BCU

Themes ::: theme_bcu
Maintained by Mike Grant, Jez H
Part of set BCU UI.
This is the theme from the moodle site of Birmingham City University. It's based on bootstrap and allows for extensive customisation and some unique features to help improve Moodle's usability.
Latest release:
453 sites
171 downloads
225 fans
Current versions available: 1

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: 

We are continually improving the features in this theme and would appreciate feedback and suggestions you may have and If we like them we will integrate and update the version here.

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.

Screenshots

Screenshot #0
Screenshot #1
Screenshot #2
Screenshot #3

Contributors

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Comments

  • Helmut Steiner
    Tue, 14 Apr 2015, 4:09 PM
    Hey Mike,
    1) Ah okay, I know that feeling...
    2) I used the AMOS translation tool and some strings are missing from the development version. I didn't write them down, but one I remember is "Search Courses" from the search box.
    3) Yeah, makes sense. I thought about bug fixing work and some other stuff, e.g.: Inclusion of Font Awesome for navigation icons, a user image (if available) instead of an icon on top, display of course tiles also in course areas (if chosen), etc. So basically little steps which imho make a better experience.
    All the best,
    Helmut
  • Jez H
    Tue, 14 Apr 2015, 4:53 PM
    Hi Helmut,

    3) That sounds great smile. As Mike said it would need to be configurable in the theme settings, so you could add a different header layout including a user icon but would also need to add an option so that admins could choose which type of header they wanted to use.

    We don't actually use that header on our main site as we inject a centrally controlled header using jQuery that has icons / updates from other systems (email alerts, library returns etc) so there is quite a lot of scope to improve that.

    You can see what this looks like here if you are interested: http://1drv.ms/1GFWbr3
  • Tim Shanks
    Tue, 14 Apr 2015, 5:28 PM
    Hi there .. love the theme. Is there anyway to edit the fonts used for the footer header and foter text used in the four footer areas.?
  • Helmut Steiner
    Wed, 15 Apr 2015, 5:02 PM
    @Tim,
    Have you tried to assign a custom CSS to the header and footer classes?
  • Chris Gronewold
    Thu, 16 Apr 2015, 5:39 AM
    Is there anyway to change the color of the font in the course list and in the blocks? It is #002f67 and I cannot seem to find anywhere to update it. Thanks
  • Jez H
    Thu, 16 Apr 2015, 4:44 PM
    Hi Chris,

    Thanks for pointing this out, I think Mike has replied to you to say you can do this in the custom css settings for now. We will add this as a setting in the theme shortly smile
  • Guildford College Group
    Mon, 20 Apr 2015, 11:35 PM
    We are on Moodle 2.8 and have the BCU theme installed (by ULCC). I've modified the css override to hide the main title, change the message rollover colour and change the login name background colour to transparent - .headermenu {background-color:transparent;}
    .headermenu a {text-decoration:none;} / .nav li a:hover {background-color:transparent;} / #coursetitle {display:none;}

    Is there a way to hide the top nav items: Home / My home / Events / My sites / This course? They are all so I don't think its possible via css. The problem we have is that we already have a top menu so having thse items as well fills up the whole top nav bar.
  • Jez H
    Tue, 21 Apr 2015, 4:36 PM
    Hi Guildford College,

    We were quite pleased to see ULCC adding our theme to their list as it is particularly useful for us to get feedback from other colleges and Universities. It should be fairly easy to add options to turn each of those items on and off, we will try and add it this week.
  • Rene Ouellette
    Thu, 23 Apr 2015, 4:30 AM
    Hi All, We are just about ready to roll BCU theme onto our server here at Northern Lakes College. We noticed that the top scroll bar in the grader report isn't working. I flipped a course to Clean, and it seems OK. Has this been disabled in the theme, or is it possible that the Custom CSS I am using has disabled it. Thanks, Rene
  • Mike Grant
    Thu, 23 Apr 2015, 4:31 AM
    Hi Rene,

    Would you be able to send me a screenshot of this and I can help with it? I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to, but that's more likely me being tired than your description!

    Thanks
  • Dirk Meyer
    Mon, 4 May 2015, 11:45 PM
    After a student receives a notification message, student sees a blank screen after logging in. I added $string['unreadnewnotification'] = 'New notification'; to lang/en/messages.php but no luck

    Below is from debugging:

    Invalid get_string() identifier: 'unreadnewnotification' or component 'message'. Perhaps you are missing $string['unreadnewnotification'] = ''; in lang/en/message.php?

    line 348 of /lib/classes/string_manager_standard.php: call to debugging()
    line 6971 of /lib/moodlelib.php: call to core_string_manager_standard->get_string()
    line 221 of /theme/bcu/renderers.php: call to get_string()
    line 169 of /theme/bcu/renderers.php: call to theme_bcu_core_renderer->bootstrap_process_message()
    line 87 of /theme/bcu/renderers.php: call to theme_bcu_core_renderer->get_user_messages()
    line 38 of /theme/bcu/renderers.php: call to theme_bcu_core_renderer->render_user_menu()
    line 90 of /theme/bcu/layout/includes/header.php: call to theme_bcu_core_renderer->user_menu()
    line 27 of /theme/bcu/layout/columns1.php: call to require_once()
    line 915 of /lib/outputrenderers.php: call to include()
    line 845 of /lib/outputrenderers.php: call to core_renderer->render_page_layout()
    line ? of unknownfile: call to core_renderer->header()
    line 1649 of /lib/setuplib.php: call to call_user_func_array()
    line 2502 of /lib/weblib.php: call to bootstrap_renderer->__call()
    line 2502 of /lib/weblib.php: call to bootstrap_renderer->header()
    line 90 of /course/loginas.php: call to notice()


    Notice: Undefined variable: OUTPUT in /var/www/moodle/theme/bcu/renderers.php on line 99

    Fatal error: Call to a member function pix_url() on a non-object in /var/www/moodle/theme/bcu/renderers.php on line 99
  • Rene Ouellette
    Tue, 5 May 2015, 4:53 AM
    Hi All, We have BCU implemented on our server, and we are seeing a potential issue with alignment when we are doing a backup. The checkboxes for each topic name are much further right than the label, and they are on the next line. We would like to have the the Topic label and the checkbox closer to each other, and on the same line to make it clearer. I am not sure if this is done by design. I have screen shots available to make things clear. Would also like to know if that is what everyone else is seeing. Thanks, Rene
  • Mike Grant
    Tue, 5 May 2015, 9:35 PM
    Hi Dirk,

    What version are you using?

    Thanks
  • John Moreno
    Sat, 9 May 2015, 1:15 AM
    I have a problem with this, Im trying to installing on my server but when I put it on a Themes folder it just block me the administrator's interface and the screen becomes white. can anyone help me with it. moodle version 2.8.5
  • Dirk Meyer
    Tue, 19 May 2015, 10:52 PM
    Hi Grant,
    we are on version 1.1.1
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