Motivation

There are many useful blocks available for Moodle. Typically, they can be only added to the sides of the Moodle pages, or to the user's dashboard page (also known as My home page). Sometimes, you may want to keep your course main page quite clean, not cluttered with blocks on both sides. In such case, you can put useful blocks into a separate Poster page.

The overall concept is somewhat similar to how pages are created in Mahara - but it is typically the teacher in Moodle who creates the Poster for students to view.

Usage

To use the module, you should understand how Moodle sticky blocks work. See Block settings page for more details.

1. Add the module instance into the course.
2. Keep the editing mode on.
3. Add the Moodle blocks you want to display on the poster.
4. Click the icon to configure the block. Set the block instance so that it is displayed in the context of the poster, on page type Poster module main page (mod-poster-view), inside the region mod_poster-pre or mod_poster-post.
5. Alternatively, use the drag and drop feature to move the block to the regions at the poster content area.
6. Note that some blocks must be first added to the course main page first, configured to be displayed at any page and then configured again to be displayed at the poster main page only (this is how block positioning works in Moodle generally).

The poster can be used as for example:

• Course wall/dashboard (contact teachers, detailed outline of the course, latest news, comments, ...).
• Project dashboard (project goals, calendar, comments, people, ...)
• Research report (goals, methods, results, comments, ...)

Implementation

The Poster module uses not so well known feature of the Moodle blocks architecture. In almost all cases, it is the theme that defines regions where plugins can be added to. However in special cases, such as this one, any Moodle plugin can define its custom block regions. Within the context of the Poster module instance, when displaying its view.php page, two extra block regions are defined - mod_poster-pre and mod_poster-post. The Poster module itself is just a tiny wrapper for displaying these two regions as its content. Simple and clever.

The module natively supports responsive layout in bootstrap based themes (both 2.x and 3.x versions).

Licence

Copyright (C) 2015 David Mudrák

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.