Moodle Help

Hi everyone

Hoping that I could get some help from here with setting up moodle, we have just recently had moodle hosted and I am in the stages of playing around before we put a link onto our website.

I am having real problems when it comes to the design (not sure what I am doing learning this as i go along) but I am trying to change a theme to allow a drop down menu to run across also to try and customize the title to include our schools logo and name but really just don’t know how to do this.

Are there custom themes out there which include the drop down menu.

any help would be much appreciated

Hi there. Well first question -which version of Moodle are you using? If it is 2.0 then you can set up a built in drop down menu with certain themes (and there are lots of nice customisable ones in 2.0 ) by going to site admin>appearance>themes>theme settings and scrolling down to custom menu. Some of the themes also have their own page of settings that you will see when you go there and you can upload your own logo instead of theirs. With 1.9 it is not the same -there are themes you can download from moodle.org for 1.9 that offer dropdown menus already -there is also some documentation on making or adapting themes for 1.9 here Themes - MoodleDocs (If you use the standard logo theme by the way then you can upload into front page>site files a banner/logo of your own choice and as long as it is named logo.gif then it will replace the default one. But that is a pretty basic theme. If you want to replace the logo/banner of another theme you will have to upload your new image to the relevant folder of the relevant theme in the themes directory on the server -take a look at the documentation in that case.

thank you very much for the information i am using moodle 2.0 at the moment and you were exactly right about the custom menu thank you have now managed to put a new menu item across the top which is great.

how do some schools customize there moodle so much? at the moment i have been trying different themes can starting to get it looking slightly better would we need to design are own banners and then load them into a theme?

Some schools employ Experienced PHP WebDevs inhouse to do it... some schools just have IT Techs who also happen to know PHP and do it as part of their regular job without any extra pay for the priviledge... and then some schools just give it to IT Support to sort out whether they have any webdev experience or not because it's to do with computers and therefore IT Techs must naturally know how to do it, even tho learning PHP as a programming language is equal to being able to speak a foreign language. And finally some schools will go to an external company to get a theme developed and maintained (note, as Moodle changes across minor version updates, themes need to be retweaked to match the changes).

Many school's approach to their website completely baffles me...

Thank you Marci this was just something i thought I would give a try and see if i would be able to maintain it at no cost i dont have any knowledge about php it may just be that we will have to work with what is available until over time i learn how to modify different sections.

Here is some documentation for Moodle 2.0 themes Themes 2.0 - MoodleDocs
I'm not a themer but if you just want to add your own banner to a theme that isn't too difficult. Agree with Marci about how schools develop their own themes. Also -not all schools can as not all schools have ftp access to their Moodle.

Thank you, we are one of those schools that dont have ftp access although if i need to get something changed it is possible only i cant ftp and do it myself

Well in that case you are at an advantage being on 2.0 because there is a lot more you can do to customise standard themes from inside Moodle than you could with 1.9

Does anyone know is it possible to allow teachers to view other courses without having to be enrolled in the course each time? I dont want to allow guests access to the courses because i dont want students to be able to enroll themselves to a course unless a staff member adds them but i would like to be able to allow other staff members to look into other courses to see what others are doing different than themselves if this is possible?

• There is an "inspector role" that does this job - details here Inspector role - MoodleDocs More detailed instructions, for 2.0 below:
• Go to site admin>users>permissions>define roles
• click Add a new role
• tick the "system" context type
• Give it a name (course viewer) for example
• in the filter type moodle/course:view and when it appears, set that capability to "allow"
• save the role
• Make a new user account with login details that you share with staff (ie, they all use this one account if they want to view courses)
• Go to site admin>users>permissions>assign system roles and assign your new user to the role you made of "course viewer"

thank you very much