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 only thing that blocks me from approving the theme immediately is the question of fonts included with the package. The origin of font files seems to be unclear, as well as their licenses. I have to insist on a proper documentation (e.g. in a README or LICENSES file in the fonts/ directory) that would list all the font files, their original location and their license (maybe that the file https://docs.moodle.org/dev/NEWMODULE_Documentation#thirdpartylibs.xml would be even better). We need to make sure that it is OK to distribute every single file in a GNU/GPLv3 package. For example, if the glyphicons halflings come from their FREE package, there are quite strict conditions of their usage - http://glyphicons.com/license/ - and it must be checked if such requirements are compatible with GPL3.
I am marking this as needing more work unless we sort this issue out. Thanks for understanding and for your patience with the approval process.
We have removed the glyphicons from the theme entirely.
Thanks
1: if logo is uploaded, why still the site name shows up besides logo? any possibility to remove that?
2: Icons tend to break on FireFox (Windows Platform), though worked on Chrome. or is it that I have installed it on Moodle 2.8?
1) I was thinking about that earlier as it happens. I think we will add an option to get rid of that.
2) Can you tell me what you mean by "break"?
This has never been tested in 2.8, there are still outstanding issues on 2.7 which is what we are using in production at the moment, once those issues are resolved we will start working on 2.8 issues ahead of our next upgrade.
I use both chrome and FireFox and have not seen an icons, none of our users have reported it either, though the version here on Moodle.Org is higher than the one we are currently using on prod, so there maybe a glitch in it. Again, it would help to know what you mean by "break"
There are a few threads on Mozilla support forums about this citing a couple of possible causes.
I was going to say it could be an issue with your test server setup, but that is unlikely given chrome is working.
There maybe an issue with the them, or at least somethign that can be improved, but at this point I would suggest the most likely cause is your FF setup.
Thanks for sharing this awesome theme.
Is there a way to customize the images shown for courses when in the tile with overlay mode?