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
So what you need to do if you have access to the server, is change the order of the stylesheets in BCU/config.php and put 'custom' at the end of the list. Here is what I said in the forum incase you missed it! https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=318952&parent=1279251
We are now working on a new version of this theme, currently in a fork, I am adding recently reported issues to the tracker in that fork.
Changes will be pulled back into the BCU repo as they are completed.
With luck and a fair wind there will be a new version available in the next few weeks.
If anyone has any suggestions on how the theme can be improved please post them in this thread:
https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=319289
Is there anywhere where I might discover such gems? Thanks
bcu.ac.uk is the corporate website not Moodle. I am afraid there isnt any documentation for this theme, there are some html snippets in the readme file and quite a long forum thread (linked above). I will be create a wiki page (on Moodle.Org) once the next version is available (which adds quite a few more settings / options).
Its possible to fix the height of the line containing the name of students in gradebook?
Thanks
Just curious
-Derek
Is there a suggested ideal size and shape for the course images? And the site logo?
-Derek
Is it possible vis CSS to remove all the styling, shading etc for the breadcrumbs and have it just some words and maybe a / symbol or a 'greater than "
And thanks Fernando for your post - installed BCU and playing with it.
-Derek
a good size for the course images is 450x300px. The default logo is 185x55px and the max. width is 250px
In the existing version, the number of tiles is not limited. So it could be a bit messy when you have many courses. Working on it for the new version.
The breadcrumb is also in the 'To Do' list to have more than one option.