Moodle activities inline display broken?

Moodle activities inline display broken?

by Phil Cobley -
Number of replies: 10

Hi all,

This is my first post, so apologies if I get any conventions/formatting/etiquette wrong.

I am a Moodle administrator and have been for some years.  One of the sites I manage, which is running 3.11, has begun displaying incorrectly over the last few days, and I'm not sure why.  I wanted to check if this has happened to anyone else?

It appears that when I have a course in Topics format, any activity links seem to get displayed across the page by any descriptive text for that activity, or any activity restriction information.  It is as if the activity link is now "inline" with the descriptive text, but gets pushed to the end of the descriptive text container.  Even if I put a carriage return in the description, the text moves down on the page, but the activity link still ends up half way across the screen.  If I turn off the descriptive text then the activity link goes back to sitting on the left alignment of the page.

In the embedded image I have blanked out the lesson names for privacy purposes, as the courses are sensitive in nature, but you can see that the two displaced activities are pushed to the right edge by the description, whilst the other activities (i.e. "Lesson 1 Test") are fine, as no description is displayed.


Has anyone seen this before, or have any idea what might be causing this, please?

This was absolutely fine last week, so I have no idea why it has suddenly changed or stopped working.  The problem happens to all types of activity, and is visible both in Firefox and Microsoft Edge/Chrome.  

Any assistance/thoughts would be greatly appreciated smile

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In reply to Phil Cobley

Re: Moodle activities inline display broken?

by Howard Miller -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers
The usual reason is someone has copied and pasted some "bad" HTML into a label on the page. We usually find that HTML lists are the problem. They can completely screw up the page. It's tricky to track down and fix.
Average of ratings: Useful (2)
In reply to Howard Miller

Re: Moodle activities inline display broken?

by Mark Sharp -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers
It also usually means the Course administration menu doesn't work properly.
My method to fix goes along the lines of: put the course into One section per page, to find out roughly where the dodgy html is, then edit each activity to eliminate the error.
However, if the edit links are broken you'll have to rely on looking for the cm id in the html and handcoding the edit link.
Alternatively, I have a handy plugin for just this situation: https://moodle.org/plugins/tool_modedit
Average of ratings: Useful (3)
In reply to Mark Sharp

Re: Moodle activities inline display broken?

by Phil Cobley -
Thank you both for the quick responses, I really appreciate it 😊👍

I'll download the plugin and take a look, thank you, although is there any chance it could potentially be something else? I'm the only one who administers our site, and I've not done any HTML updates or changes in the last week (I typically do any text changes in source view in the editors to ensure there's no unnecessary tags or formatting, to keep it clean). This also seems to be impacting both our main site and test sites, across all courses and activities, so it seems to be site level, from what I've been able to see this afternoon.

So, any other possible causes that you can think of, that I could possibly explore alongside the html lists theory?
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In reply to Phil Cobley

Re: Moodle activities inline display broken?

by Paul Holden -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Moodle Workplace team Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
Hi Phil,

Can you replicate the same using Boost and/or Classic themes? Is there any additional CSS configured in site administration settings?
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In reply to Paul Holden

Re: Moodle activities inline display broken?

by Grant Dunham -
I'm having the same problem. The plugin works great for course pages. But it does not work for categories or the home page.
Is there a fix for this besides the plugin. I'm having the problem throughout the site.
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In reply to Grant Dunham

Re: Moodle activities inline display broken?

by Grant Dunham -
I figured out what happened to our site. I am using the Boost theme and had created some custom CSS. When I removed the custom CSS, everything returned to normal. Not sure why it broke during the update from 3.11 to 4.0 - but that's when we ran into the problems.
But all's good now.
Average of ratings: Useful (1)
In reply to Grant Dunham

Re: Moodle activities inline display broken?

by Phil Cobley -
Grant, thanks for the update and I'm glad you managed to fix it. I don't suppose you know what within the CSS was causing the issue, do you? It would be incredibly useful to understand what is getting broken.
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In reply to Phil Cobley

Re: Moodle activities inline display broken?

by Grant Dunham -
Sorry for taking so long. I just got around to isolating the problem CSS.
In my case, I had hidden the options in the Forums with this CSS
/* Hide forum options */
.fa-ellipsis-v:before {
content: none;
}
Not sure why I did not see that earlier. Of course it would not show up when I have it hidden.
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In reply to Paul Holden

Re: Moodle activities inline display broken?

by Phil Cobley -
Can you replicate the same using Boost and/or Classic themes? Is there any additional CSS configured in site administration settings?
We do, but it hasn't been touched or edited for over a year, and we test it with each update of the site on a test instance. I haven't updated our Moodle site for a few months, and it was working perfectly fine, so I don't understand why it would suddenly stop working.
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