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
52 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.
If you've made it this far you should show some love and add Pioneer to your favorites!
Useful links
Screenshots
Contributors
Chris Kenniburg (Lead maintainer)
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Awards
Comments 
Comments
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As long as the top marketing spot is optional and doesn't push the course list down as enrolled courses is the most important component. Apart from that I'm all for as much flexibility as possible where we can turn things on and off and change where they appear
Cheers
Michelle
Probably the biggest change will be something called "scroll spy". It is the first of its kind for Moodle themes. It will allow you to keep your place in a course when you turn edit on or leave and come back! We moved the edit button to the top sticky bar. Teachers will love that they don't have to scroll everything they turn on editing.
I'd be fine with it being in both areas as long as there are options to turn one off and one on as Michelle suggested.
Thank you very much,
Bruce
The next release will introduce many new features. I am finalizing them this week and putting the finishing touches on. I realize you'd like more options for colors and better control over where and how things appear. I am trying to make the theme admin pages easier to understand as well as better grouping of the settings page so that it is hopefully more intuitive to setup.
I'll post a video tomorrow of where we are at with it so you can provide feedback.
Andrew
Again, thank you very much for making these changes and for developing / maintaining this theme. My audience includes a lot of adults, many of them later in age and not so web savvy. This theme will help a lot with keeping them engaged.
Thank you,
Bruce
It would be great if we could choose the "Role" for this "Frontpage Textbox". In my Instituion we use a different Role for creating a course.
Oh, yes! Congratulation on the theme!
Yes, i did and it works just fine!
But the way we create courses in our institution is slightly different. So we had to set up another role for that function.
I understand the idea behind this feature, but we won't be able to use it, as we don't use the "course creator" role.
What about if this feature were restrict to "system context" roles? I think it would work just fine for us. ;)
Ricardo
Upgraded to v1.3.8 yesterday. Marketing top spots and most of new functionality working well. Looking forward to the images for them.
We're having issues with the course completion radial indicator. It just says Editing in the center of it. The nothing ever fills in color wise. Thoughts?
Thank you,
Bruce