David Scotson

I'm a big fan of this, though I'd go with just spacing rather the seperators.

Does the eye still work? When I tried this with the Bootstrap Glyphicon icon-sprite the javascript was looking for an img tag and failed if it didn't find one. I worked around it by adding an empty and invisible img tag for the JS to find and then used CSS based on the img next door. I believe the same javascript caused problems for the new drop down menu that they're working on for 2.6 in this area.

Your double square brackets got eaten by a Moodle filter, so for anyone cutting and pasting:

.course-content ul.topics li.section.main.clearfix.current {
    box-shadow: 0px 0px 10px [[setting:themecolor]];
    border-radius: 5px;
}

Is the topmost image the one you meant to post? From your text it sounds like the phrase "Answer the questions" should be visible (even if not a link) but I con't see it.

Have you tried turning all the debug messages up to full? It might provide some clues at the point where the text fails to display.

Is there a issue tracker for this?

I put in a bug about giving themes more control over the login page, here:

https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-40160

In the process of looking at this issue, it seems there's a feature in Moodle that will let you redirect people to any URL for login. I don't know anything about it, and documentation seems to be lacking but it seems like it might be relevant to your needs.

$CFG->alternateloginurl