Thomas Hanley

OK,

I am replying to myself ; )

Using Moodle 1.94 courses in 'My courses' block sort alphabetically.

To change it you have two choices:

1) patch
2) hack

1)
I felt unsure about applying the patch because I have never used one before and because I can't see exactly what happens when this occurs. Also I am on a network where IT scrutinise every bit of software installed. So I would have to download patch editing / viewing software to try and understand this approach better. I would then have to jump through hoops with my IT support guys to explain why I needed the software!

So I have followed the instructions here from Sharon:
2)
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=115793&parent=508050

...and 'My courses' now renders in the order that I set as administrator.


I still find it bizarre that in order to achieve this task I have had to resort to hacking PHP rather than interacting with the admin interface. Recent interesting discussions on Themes such as this one instigated by Ian Grivois have asked the question: why are there not more Moodle theme designers?

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=122021

Part of the issue is making Moodle accessible to XHTML/CSS designers.

So now I need to move onto increasing the width of the block above so that words don't wrap so untidily ; )

~thomas

Hi,

I am finding this very frustrating for the opposite reason to Melissa!

I am using Moodle 1.94.

When I am logged in as administrator I can alter the order of the courses here:

Administration► Courses ► Add/edit courses

Order of courses can be set to / appears as:

Setting Up
Auditing & Planning: L1
Implementing: L1
Assessment: L1

For my users / needs these courses need to be displayed sequentially. However when I log in as a test user the courses display alphabetically in the 'My Courses' block:



For my users this is a completely jumbled order resulting in the course that needs to be done first 'Setting Up' being listed at the bottom!

I have had alot of difficulty in trying to change this.

Paul--I have tried setting course ids but for me I am not experiencing a default behaviour where the courses are listed by id number




Giving the course "Setting Up" Course ID number 001 and all other courses progressively higher numbers changes nothing for me!

Or if you mean the id at the end of the URL:

Setting Up is:
http://www.rightsrespectingschools.org.uk/course/view.php?id=6

Assessment: L1 is:
http://www.rightsrespectingschools.org.uk/course/view.php?id=10

..but as you can see Assessment: L1 is displayed first in the list.

Clearly the default behaviour in my case is that the MyCourses block displays courses alphabetically!

Maybe I should swap Moodles with Melissa ; ) LOL

After trawling through the forums the only solutions I have found seems bizarrely arcane and convoluted ie. you cannot make such a simple change directly through the admin user interface. It seems that you have to either:

a) patch Moodle
http://server3.moodle.com/browse/MDL-13436

b) hack index.php inside the my/ folder as explained here:
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=115793&parent=508050

Perhaps there is some other setting I have missed? Is there some way for me to make courses display for my users (whose role is non-editing teacher) in the order I set as administrator?

Any advice would be appreciated

~thomas

Hi Sharon,

Many thanks for your input here, it really helped me : ) I messed around for several hours looking for this solution!

I am using Moodle 1.94

I have specific aims for my course which require that I do not want courses to display alphabetically. I wanted them to sort based on the order I set in the admin settings. Your line above helped me do that. Seemed to only need to be changed in one place
in this file:

blocks/course_list/block_course_list.php

I do not understand really why I should be hacking PHP in order to make such a change. I will find somewhere in the Tracker to say this : )

Many thanks

~thomas

I really agree with Patrick on this (well put, nice analogy!). A key point depends on what you think a theme could or should be capable of affecting.

The way I see Moodle is there are 3 critical parts

Content
Usability / user experience (most critically navigation)
Appearance (although emotional engagement is part of this, and I feel an important part as you want to engage users with high quality visual design, appearance also overlaps with usability as things like layout, visual weighting, typography etc have a big impact).

I have found using themes frustrating because they feel hard to use / restrictive. Changing colours is nice (but pretty low on my list of priorities as it has less signifcant impact on user experience than othere aspects of Moodle). I would rather have more control of

a) the layout
b) the modules themselves

For example with the course menu so far I have been unable to make the order of the courses non-alphabetical for users (although logging in as admin the order is the same as set through the admin area!). So I cannot solve this through themes.

Hopefully Tim's work will result in a more coherent and usable navigation mechanism.

So for me while I place navigation as a higher priority than themes I still think that themes can mean more than just changing colours.

~thomas

Hi Ray,

Nice to bump into you again here ; ) Hope things are well with you.

Not sure if I have understood exactly what your aim is as I am not familiar with your custom theme. Plus I am still learning how Moodle works ; )

If you wish to change the background colour of the chat pane to a different colour to that of the background colour of the main site like this:

Then you need to specify the css for the specific chat page using its id:

#mod-chat-gui_basic-index

..as otherwise I think the colour is inherited from the global body background colour.

So if you want this lovely yellow colour ; ) then in your custom css file for the theme you need this rule:

#mod-chat-gui_basic-index {
 background-color: yellow;
 }

Hope this helps.

~thomas