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:
519 sites
174 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

  • Çağlar MERSİNLİ
    Tue, 3 Mar 2015, 3:59 AM
    Hi Mike;

    i use BCU theme on moodle 2.8.3+ and i cant see user menu after log in at mobile device .

    there is no problem on tab device . problem is only mobile device (all browser ).

    i wanna see user menu item because i dont know how to log out on mobile device ,
  • Jez H
    Tue, 3 Mar 2015, 5:18 PM
    @Mary, thanks for the pointers on jQuery, we have added a ticket for that

    @Çağlar - thanks for reporting that, should be fixed in the next day or so on our GIT repo and be updated on Moodle.Org shortly

    @Ben, the version on GIT has git fixes the issue with hard coded strings.

    I am not sure how to approach languages yet. In principle we are happy to add contributed language packs to our theme but we cannot maintain them. It maybe better to look in more detail at AMOS.
  • Ben CI
    Tue, 3 Mar 2015, 8:18 PM
    Thanks, Mary! smile

    Hi, Jez.
    I translated yesterday 9 strings in AMOS. I'm waiting to manteiners' approving to update the Spanish international language pack. I don't know how long does it take.
    Thanks a lot!
  • It's only an avatar...
    Wed, 4 Mar 2015, 1:56 AM
    H you do not need to add any language strings other English(en)
    AMOS take care of all the others as all theme Lang strings are added / updated automatically.
  • It's only an avatar...
    Wed, 4 Mar 2015, 2:01 AM
    Ben, if the text in the theme is hard coded then you will need to Change it in the file. However, first of all it should have been added as a $string and the using get_string('hideblocks')
  • Ben CI
    Wed, 4 Mar 2015, 2:10 AM
    Mary, the manteiner approved my changes and I've updated the Spanish language pack.
    It works!
    Now these strings are translated to Spanish
  • It's only an avatar...
    Wed, 4 Mar 2015, 4:36 AM
    Great!
  • Jez H
    Wed, 4 Mar 2015, 5:53 PM
    Thanks Ben!
  • Sketch...
    Mon, 9 Mar 2015, 8:53 PM
    This is a stunning theme! Thanks for sharing it.
  • Chris Pratt
    Mon, 16 Mar 2015, 11:08 PM
    Hi, great theme, thanks for sharing. How do I change the "My Sites" link to say "My Courses"?

    Thanks smile
  • Morgan Murphy
    Wed, 18 Mar 2015, 8:20 AM
    Hi, great theme. I'm failing to find where I can change the colour of the line under the navbar. It's currently a light purple, and I do not see that colour anywhere in the customisation panels. Is it something obvious that I'm missing?
    Thanks.
  • Jez H
    Thu, 19 Mar 2015, 5:26 PM
    @ Luis, you can edit the "My Sites" string in Moodles language customisation: https://docs.moodle.org/28/en/Language_customisation
  • Jez H
    Thu, 19 Mar 2015, 5:27 PM
    @Morgan we will add colour settings for that underline and the dividing lines in the header and footer to the colour settings, I am guessing that will be available in the next week or so.
  • Chris Pratt
    Thu, 19 Mar 2015, 5:36 PM
    @Jez H

    I've searched for 'my' and 'sites' and cannot see that anywhere in the language customisation. We are version 2.6 if that helps?
  • Jez H
    Thu, 19 Mar 2015, 9:42 PM
    Hi Chris,

    Did you select the right "component"? (see image below)

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/pic28tfz4nyqqld/language-customisation-bcu-theme.png?dl=0
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