David Scotson

Would manually adding the CSS work in the short term though?

I think if you cut'n'pasted the code needed to load the necessary fonts into the Header HTML textbox in Moodle then it would work, but your website would still be making calls to files it can't reach, which obviously isn't ideal.

Try this and see what happens:

<link href="//netdna.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.0.3/css/font-awesome.min.css" rel="stylesheet">

I've added a link to the source in that issue, but the upstream Bootstrap 3 project dropped support for these as they don't make much sense on mobile (and aren't great on desktops to be honest).

Adding them back is probably possible, there's third party modifications that attempt it, but I'd strongly advise thinking about whether it's a good idea or not before anyone spends any time on it.

Hi Mary,

the two themes are, as far as I can tell as an outside observer, only a "Work In Progess" in the sense that they keep getting better, and at a fairly rapid pace. Lots of people have been using them in production with great success, and I'm putting my money where my mouth is on this one as my institution will be using Elegance from this summer onwards.

Julian has mentioned before that the large numbers of excited users wanting to try his themes, and then struggling with the basics of installing a Moodle theme, gives a false impression of their maturity to those just skimming the forum and seeing a bunch of posts titled "Problem with Essential". As a forum moderator, you should know that these "bugs" are primarily the result of enthusiasm for the theme, something that anyone interested in the future of Moodle should welcome (even if they can be a bit annoying when they provide little context for their issues, and are often the same simple problems over and over again).

Note that some will be much easier to convert than others, and even for the ones that map across quite well, it can never be a perfect replacement, more like a different theme with the same color-scheme and font choices.

But with those caveats in mind, I think it's a good idea.

Would surrounding the $OUTPUT-main_content() with HTML comments work too?