it does not come into their thinking when they are installing a theme..."
I (think) I know what a child theme is but wouldn't want to have to think about it or understand any consequences of it it when I am installing a new theme.
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In reply to Mary Cooch

Re: Moodle admin on themes feedback wanted!

by Gareth J Barnard -
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Thanks Emma and Mary,

MDL-69982 has posed a bit of a quandary, so I do want to be sure, get the users opinions and thus have the code that operates Moodle in the way desired.

G
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In reply to Gareth J Barnard

Re: Moodle admin on themes feedback wanted!

by Hugo Ribeiro -
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Hope this is still useful but here it goes:

1- Yes, I use (always) Boost child themes
2- No. I would expect that the settings on the theme options would relate to that theme only. IMHO a child theme should not  inherent settings. Those should only apply to the theme where they belong. The admin might not even know that a theme is a child of Boost and could be confusing to change settings on a different theme.
3- Yes. Bootstrap should be supported as long as is supported through all areas of Moodle.
4- Of course having it to work is the main thing, but using a widespread framework would make development and presentation easier.
5- Obviously, themes are one of the most important pieces of moodle and we are all very anxious about 4.0 (sorry for the lack of suggestions)  

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In reply to Hugo Ribeiro

Re: Moodle admin on themes feedback wanted!

by Gareth J Barnard -
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Dear Hugo,

Thank you for taking the time to reply, that's really helpful and just the different perspective I was wanting to discover.

Kind regards,

Gareth
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In reply to Gareth J Barnard

Re: Moodle admin on themes feedback wanted!

by Gareth J Barnard -
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Thanks again to everyone who has responded, it has really helped to make a decision on MDL-69982, and indeed I hope this post and thread will prove useful to theme developers in understanding the needs of the user. I certainly won't forget about it smile.
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In reply to Gareth J Barnard

Re: Moodle admin on themes feedback wanted!

by Chris Kenniburg -
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  1. Child Theme but that is because it was advertised as such (and I wrote it)
  2. I expect it to inherit from Boost and this is both a blessing and curse.  Sometimes things are introduced that breaks styling.  Other times it is a blessing because you don't have to update the child theme's styling for new elements.
  3. I am happy with Bootstrap.
  4. I really just want it to work.  I've invested in Bootstrap but could care less as long as there was a strong enough community supporting it to provide support and creative examples of code.
  5. Moodle can and should break stuff in order to move forward.  No theme or plugin should stop progress in pursuit of making Moodle relevant and modern.  This jump to Moodle 4 makes everyone nervous.  I plan on taking in all that Moodle 4 is and then look at how a theme or other plugins might round the edges of the new layouts and features.

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In reply to Chris Kenniburg

Re: Moodle admin on themes feedback wanted!

by Gareth J Barnard -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers

Thanks for your reply and thoughts Chris.

With '2' that pertains to the settings who's values aren't inherited, and yet as you've indicated, the CSS is.

With '5', I've already updated my Foundation theme to work on a alpha of M4.0 and it was fairly easy to do.  But the best thing has been to make use of some of the new core UI components.

Kind regards,

Gareth

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In reply to Gareth J Barnard

Re: Moodle admin on themes feedback wanted!

by Chris Kenniburg -
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That's good to hear. I will have to check out Foundation. Does it maintain the new look of Boost?
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In reply to Chris Kenniburg

Re: Moodle admin on themes feedback wanted!

by Gareth J Barnard -
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Ah, you might of guessed by now that I'm a bit of a rebel, so Foundation is what I want it to be. So it uses some components, but is intentionally different from Boost.
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In reply to Gareth J Barnard

Re: Moodle admin on themes feedback wanted!

by Ross Lovell -

  1. Yes, the theme my school uses is a child theme of Boost, which I coded.


  2. I would expect any setting changes or SCSS to be kept in the settings for the child theme rather than in Boosts settings. That way I wouldn’t need to look in two different places when updating things.


  3. I’m heavily invested in Bootstrap for Moodle and wouldn’t want it to change or be removed. I’ve coded my schools theme making heavy use of Bootstrap features and I make use of Bootstrap features in the Atto Editor’s HTML view to output alerts, tabs, accordions, etc in Moodle for activities and resources.


  4. I mostly just want things to work. I want to know that the code I’ve written for the theme isn’t suddenly going to break unexpectedly after an upgrade.


  5. My school relies on the Microsoft 365 Integration plugin (o365-moodle) and the Microsoft 365 Teams Theme (theme_boost_o365teams) for user syncing from Azure Active Directory, and linking Moodle courses to Microsoft Teams. I wouldn’t want the plugin and theme to break in such a way that they couldn’t be upgraded and we couldn’t upgrade to Moodle 4.0 and above. Should such a thing happen my school would probably abandon Moodle in favour of using Microsoft Teams exclusively.

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In reply to Ross Lovell

Re: Moodle admin on themes feedback wanted!

by Gareth J Barnard -
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Thanks for your reply Ross.

With '2', would you expect the settings that are only in Boost to apply or not apply when using a child theme of Boost? i.e. They don't at the moment, the SCSS / CSS does but not the other settings.

With '3' I would doubt that. What I would like to see is multiple framework support.

With '4', me too, however the nature of software change is that it will break things as a consequence of progress.

With '5' I can't say what will happen to those contributed plugins. That's more of a question for the developers of them and perhaps Moodle HQ given the potential loss of market share.
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In reply to Gareth J Barnard

Re: Moodle admin on themes feedback wanted!

by Ross Lovell -
Hi Gareth

2. I would expect the Boost only settings to apply to just the Boost theme and not the child them of Boost. That way I wouldn't be hunting in two different locations for settings that affect Moodle's appearance.

3. I'm more than happy for multiple framework support to be added to Moodle, so long as I can keep on using Bootstrap for my schools theme and use it's features in activities and resources via the Atto Editor.

4. I completely agree with you. Although I would like things to just keep working I know that things will break at some point. I always make sure to create server checkpoints before I install updates. It's saved my skin a few times.

5. Very true. I'll be keeping a close eye on how things go with those plugins, hopefully they'll be updated in a timely fashion so that we can upgrade to Moodle 4.0 without too much of a delay.

I'm fully aware that come Moodle 4.0 I'll have to revisit my schools theme and maybe even create a new one from scratch in order to get the most of 4.0. Thinking about it I'm perfectly fine with that. It'll give me a chance to start with a clean slate and tidy up my code using what I've learned as a foundation.
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In reply to Ross Lovell

Re: Moodle admin on themes feedback wanted!

by Gareth J Barnard -
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Dear Ross,

With '2' it does not apply the settings unless the child theme is written in such a way as to make it do so.

G
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