Moodle plugins directory: BCU | Moodle.org
BCU
BCU Theme
This theme is no longer being actively developed, please see the forked Adaptable Theme instead.
This bootstrap based theme is in use on a large site and has been thoroughly tested using pretty well every possible permutation of a Moodle course including several third party course formats. It is customisable through admin settings and should serve you well!
Cool features: (at least we think so)
- Toggle to hide show blocks in one click
- Toggle to switch between fixed and full width
- Support for bootstrap elements (Toggle, Modal, see our Bootstrap Elements Plugin Here )
- Choice of two tiled renderers for My Courses on front page, one static and one with overlay
Home Page:
- Jquery slider
- Marketing spots on front page (three or four should render well)
- 2 x info boxes on front page
- My Courses rendered as "tiles" making better use of space
- Four configurable blocks in theme footer (display sitewide)
Navigation:
Top navbar includes:
- Messages icon showing alerts of unread messages + dropdown of users sending messages
- Dropdown with users profile related links
Secondary navbar includes:
- links to home, my home, events
- My Courses drop down list of enrolled courses the order of which is controlled by My Home settings. Students can customise order of this navigation list in My Home. Drag courses to re-order them in My Home and the same order will be reflected in the drop down navigation
- This Course drop down list provides consistent course navigation to activities (replicates activities block), participants and grades
- Ability to add a "help" link into navigation for help pages
Other Features:
- Ability to display a site wide message across the top of the site to notify of downtime or similar
- Truncate course / category names in breadcrumbs, if you have long names and a deep category structure this will come in quite handy! (we plan to apply expanding breadcrumbs on mousever as seen in Essential theme)
- Uses Font Awesome so icons can easily changed
Admin Settings: highly customisable with many settings:
- Color pickers to alter look of theme
- File uploader for slider images
- File uploader for Logo
- Field for stats tracking code (Piwik, Analytics etc)
Credits:
- Full Screen / Show Hide Blocks toggles based the on work by Bas Brands (consider voting for MDL-45269)
- Ideas and code taken from other themes notably Essential, Elegance, Simple and other New School Learning themes (commercial)
- Many thanks to Gareth J Barnard for some very good advice prior to us beginning work on this theme
- Screen shots and video show CUL Activity Stream and CUL Upcoming Events blocks by Amanda Doughty.
If you find any problems please check the issue tracker, hopefully you will find we already have it on our list.
Future Plans: we will be adding more navigation items into the theme (configurable) with the aim of reaching a point where we can disable the administration and navigaion blocks for students giving a simplified more consistent way of navigating courses which is less dependant on the random availability and placement of blocks.
Useful links
Screenshots
The information shown in the tiles comes from the course settings (title, summary and summaryfiles), to to alter the image:
1) Go into your course
2) Edit settings
3) Upload image under "summary files"
editing the summary text will also show in the front page tiles.
If you want to change the default tile image (our logo currently) you will ned to replace the following file with your own:
/moodle/theme/bcu/pix/tile-background.png
There is a Moodle one here you can try if you dont want to make your own just yet:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/hhlmikg5nuqwxm6/tile-background.png?dl=0
Regarding my issue with FA not showing up on FF, it was that it was installed on Moodle 2.8, as I just installed on 2.7, everything works!
Can this Hide Blocks, Full View and Search bar become part of Admin settings? as full view can be thought of given control for end user, but what if blocks are setup as a part of Theme FrontPage and hiding them effects the appearance?
Thanks for the pointer on FA, we would like to get this listed for 2.8 as soon as possible though there are issues we need to fix for 2.7 first (like renderer on category pages, sticky dropdown navigation in iPads).
As for the hide blocks / search features I guess they would be pretty easy but are not things we need / want so are not going to get any kind of priority. If anyone wants to add those features by pulling our GIT repo and give us the changes we would add them to our version and re-distribute, otherwise it will be a case of "maybe one day when things are quiet", and things are rarely quiet!
Since we added these features I have looked at how people use it and its a mix between full and fixed, I think that is largely determined by the device you are using.
What I have NOT seen is anyone leaving their blocks hidden. What I do see periodically are users who have docked their blocks, so if you are worried about this I would suggest disabling docking would make more of a difference than the show / hide blocks feature. That is based on looking at a LOT of users.
This is a nice contribution. This theme is really interesting.
One thing I could not found (since I am very new to moodle), is it possible to shift BLOCK section to LEFT from RIGHT in this theme?
No I am afraid it is not possible to do that without modifying the theme.
In moodle 2.6 , this theme is not worked as expected. I think the function based on css/jquery not working.
such as hide blocks, standard window button and expand of settings in all navigations.
but it work fine in 2.7 and 2.8
This really wonderful theme. Especially for front page look and feel. But it's not fully supporting Moodle 2.6. is there any setting need to change for all features working well.?
Are you referring to docking of blocks?
Older 2.6 versions did not support docking and this has to be enabled by editing the file:
/moodle/theme/bcu/config.php
On line 37 change:
$THEME->enable_dock = false;
to
$THEME->enable_dock = true;
and that should enable docking.
On my 2.6.6 test system it is working but I dont think it will work on earlier 2.6.x releases.
As far as I am aware the show hide blocks / full width feature should work in older versions of 2.6 if docking is disabled
I appreciate your help
Can you send me a screenshot of the error? I've tested it on 2.8 and not seen this error yet.
Thanks
offline version https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/64650950/offline.tiff
online version https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/64650950/online.tiff
Thanks
Thanks
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/64650950/depu2.tiff
Is it possible to show alerts to end users one time or only on Main Page? Especially the top alert would be very good for us.