Joomdledemo template for moodle - Back to Course button

Hi there,

Is there any way I can edit the Joomdledemo template to include a 'back to course' button on each page? I read this - ( moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=209483 ) which is more about editing a specific moodle module to include the button - but I'd prefer a complete, cross-template solution.

I found this - moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=198952 but I couldn't get it to work with the Joomdledemo (It actually prevented Moodle from displaying) despite trying to fiddle around with certain tru/false variables (I'm no programmer by the way).

Can you help out with this?

Thanks a lot!

I shall leave the technical discussion for Antonio.

That said, how about an alternative approach. If I understand your question correctly you are referring to changing the Moodle theme that we are using to hide Moodle's navigation. If so, given that you know what course you are in, why not have a Joomla Module which includes a button with is part of your left or top menu (assuming you have left modules in place). This therefore would be always visible, easily movable based on Joomla's module positions and very easy to style as you desire based on your changing business needs.

Hi Chris,

Thanks for this!

I should have said that I've chosen to display the course content within the Joomdle wrapper. If I create a module in Joomla including a button, this would need to point to a specific Course id and Item id URL (e.g. wwwroot/index.php?option=com_joomdle&view=wrapper&moodle_page_type=course&id=6&Itemid=528)

How could I get this to work if I chose to use the system that I've built, for more than one course?

Thanks!

Rob

The easiest and fastest way but not exactly what you want is to publish the My Courses Module on your left navigation or some where convenient. This does not give exactly what you want because it shows all of the users enrolled in courses. This does provide some advantages that it is fast to deploy and gives students a quick way to navigate back to the main course page or to other courses if they are enrolled in more than one.

Other ways:
Install metamod which will allow you to publish a module or group of modules (if more than one course) based on the url. If you notice that when you click on a course the url will be something like this index.php?option=com_joomdle&view=wrapper&moodle_page_type=course&id=xxx&Itemid=yyy
This requires you to manually edit the metamod to add each course and have a line for xxx ie the course id

Install advanced module manager and do very similar to metamod using its php section to check the url

Simplification
Using the Joomla Groups to Course Mapping component, use the component to map joomla groups to Moodle courses. Then using either of the above, just choose which modules are displayed based on the Joomla Group. So for each group the student belongs to the module shows up.

This can also be achieved by using a Social extension such as EasySocial, EasyProfile, etc. or even a membership management extension. The Joomdle integration will work together with those components places students in Joomla Groups. Then like above display the module based on Joomla Groups.

Additional ways
- Using the Moodle Theme just enable breadcrumbs to be displayed. Risk is that you open up complete navigation to students potentially breaking your display.
- Build a custom module which displays a Course Home button in the module. I do not think this would be too difficult and will speak with Antonio about the effort required for this.

As Moodle has different entry pages, I don't know how to get a link to appear in all course pages. I am not a theme expert by any means, so there could be a way to do it, but I just don't know.

What I am going to do is to update the course navigation module, to include an option to link to course in wrapper. This way you could have a module showing a link to course main page.

Thanks Chris and Antonio. I'm going to investigate some of the options that Chris has suggested.

In case anyone has had a similar question in mind, over the weekend I found the Moodle plugin: block_navbuttons ( moodle.org/plugins/view/block_navbuttons ) to be an alright fix. It adds buttons to every type of 'page' which isn't a course content section (e.g. Quiz, SCORM, Forum, Wiki etc.) except for the Calendar and User Profile view in Moodle... and I can live with that(!)

Thanks again,

Rob

Ah - one last thing, I can repost this elsewhere but similarly, is there a way to edit the Joomdledemo template to include the 'Turn editing on' button for Teachers/Editing staff? If not, I'm confident I could direct teachers to a different Joomdle wrapper which opens moodle content in the 'Clean' theme perhaps, but I'm just trying to simplify as much as possible.

Thanks again -

We have not gone down that path on purpose and have been recommending teachers / editing staff to go directly into Moodle or through a link from Joomla to open in a new window. The reason for that, is that there is a lot of Moodle navigation for managing content which would require a significant amount of testing to ensure the functionality works properly. Given that editors tend to be more involved and have appropriate training (compared to students), the need for a simplified user interface should be reduced ie we built for the 80-20 rule.