Ability to change activity icon and name in activity settings

Ability to change activity icon and name in activity settings

by Jeff Gregory -
Number of replies: 6

Is it possible, or if not, can I request that it be possible to be able to change from the default icon and name in the setting of any activity. For Example, the default could still be 'PAGE' but then within the settings at the activity level, I could change the Icon and name of the avtity to better reflect what I am using that particular activity for.

I use Page a lot, but very often it is to embed a video. It would be be really helpful if I could make the changes as show in the two screen shots, the first is as it is currently, the second how I would like it to look. Icons could be selected from Font Awesome Icons


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In reply to Jeff Gregory

Re: Ability to change activity icon and name in activity settings

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Translators
MDL-74272 perhaps? There's a longer discussion under MDL-75204 and much more in the forums. Here are some samples:
- Page module display request for help https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=435917#p1754232
- Moodle 4 how to remove activity title from activity page https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=436155#p1755204
- Moodle 4.0, theme moove and I need to hide the activity or resource name https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=436213#p1755432
- Using Moodle 4.0 https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=436250#p1755538
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In reply to Jeff Gregory

Ability to change activity icon and name in activity settings

by Stefan Scholz -
Picture of Plugin developers
Hi Jeff,

Where are your videos located? You mention that you embed them, so I assume they are not stored directly in your moodle course.

If they happen to be stored in Vimeo, try our plugin Video Time. Video Time is an activity, so you don’t need to use a page any longer. If you store them on YouTube and want to use Video Time, you’ll just need to wait a little because YouTube support is coming in the next release, alongside support for video files stored locally or linked from an external source.

An alternative would be to use our course format Designer, where you can simply hide there activity type if you don’t need it.

Both can be downloaded directly from the moodle plugin database.

You can test both on labs.bdecent.de

Hope this helps!
Stefan
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In reply to Stefan Scholz

Re: Ability to change activity icon and name in activity settings

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Translators
Hallo Stefan

Your plug-in empire seems to be the next big thing!
smile

Seriously, this is exactly what I was betting on; third-party developers to undo some of the missdoings in Moodle 4.x.

The next, less rosy, bet is that Moodle 3.x will soon be forked.

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In reply to Visvanath Ratnaweera

Re: Ability to change activity icon and name in activity settings

by Stefan Scholz -
Picture of Plugin developers
Hi Visvanath,

glad you like it! Wouldn't call it an empire though, we're still tiny in comparison to the big ones in the moodle ecosystem. But we're working on it ;)

To be honest, I do like the direction of Moodle 4.x a lot. Sure, like with any major new version, there's a few hickups here and there, and improvements are required.

In Designer, we effectivley tried to combine the best of both worlds — a clean and condensed section layout when there are many activities, and a more generous list layout and card layout when there's more of them, or if they are simply more important. We wanted to allow the teacher to give the activities the appearance (and space) they should have. Actually one of the test courses I like to show is how the community forum courses look with topics and with designer in comparison.

While teachers currently are "only" able to hide the activity icon and type if they don't want it, we plan to allow customisation of both in an upcoming release.
I am a big fan of icons, and I actually think that the activity type makes sense to show in many cases, just not in all of them, like if you're using the page activity for videos (and are using a video hosting provider which video time does not support yet). In these cases, it would be very nice to be able to just override both icon and type.

Won't be long and it's implemented, probably as early as in our spring release.

If you don't mind, I'll ping you when we specify the media library.

Best
Stefan
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In reply to Stefan Scholz

Re: Ability to change activity icon and name in activity settings

by Jeff Gregory -
Stefan,

Many thanks for your reply. Our videos are all hosted on Vimeo and then typically we embed them in a page. I do use both Designer Format and Video Time in a few of the courses, but the bulk use a course format called Tiles, which provides a visually appealing Tiles layout for sections, but also allows for Pages to display in a Modal rather than opening a new browser window. It would be great if the portion of your Designer Format that allows for the removal of Activity Names to be accessible by any format. Though really, I don't just want to remove the Name but rather have the ability, on a per activity basis, to change is from the default, which is why I think it would be best if this type of flexibility were part of the Moodle core functionality.
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In reply to Jeff Gregory

Re: Ability to change activity icon and name in activity settings

by Stefan Scholz -
Picture of Plugin developers
Hi Jeff,

sorry for the late reply. I do like the tiles format as well and use it regularly, it's a pretty cool plugin, and super easy to use! If I understand you correctly, you'd like to be able to define per activity, which information is displayed? If that's true, we have implenented exactly that in Designer. For each activity element, you can choose the visibility:
  • Activity icon
  • Activity visit counter
  • Activity call to action
  • Activity Title
  • Activity Description
  • Activity type
  • Activity completion

Visibility options are:

  • Hide (hidden, but it exists, i.e. it consumes space)
  • Show
  • Show on hover (only shows when you point at it with your mouse, otherwise hidden)
  • Hide on hover (hidden when you point at it with your mouse, otherwise shown)
  • Remove (completely hidden, i.e. does not consume space)

There's of course global defaults for it, so you don't need to do this per activity, but you *can*.




The thing about core is that Moodle already has tons of features, which all need to be maintained and thus cost Moodle HQ time and money. That's why third-party plugin vendors like us create plugins, because we think that there's a need for it. That's the beauty of Moodle and open source in general — we *can* change pretty much everything if we want to.

You can have a look at our demo courses if you want to see what I mean:
https://labs.bdecent.de/course/view.php?id=484
https://labs.bdecent.de/course/view.php?id=525
... or create a test course for yourself: https://labs.bdecent.de/local/kickstart_pro/createcourse.php?category=4

I've attached screenshots of the two courses here for reference.

Hope this helps!
Stefan
Attachment Activity Designs with Designer.jpg
Attachment Flow collapsed with Designer.png
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