Moodle plugins directory: Pioneer | Moodle.org
Pioneer
Themes ::: theme_pioneer
Maintained by 
Chris Kenniburg
Pioneer strikes a balance between features and beautiful design. The Pioneer theme is focused on enhancing learning by using intuitive navigation, a simple layout, and amazing styling.
You have learning content, Pioneer makes it beautiful.
Latest release:
140 sites
43 downloads
76 fans
Current versions available: 2
Pioneer | features
Features for Site Admins
- Custom Colors, Logo, Site header image, Course header images, and many more customizations
- Featured Course Slideshow - Add up to 6 featured courses and Pioneer will take the course image, title, and summary to build a stunning responsive slideshow for you. This appears at the top of the page with a wonderful fade effect between courses.
- Featured Course Slider - Add up to 12 courses and Pioneer will build a slider which displays 4 courses at a time up to 3 pages of sliding courses. All you do is add the course ID number for each course and Pioneer takes over to give you a brilliant responsive slider complete with a link to a course category to view more courses.
- My Courses Slider - Displays a list of user courses in a responsive slider.
- Personalized Recommended Courses - Uses course tags(Must use Tag Block and tag the course) and profile tags (Profile Interests). Matching courses are displayed for the user in a responsive slider.
- Site Alerts
- Frontpage Tabs Display - Add up to 6 custom tabs packed with content which are displayed on the frontpage in a powerful hidden slider. A prominently displayed button is used to show and hide the tabs. The hidden tabs help keep the page clean and neat.
- Social Icons - Add custom links with icons to popular social websites.
- Block Alignment - toggle between left or right aligned blocks.
- Two Marketing Spot positions - top and bottom of the page with custom image backgrounds
- Intuitive Navigation Options: My Courses, This Course, Tools custom menu, 8 custom Icons with tool-tips and links
- Google Analytics and font support
- Custom Footer - Provides several textboxes to populate the footer of the page with custom content.
- Socialwall Course Format Integration - Styling and color selection for elements of the Socialwall course format (separate download and plugin)
Features for Teachers
- Scroll Spy - A first for Moodle Themes! The turn editing button is always visible on the page. When a teacher clicks to turn editing on or off it will return the teacher to wherever they are in the page. No more scrolling!
- Customized full-width header Image for each course- On the course settings page a teacher can upload a JPG or PNG image into the “Course Summary Files” box. This image is used by Pioneer as a header image and is stretched to fill the top part of the page. Site admins can turn this feature on or off in theme settings. If off, the image uploaded in theme settings is used by all courses.
- Control My Courses Dropdown - Uses the Course Overview block to allow users to organize which courses are displayed in the My Courses dropdown.
- Two Column Layout - Designed to maximize usability
- Turn Editing On button is always on screen
- This Course Dropdown - Quickly organize and navigate course activities
- My Courses Dropdown - Quickly navigate to your courses
Features for Students
- Activity Completion Visual Display - Quickly see your course completion in a nice animated radial which shows you the total percent completed in the upper left of the screen. Site Admins must turn this feature on in theme settings and a course must have course completion turned on.
- Total Course Grade Visual Display - Quickly see your total course grade in a nice animated radial which shows you the total grade percent in the upper left of the screen. Site admins must turn this feature on in theme settings and the teacher must set the course to show student grades.
- Course Gradebook Slider - Just like the Frontpage Tabs mentioned above the Course Gradebook Slider will show/hide a list of assignments and the logged in student’s grades. The button to toggle this feature into view is located at the top of the page directly below the course title. The site admin must turn this feature on, set the button text, and the individual course must be set to allow students to see grades.
- My Courses Slider - Displays a list of user courses in a responsive slider.
- Personalized Recommended Courses - Uses course tags(Must use Tag Block and tag the course) and profile tags (Profile Interests). Matching courses are displayed for the user in a responsive slider.
Special Thanks
Pioneer would not be possible in it's current form without help and code from the following:
- Richard Oelmann for coding the Header Image functionality and Course Grades display. Richard is also the mastermind behind the course grade radial display and course completion radial display. He is also the developer of the Flexibase Theme.
- Mary Evans designer of More Candy theme and support in the Moodle.org theme forum
- Eguru Theme with Featured Courses functionality
- Gareth Barnard for support and ideas in the Moodle theme forum
- Troy Patterson and Anupam Chugh for design and implementation support
Pioneer | explore tutorials
- Google Doc Setup and Feature Overview (Work in Progress)
- Theme Overview and Release Notes
- Video Tutorials and Feature Setup - General Settings, Frontpage Tab Slider, Adding Google Fonts, Icon Navigation and Search Box, Custom Footer and Social Network links.
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Useful links
Screenshots
Contributors
Chris Kenniburg (Lead maintainer)
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Awards
Comments 
Comments
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What is not working? I just spun up a fresh install and the theme works just fine on Moodle 3.02. I suspect you might have other issues. Maybe another plugin?
I do have one teeny, tiny, itty-bitty little request:
We allow people to create their own accounts. And turning this on adds the link "create user" in the login portion of the header.
I'd rather it say something like "sign-up" or "new account" or something more intuitive. Is this a possibility without having to hack-n-whack code? Or even better yet: Consider this a feature request to allow admin to put their own label here.
Thanks!
You should be able to change the text using the language manager in site admin. You can change that text string and no hacking. Do you know how to change language strings? I can do a video if you do not.
Chris have you tested it with the grid format installed (which is a really popular one). I am getting collapsed navigation and it says orphaned. The only thing that changed was updating to 3.0.2+ (fortunately only in my test environment currently.
Is there a way to remove the Calendar Block from the front page? I removed everything else but it appears that block stays.
Also for the Full Site Name displayed on the background image, Is there a way to change the black background border or completely remove the background and just have text?
Thanks
The blocks are not hard coded into the theme. The calendar block is based on user or site settings depending on how you have your configuration.
For the course titles you can control the color by adjusting this to your liking and adding it to custom CSS block on the theme General Settings page:
Change background color to - none - to remove the color. Change color to adjust the text color.
.course-title {
background-color: rgba(0,0,0,0.75);
color: #fff;
}
This is a good idea for me to include in the next update and I will try to get some color pickers in theme settings for you to change up the Course Title Area directly.
Upcoming changes look really great. Any chance that an option could be added so the marketing spots can appear under the Welcome box? Some of our presentations are open to guests so we display our course list before the user logs in. In this situation the marketing boxes are at the far bottom so we have to rely on using News posts for our marketing blasts.
Thank you - Bruce
How about I just create a "top area marketing" spot and that way you can have both areas: top and bottom marketing areas?