Aardvark

Themes ::: theme_aardvark

Maintained by

Shaun Daubney

The original 'menubar' based theme for Moodle, evolved for the modern student. NO LONGER BEING DEVELOPED

Latest release: 7 years

785 sites

365 downloads

299 fans

Current versions available: 7

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The Aardvark project started in 2008 after a focus group with students led the development of our somewhat basic and neglected installation of Moodle into a (at the time) modern and engaging platform. The idea was to drive student use by creating a colourful, MySpace-inspired, student intranet as the front-end, with the functionality of a VLE behind it. Pressure from those students would then ultimately drive adoption by tutors.

Over the years, Aardvark has been an exciting and arguably inspiring project, started at Newbury College, but benefiting from the contributions and expertise of many other developers. It was the first open-source Moodle theme to include a drop-down navigation menu, a concept that would eventually become a core element of Moodle theme engine, and at its peak was installed on over 5,000 Moodle installations around the world.

Development of Aardvark slowed down a few years ago as many of its advantages were adopted as features in the core theme engine of Moodle and a lack of development time meant that I was no longer able to keep up with the changes required to make the theme compatible with the latest releases. Unfortunately I have had to make the decision to cease development of Aardvark to focus on other commitments.

Aardvark has been an incredible project to work on, and I have learnt a huge amount about PHP and CSS along the way and I would like to thank everyone who has contacted me over the years with their kind comments. Special thanks to Mary L Evans, Patrick Malley and all of the other contributors and supporters who have been part of this journey.

Useful links

Screenshots

Contributors

Shaun Daubney (Lead maintainer): Shaun is the main creator and maintainer of the Aardvark project and is an eLearning developer based at Newbury College.

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Mary Evans: Mary contributes a lot towards this theme and has been a great supporter of the project since its early days.

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Awards

Early bird 3.0

Comments

Victor Hugo
Tue, 23 June 2015, 7:28 AM
how does you changed the background color?
Andre Kruger
Thu, 2 July 2015, 9:47 PM
Hi, just want to know if anyone have used the current version of Aardvark on Moodle 2.9?
Perry Way
Tue, 14 July 2015, 7:39 AM
Andre Kruger, we are using Aardvark on Moodle 2.9 with some issues. I didn't check to see is Aardvark supported version 2.9 before upgrading our site and now that I have upgraded there have been a number of small things I've noticed which are now missing, such as the icon to unhide a column from the Assignments (view/grade all assignments) view. There you get an "UP" icon that will hide the column but there is no "DOWN" icon that shows up after you hide it. However the HTML is definitely there. It seems to me to be a style issue possibly related to changes in Moodle versions to version 2.9 because I swore this used to work before but just isn't now.
SECOMV EMARF
Tue, 14 July 2015, 11:38 PM
Hi, Folks!. Does anybody know if there are some issues on Moodle 2.9+ or later? I've just installed and it looks perfect. Thanks!
Sotiris Pafitis
Thu, 16 July 2015, 5:37 PM
Hi Guys,
I have installed lates moodle and theme Aardvark but my feeds don't show pictures even though I have enabled it on their settings... Any ideas why ?

thanks
Mary Evans
Thu, 16 July 2015, 6:50 PM
I do not think this is anything to do with Aardvark, as there is nothing I can see in the settings to suggest that. Have you tried using Clean theme and see if the problem still exists? How are you adding the RSS Feeds...is it using Moodle settings?
Sotiris Pafitis
Sat, 18 July 2015, 4:18 PM
Hi I tried Clean theme and indeed I still cannot see the pictures in feeds. I added the feeds using the moodle blocks. Is there any other way ?
Mary Evans
Sat, 18 July 2015, 4:49 PM
I am not sure as Its ages since I added an rss block and cannot remember if you need to configure it to allow pictures...it may be a permissions thing ... Can you ask in the forum as some one may know the answer?
https://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=46
Thanks....Mary
Mary Evans
Sat, 18 July 2015, 6:11 PM
Hi Sotiris, I have just tried this out in my Moodle site. You need to edit the setting in the block itself. There is a yes/no question that disallows/ allows images to be displayed. So make sure that says YES.
Here are the docs for the RSS Feed block https://docs.moodle.org/28/en/RSS_feeds just make sure you read the version for you Moodle site. The link is for 2.8 there is a menu where you can select your version of the doc for your version of Moodle.
Cheers
Mary
Chris Chapman
Tue, 4 Aug 2015, 7:13 PM
Hi not sure if I've already mentioned this before, but in webkit browsers (Chrome, Safari..) Gradebook Single view icons overlap the activity titles.. fine in IE though.. anyone got a fix before I figure it out?
Gary Lee
Tue, 15 Sept 2015, 6:04 AM
Hi Shaun, are you planning to update the theme for 2.9? Although visually everything is pretty much alright, the javascript dropdown on the mobile version doesn't work anymore, I think they've changed something to do with the way jQuery is handled in themes and plugins.
Nathan Salmon
Mon, 21 Sept 2015, 5:59 PM
I can't get the dropdown menu to work with moodle 2.9. Is this a known issue?
Shaun Daubney
Mon, 21 Sept 2015, 6:43 PM
I'm afraid so. I have put some time aside this week to try and fix it.
Mary Evans
Mon, 21 Sept 2015, 6:49 PM
moodle 2.9 uses jQuery now to work the dropdown menu. So I think removing bootstrap.js from aardvark should help...just guessing though as I do not have time to test it out.
Nathan Salmon
Tue, 22 Sept 2015, 10:56 PM
A quick hack to fix was to comment out "dock.on('dock:initialised'," in dock.js under the bootstrapbase theme. Not ideal I know, but get's the menu working..