Hi All,
My question today is a bit complicated. I have made a few diagrams to illustrate what I am struggling with.
When I look at Moodle at the moment, it seems to me that there is no structure or united appproach as to how Page Headers, Page Titles, Main Headers, and even breadcrums are displayed and the relationship between them.
I know that there is normally a good reason for these things in Moodle, and therefore I would love if someone could maybe paint a clearer picture as to the rationale behind this system so that I am not so confused.
In the latter part of this post I will also post questions on possible approaches to change this.
So, like I said, this will be very difficult for me to explain, so hopefull my diagrams will help.
Here goes:
1 Here I have an illustration showing how my school's simple homepage would look. School name in the Page header.
2 Now I go into one of my courses, 'Sample Course'. The Name of the course now appears in the page header. There is no main header. Now this I kind of understand, all good.
3 Now when I go into an assignment in my course, 'Sample Assignment', again the name of the assignment now becomes the Page Header. In addition, There is now also a main header with the name of the assignment. At first glance this is all good, it seems like all modules/activitities will have their names in the page header when viewed, but now .....
4 ... when I view another activity, this time the 'Sample Forum', I now realise that there is no more main header, for some reason. This is causing a big problem - how can one make a page look consistent when some activities show a main header and some not.
5 Now this is where it all starts to get really confusing for me! I go to Badges: Preferences and there it is - not only does it say 'Badges' in the page header, It even says the subcategory of badges.
6 And by this point I gave up and decided to ask all the experts on here to help me What!!!?? Now we go to another subcategory of Badges, but this time the Page Header is completely different from the above. Looking at number 5 above you would have thought the Page Header for My Backpack settings would have been 'Badges: Backpack Settngs', but here it's something completely different instead!
Now the above illustrations are all when logged in as a student. When I dig deeper into some of the Admin pages it gets even more confusing.
In the past when I've set up Moodle installs we always sort of changed the core code to get a more consistent looks, but this time I really want ti understand this and move away from core changes.
I will now post my questions:
Question 1:
(Main Header) Why do some activities display a main header and some don't? Is this up to the developer of the activities to decide? These two mentioned activities above are both in Core, yet they are not consistent. When I say 'Maine Header' I mean the header in activities for example <h2 class="main">Sample Assignment</h2>. Some activities for example a Forum does not have this eader.
Question 2:
(Main Header) Assuming that it is not required by the developer to be consistent with these things, or there is perhaps some other reason for this, Is there a simple way to print the name of the activity in a main header for ALL activity types, as in picture number 3 above? I understand that one could use renderers, but some activities perhaps have not adopted this approach yet and a different approach would have to be taken?
Question 3:
(Page Header) What is the system or structure used for displaying Page Headers? Or is there none and developers are free to set the page header to what they want to?
For exaple the two 'Badges' illustrations - One shows the whole tree of where we are in the Page Header (Badges: Preferences), while we don't do this for other pages?(My Backpack Settings)
For example, when we went to the 'Sample Assignment' at number 3 above, the page header was not 'Sample Course: Sample Assignment', nor was it 'Sample Assignment: View'. Shouldnt the page header here be 'Badges' and the main header 'Preferences' for example?
Question 4:
Another thing that I failed to explin in depth here - Page Titles. Is there a structure used? It seems like some Page Titles are the same as Page Headers, and some are completely different?
I hope I got my point across and that you all will understand what I mean here. I love Moodle and like I said I know that there is usually a good reason for things, I just want to try and understand how it all works, and if there is a way to make it more consistant?
Please feel free to ask for further information or request more screenshots or illustations!
Thanks!