Welcome to the Moodle appearance tutorial. This tutorial is presented by Joseph K. Kataka. First lets go through the preliminary requirements.
In order to manage your Moodle site’s appearance. First login as Administrator by clicking on the login link as indicated on the left. From the login window that appears, enter your administrator username and password and then click on the login button or press enter on the keyboard to login.
To access appearance, first click on Site Administration link at the bottom left of your window on the settings side bar. From the resulting menu, select Appearance by clicking on it. Appearance has several other submenus each of which when selected can help in changing the appearance of the site. For Theme setting and selection, click on Themes. Theme settings allow you to determine whether users can change themes or not. Theme selector enables the user to select the theme to display. The user can choose which theme to display for modern browsers, old browsers, Mobile phones and for tablets. The themes may be different for each device.
To determine calendar settings, click on the calendar option. This allow the user to setthe week start, events to look ahead, week days e.t.c
You can set how Blogs can be associated with courses and course modules by checking the checkbox at the top. You can also choose on whether blogs can be viewed by everybody or if users can only view their own blogs by setting your Blog Visibility. You can also determine whether users can allow and view feed entries from external blogs by checking the Enable External blogs checkbox
Under navigation settings: one can determine, the default home page for users. Allow guests to access the moodle site content (including pages). Allow course categories and / or all courses to be displayed. Or determin the limit number for courses to be displayed.
This option allows the Administrator to set whether or not HTML tags can be used in user activities like in chat and blog. It allows users to embed emoticons in their messages or blogs.
Moodle Docs enables the user to set the path to the documentation of their moodle site. They can determine whether the documentation page opens in a new window or in the currently active window. . Default My Moodle page displays your default moodle page with available courses and activity. . Default profile page link displays your home page or default main page.
The Course contacts setting allows you to control who appears on the course description. Users need to have at least one of these roles in a course to be shown on the course description for that course. Display extended course name allows you when showing lists of courses, or when referring to courses on administration screens, to show the course short name as well as the full name. You can change what is displayed using Language customisation. The Courses per page option, allows you to enter the number of courses to be displayed per page in a course listing. Courses with summaries option, is where you enter the maximum number of courses to display in a course listing including summaries before falling back to a simpler listing.
Enable Ajax: Controls the use of AJAX across the site. AJAX is required for certain functionality such as drag and drop. Use online YUI libraries: Instead of using local files, it allows the use of online files available on Yahoo‘s servers. You must be on internet or no AJAX will work on your site. It is not compatible with sites using https. YUI combo loding: Enables combined file loading optimisation for YUI libraries. It should be enabled on production sites for performance reasons. Cache Javascript: Javascript caching and compression greatly improves page loading performance. it is strongly recommended for production sites. Activity chooser default allows you to determine whether the activity chooser should be presented to the users by default or not.
This setting allows you to add, edit or remove official tags to the site
These settings allow you to specify HTML that you want added to every page. You can set HTML that will be added within the HEAD tag for the page, immediately after the BODY tag has been opened, or immediately before the body tag is closed. Doing this allows you add custom headers or footers on every page, or add support for services like Google Analytics very easily and independent of your chosen theme. . This marks the end of the presentation.
