College Green – A responsive education website template

Posted on 11 February, 2014 by Admin

We are happy to announce our first responsive education website template based on the Bootstrap framework. If you are using Bootstrap 3 as your website’s framework, this Bootstrap theme can be seamlessly integrated to take advantage of it’s unique simplicity and style, with four hand-picked interchangeable colour schemes ready to use straight away.

Based on years of experience designing for the Education sector, this template is tailored specifically for Schools, Colleges, Universities and online educational establishments who want to offer a clean and professional user experience for their users. Built with simplicity in mind, the responsive HTML5 template is ready to use on desktop, tablet and mobile with minimal customisation and is high on usability and low on gimmicks.

If you have any questions or feedback please get in touch.

Template details

Live Demo

How to set a different theme for a Moodle course

Posted on 30 November, 2013 by Admin

A lot of you know that you can set a theme for your Moodle site but some of you may not know that you can also set different themes for the courses in the same Moodle site. A theme you set for the course will always override the site theme. Below are the 2 simple steps you need to take to set a different theme for a Moodle course.

Step 1

Log in as an administrator and go to: Settings > Site administration > Themes > Theme settings and tick the “Allow course themes” checkbox

Step 2

Go to the desired course and navigate to its “Edit course settings” page. Select a theme option from the “Force theme” dropdown menu. Click the “Save changes” button and you will see the page refresh and the theme being applied immediately.

That’s it. Depending on how you use/organize your Moodle site, you might find this feature useful in the future.

Below are some examples of how the same Moodle course would look when different course themes are applied.

Ergo

Ace

Brizzle

Cantata

Dishy

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How to make Moodle grader report easy to read

Posted on 27 November, 2013 by Admin

In a Moodle course teachers can grade students’ work and view the report via the “Grades” option under the “Course administration” (see figure 1). However the default view of the report is not easy to read as there are too many available columns in the table and teachers have to scroll left and right horizontally to be able to see all the column data. Although it is not a big problem when there are only couple of students, imagine that you have more than 10 students in the course – it will get difficult to keep track of whose grade report you are looking at as you scroll the student names column out of view.

Figure 1

Luckily there is a useful “Static student column” feature which can be enabled to make the Moodle Grader report easier to read.

All you need to do is to navigate to Administration > Grades > Report settings > Grader report and tick the checkbox for the “Static students column” option. Click the “Save changes” button before you leave the page.

Go back to the course Grader report page and try to scroll the table horizontally. You can see the student names column is fixed to the left of the table and it doesn’t matter how far you scroll the table; you always know exactly which student’s data you are looking at.

Below is a figure containing a comparison of the Grader report page before and after the “Student static column” feature is enabled.

(The theme used in the screenshots is “Ergo”)

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How to add a Twitter timeline widget to Moodle after June 2013

Posted on 25 November, 2013 by Admin

Two years ago we wrote a blog post about how to add a Twitter timeline to a Moodle site via the Remote RSS Feeds block. Unfortunately Twitter fully retired its API v1 in June 2013 which means you can no longer pull in a Twitter timeline via the method described in that old blog post. However, subsequently Twitter introduced a new way for users to embed their own Twitter timelines on websites. In this blog post we are going to walk you through the steps to achieve this.

End result

You can view an example on our theme demo site here.

Step1

Step 2

Click the “Widgets” option in the left nav.

Step 3

Click the “Create new” button.

Step 4

Configure the widget depending on your needs and click the “Create widget” button.

Step 5

Copy the generated widget code. Also don’t forget to save the widget by clicking the “Save changes” button.

Step 6

Step 7

Configure the newly added HTML block and paste the widget code into the text editor’s HTML source editor.

Step 8

Save changes and turn off editing. Now you should see the Twitter timeline embedded in your Moodle site.

It is also possible to customize the appearance of the timeline.To find out more on how you can customise the widget further you can check out Twitter’s official documentation for developers.

What’s new in Moodle 2.6

Posted on 23 November, 2013 by Admin

Moodle 2.6 was released this month and you can download the stable version via the Moodle’s official website.

While updating all of our premium themes to work with this version we noticed some nice UI/UX improvements made by the Moodle development team and thought we’d take some screenshots to share with you. (The theme used in the screenshots is “Ergo”)

1) Configuration dropdown menu

Configuration related actions are grouped into relevant dropdown menus. The interface looks cleaner and decluttered. See the comparison figure below.

2) Brand new look for the TinyMCE text editor

See the comparison figure below.

3) New category and course management interface

Fewer clicks are required from the admins to add/edit/move categories and courses.

4) New course format

The old “SCORM format” has been replaced by a more versatile “Single Activity format” which allows all available activities to be used as the course format.

There are other new features in this release and if you are interested you can watch the short overview video from Moodle below:

How to customise CSS in our premium Moodle themes

Posted on 12 May, 2013 by Admin

We’ve got more and more customers who have bought our premium Moodle themes deciding to apply small changes/tweaks to the theme CSS file to meet their own design needs (eg. change button colours, background images/colours etc). If you are in this situation please read on. In this tutorial I will explain how to customise CSS so you won’t lose your changes when there is an update available for the theme. (Yes, we update all our premium themes regularly to fix reported bugs and add improvements – all customers get free updates.) The key to retaining your theme CSS changes is simple: ALWAYS override the existing theme CSS rules and NEVER edit the original theme CSS in place. There are two ways of doing this.

Method One (Basic)

What you need to do initially: Open the theme css file (general.css) and go to the bottom of the file and write your CSS changes there. This will duplicate some CSS rules, but the ones lower down override the existing ones above. What you need to do when you receive a theme update from us: 1) Copy the CSS code you wrote from your current CSS file and paste the code into the bottom of the new CSS file (below all existing code) and save. 2) Replace the old CSS file with the new one which now has your code at the bottom. This method is easy to follow but it does require you to copy and paste your own code whenever there is a theme update.

Method Two (Advanced)

What you need to do initially: 1) Create a CSS file under the theme style folder and give it a name. I’m going to use custom.css as the file name for demonstration purpose.

2) Open the config.php file under the theme folder. Go to line 9 and add the new CSS file name “custom”(without the “.css” file extension) AFTER the main CSS file “general” as shown in the figure below. Save the config.php file. The theme is now reading CSS rules from this file.

3) Write your CSS code changes in the new CSS file (custom.css) and save. What you need to do when you receive a theme update from us: Replace your old CSS file (general.css) with the new one we provide. This method requires more work initially but will save you from doing any manual copying and pasting work in the future.

Conclusion

It’s completely up to you which method you pick as they all serve the same purpose – prevent you from losing your CSS customisations when there is a theme update available.

Tip: When you are doing your theme customisation you may need to clear your theme cache regularly to see the changes you’ve made.

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How to clear Moodle theme caches

Posted on 3 September, 2012 by Admin

“Why are changes not applied when I update my Moodle theme files, even when I clear my browser cache?” I was puzzled by this question when I started out designing themes for Moodle many years ago. If this is also an issue for you, read on. The answer is actually really simple – Moodle caches files at server level. Clearing the browser cache is not going to get you anywhere, You need to clear the Moodle theme caches

“So how do I clear Moodle theme caches?” you may ask. There are three options and I will go through them with you.

Note: The theme used in the screenshots is our premium Moodle theme Brizzle.

Option 1 – Quick way to clear Moodle theme caches This option is recommended if the changes only need to be applied once. For example, there is a new release of your Moodle theme and you need to update your current theme.

Log in as an administrator and go to: Settings > Site administration > Themes > Theme selector. Click the “Clear theme caches” button as shown in the figure below.

Option 2 – Quick way to clear site-wide Moodle caches Similar to option 1. The only difference is that option 1 only clears Moodle theme caches, and option 2 clears all Moodle caches.

Log in as an administrator and go to: Settings > Site administration > Development > Purge all caches Click the “Purge all caches” button as shown in the figure below

Option 3 – Suitable for Moodle theme designers while developing themes on a development site When this option is enabled, Moodle will clear the theme cache automatically every time you refresh your browser. However, it’s not recommended on a production site as leaving this option on will affect your site’s performance and significantly slow your site down.

Log in as an administrator and go to: Settings > Site administration > Themes > Theme settings Tick the “Theme designer mode” checkbox and click the “save changes” button at the bottom of the page.

How to add a Facebook Comments Box to your Moodle site

Posted on 31 July, 2012 by Admin

Adding a Facebook Comments Box enables users to easily make comments, which is a nice way to enhance the social media aspects of your site. In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to add the Comments Box to your Moodle site’s side column, which, in my opinion, is the best place to hold it.

To see an example, you can visit the live demo for our premium Moodle themes here.

Below is a preview of the end result on our theme demo site (themes used from left to right: Ace, Brizzle and Cantata).

Before we do anything in Moodle, we need to get the Comments Box from Facebook first.

Get Facebook Comments Box

1) Go to the Facebook developers plugin page:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/comments/

2) Configure the Comments Box settings depending on your specific needs.

3) Once you are happy with the settings, you can click the “Get Code” button to generate the code. Keep the page open because you’ll need it later on.

Ok, now it’s time to do something in Moodle – log into Moodle as an administrator. (Here I’m using our premium theme Cantata as an example in the tutorial).